To accept an award for being the best Taylor Swift all time, Taylor Swift wore a velvet Monique Lhullier dress and a black choker that looks like something I got out of the gum ball machine in the seventh grade. So she was perfect, basically.
An Yves Saint Laurent ad in Elle UK magazine has been banned for featuring a model who is “unhealthily underweight.”
The French Parliament passed a measure Friday banning the use of excessively thin models on the runway. Part of a larger Health Bill, the measure won a majority vote in the National Assembly lower house of Parliament and will move on to the Senate next week. Other countries, including Spain and Israel, have passed…
The private women's college Bryn Mawr emailed a group of students late last week encouraging them to join the new school-sponsored weight loss program. Students received the email based on their elevated body mass index, data that was mined from their medical records collected by the college's Health Center.
After months of mandatory weigh-ins, stern finger waggings from campus health officials, and stress over her academic future, Yale University has graciously agreed to stop trying to kick twenty-year-old history major Frances Chan out of school for being too thin.
A massive new meta-analysis of medical studies involving tens of thousands of subjects has shown that even "healthy" obesity is often a precursor to health problems — but then again, so is unhealthy non-obesity. So why are news outlets once again making it all about tongue-clicking fat people?
Why can nothing be easy in this country? First you have to submit to ten personality tests to get a job folding jeans at Old Navy, then your vacation days are whittled down to six per millennium, and now you have to relinquish full blood work, a pint of urine, and your soul to get reasonably priced healthcare (lest…
The formula used to calculate body mass index (BMI) has erroneously made tall people seem fatter than they are and shorter people seem thinner, according to mathematicians who say that it didn't take into account that a person's weight grows with their height. So an Oxford mathematician has come up with a new formula…
It's pretty obvious that magazines for teenage girls are just grooming schools adult lady-mags—funneling impressionable teens neatly into the image-obsessed arms of Elle and Cosmo. I mean, okay, whatever. As much as it bugs me that women's "entertainment," from childhood, is institutionally wedded to this weird…
For years, obesity has been measured by BMI — Body Mass Index. The CDC calls BMI a "fairly reliable indicator of body fatness for most people." But critics call the BMI badly flawed, and in 2007, Kate Harding put together a slideshow demonstrating how problematic the BMI can be: A 5 foot tall size 4 woman is…
Some scientists think Body Adiposity Index will replace BMI as a measure of obesity. But it may have some of the same problems.
A rather unsurprising study has found that new moms' health can suffer because they don't have time to work out or make healthy food. But new dads' health remains unaffected.
The more mothers work, the fatter their kids get. The solution is obviously to live in a world where, magically, economic necessity doesn't dictate that two parents earn incomes in order to adequately support children. Be richer, moms!
Last month an FDA advisory panel recommended lowering the B.M.I. requirements for gastric lap bands from 35 to 30. Now some doctors say this could turn the serious procedure into another quick-fix weight-loss method. Saw that one coming, didn't you?
A shocking new study says being skinny is not in fact the most important factor in a healthy marriage. Nope — the wife just has to be thinner than her husband!
Today in fat news: New evidence shows that babies can be prenatally "programmed" to become overweight children. And those kids are more likely to be fat grownups.
Three years after noted "Fat-O-Sphere" writer Kate Harding posted a slideshow illustrating how ridiculous the BMI standards are, the NY Times agrees: the body mass index is unreliable.
• In response to the four New Hampshire teenagers who convinced a 14-year-old special-needs student to get an obscene tattoo on his butt, the school's principal has called the incident "more horrific than bullying."
America — third-fattest country in the world, according to the WHO — has a schizophrenic relationship with food. Could the union of obesity activists and eating-disorder advocates generate any real insight? Strangely, at a recent panel, it kinda did.
Lisa Hilton, an Oxford-educated writer, thinks we should all stop worrying and learn to love the size-zero model.
