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weighty issues
Is The Obesity Epidemic Messing With Kids' Minds?
Which is worse: Feeling fat? Or being fat? A survey by the Germany Health Interview and Examination Survey for Children and Adolescents (KiGGS) found that among 7,000 teenagers, more than half of the girls (and 36% of the boys) thought that they were "too fat," even though only about 18% of the kids were actually overweight. And the teens — especially the girls — who thought that they were "too fat" reported lower self-esteem and "quality of life." Reporting on this issue in the New York Times, Tara Parker-Pope writes: "At a time when much of the Western world is focusing on obesity problems, even teens who are at a healthy weight may develop a distorted body image." Even more troubling is how some kids act when they think they're overweight: The Times of London has a story about a boy named Zach, who is on a careful diet, works out for 45 minutes after school every day and does push-ups, sit-ups and crunches before bed every night. Zach is 10 years old. And still fits into the same clothes he wore when he was 8 and 9. Writes Siobhan Mulholland: "Not by any stretch of any fattist imagination could he be described as fat." More »
krazy kat ladies
The Fat Cat Epidemic: Unfortunate, But Cute!
Rachel Ray explored the subject of pet obesity, which should be a shocking exposé (33 million overweight pets in this country? While there's a food crisis elsewhere? Holy mackerel-flavored Purina!) The truth is, it's hard to be upset when the fat felines are so damn squishable. And hey: How come overweight humans are subject to mean comments, while overweight kitties just get petted, fed and belly-rubbed? Sigh. Clip above.
big questions
Is Sending A Fat Teenager Away From Home A Good Idea?
Wellspring Academy of the Carolinas costs $6,250 a month, which means staying there a year costs more than a year at Harvard, according to the Washington Post. Wellspring is a "highly structured therapeutic boarding school for rapid weight loss and intensive behavior therapy." It's fat camp meets boarding school, and kids there do lose weight: Terry Henry enrolled in September 2004 when he was 15. At the time, he weighed 558 pounds. He left 15 months later weighing 253 pounds and today weighs about 278 pounds. But not all stories are success stories. And author Stephanie Klein has a new book, Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp, in which she recalls the awful reality of being an overweight teen. The most surprising thing about fat camp, Klein tells Newsweek, was that "They weighed us on meat scales. The kids who were too heavy got weighed on a truck scale at the truck stop." It was, in a word, "Humiliating." More »
my anaconda don't want none
Harvard Doc Likes Big Butts And He Cannot Lie
Dear Dr. Ronald Kahn of Harvard Medical School: Your new study is amazing. You found that subcutaneous fat (that's fat right under the skin, for those who don't know) which accumulates around the hips and bottom may offer protection against diabetes. Love it! See, researchers have always known that fat in the abdomen — visceral fat — can raise a person's risk of diabetes and heart disease. Duh. But pear-shaped people (cough!) are less prone to these problems. So, Dr. Kahn, it was sheer genius when you decided to conduct experiments on mice. Because you found that subcutaneous fat transplanted into their bellies cause the mice to lose weight and show improved blood sugar and insulin levels. Crazy, right? Even crazier is what you said about fat: More »
crap email from a journalist
"Hi Tracie! I'm Writing This Story About People Who Grew Up As Chubby Kids"
I've definitely struggled with my weight, but my troubles started when I was an adult and started (and stopped) doing certain drugs, causing me to yo-yo like Anna Nicole Smith. I've dealt with the extra pounds in both healthy (the gym, Weight Watchers) and unhealthy (prescription diet pills, laxatives) ways. I've learned to accept that my relationships with food and my own reflection in the mirror are kind of like a marriage: I love them, but it takes a lot of work, patience, and forgiveness to get through the day-to-day struggles of living together. So knowing that, imagine my touchiness when I received the following email: More »
clips
Related: Would You Rather Be Fat Or Blank? [NBC News]
Fat & Smart? Or Skinny & Stupid?
The Today show had a segment this morning ostensibly about "brains and beauty" that actually concerned some internet game "Would you rather be fat or [blank]", in which people go online and pick the "disability" they would prefer over suffering from obesity. In predictable fashion, Today show producers sent their cameras out on the street and interviewed a half-dozen people (all of them women, of course), asking "Would you rather be 40 pounds overweight and smart, or skinny and stupid?" Almost every one of the respondents picked poundage and brain cells over being svelte and stupid, except for one woman, who gave an amusing, politically-incorrect answer she will no doubt get shit for. Clip above. (A more in-depth, in-studio discussion can be seen here.)Related: Would You Rather Be Fat Or Blank? [NBC News]
womb raiders
When Did Baby Weight Become Just Plain Fat?
A week or two ago I glanced up from my laptop long enough to catch my first glimpse of a commercial whose audio I had heard dozens of times before. It was for Nutri-System, and the audio consisted of a woman's claim to have lost 41 pounds following the weight-loss regimen. Is that Jillian Barberie? I wondered, unaware that the morning television personality I had watched habitually for years as a resident of Los Angeles in the earlier part of this century had since changed her name to Jillian Barberie-Reynolds or, more to the point, that she had become fat. (And, mercifully, thin again.) I consulted Google: indeed, she had gained 41 pounds. And what unfortunate fate had occasioned this traumatic bloat in Jillian's trademark svelte frame? Oh, pregnancy. Hmm. Well, then. It is now a few weeks later, and I find myself mulling the merits of Lisa Marie Presley's libel lawsuit against the Daily Mail for a related phenomenon, the equation of the weight gained due to one's pregnancy with weight gained due to eating an excess of food. More »
baby fat
Study: Childhood Obesity Has Stronger Link To Nurture, Not Nature
A group of British scientists is reporting that overweight moms are not genetically "programming their children to be fat". The University of Bristol's Debbie Lawlor and her team wanted to see if the high levels of sugar and fatty acids in the blood of overweight women caused higher levels of those substances in the blood of their offspring, thereby predisposing their fetuses to "poor appetite control and a slower metabolism." Lawlor found that genetic link to be tenuous, though the children of overweight parents are still more likely to tip the scales. There is a "fat mass and obesity associated" gene called FTO, but it is unclear how this gene works in concert with outside dietary forces. The only conclusive result of the study seems to be that the effect of maternal Body Mass Index is more of an indicator of childhood obesity than the effect of paternal BMI. (Yeah, mom is always to blame.) More »
sucks to be us
Shocker: Fat Boys Have It Easier Than Fat Girls
I am not one of those people who tries to pretend there is some upside to being born a female. I just try to remind myself things like "at least I'm not blind!" and "at least I wasn't born in Algeria!" etc. etc. when I get all "victim"-y feeling about it. Because we get less pay and less respect and more hormones and more emotions and more responsibilities and more vulnerability to STDs and, it even turns out today, we get more emotional distress when our husbands or boyfriends get cancer than they even do.So anyway, no, this revelation is not going to shock you anymore than it would Judd Apatow, but it is much easier to be a fat boy than it is a fat girl. Writer Sandy Hingston has a chubby son and daughter, and while the son, a football player, looks at his size as something of an awesome feat, her daughter got an eating disorder. "By 10th grade, she was Kate Moss-thin. I was impressed by her self-control — until her hair began to fall out in clumps." More »
weighty issues
Skinny Bitches Are Breaking Our Health Care System
Well, they're not, actually; that was just a way to draw your eyes to this item! But on a day when both the economy and the failing health care system are in the forefront of voters' minds, we were fascinated by the following news now all over the wires: overweight and obese individuals are easier — and cheaper — to treat. Dutch researchers writing in the journal the Public Library of Science Medicine report that the healthier the person, the more expensive their medical care over the course of their lives: about $417,000 for the thin and healthy, $371,000 for the obese and $326,000 for smokers. Logical, yes — smokers and the morbidly obese don't tend to live particularly long lives — but the findings, taken from mathematical models of three (hypothetical) groups of 1,000 people, may a big bucket of heavy cream on the argument the obesity epidemic contributes to higher health care costs. More »
weighty issues
Do You Have A Fat Ass? Then Clean Up Your Room
Peter Walsh, the professional organizer and author who de-clutters for a living on the TLC show Clean Sweep has written a self-help book called Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?. The basic premise of the tome is that your mental and physical "clutter" are preventing you from losing weight. "Your home is a reflection of you," Walsh writes, "Not in some airy-fairy way, but in a real and tangible sense. It's no accident that at the same time we are struggling with the national 'epidemic of obesity' we are also living in homes weighted down with clutter and filled with 'stuff.'" More »
weighty issues
Thin May Be In But Fat's More Fun
A new study out of Japan has found that outgoing people tend to be overweight, while "anxious types" are more likely to be thin, reports Reuters. In a survey of more than 30,000 Japanese people, Tohoku University researchers found that extroverted men and women are nearly twice as likely to be obese. Introverts were twice as likely to be underweight. The age-old images of fun, jolly fat characters and thin, drawn nervous types have some basis in fact. And, according to The New York Times, fat people are indeed outgoing — especially on blogs — or as the Times calls it, "The Fatosphere." More »
Wait a second alcohol has calories in it? Well, the New York Times is here to clear up all your misconceptions about alcohol and how fat it can make you. You can thank "studies," of course! ""Those who averaged a single drink per day had the lowest levels of abdominal fat" amongst all groups in a study of 2300 drinkers and non-drinkers." Who has a single drink every day? I'm thinking the answer to that is "extremely boring people with a preternatural amount of self-control" and is it any surprise those people are thin in the gut? They probably don't go to sleep without doing 150 crunches — no cheating! But also,"drinking regularly increases the amount of enzymes that break down alcohol," resulting in a lower chance of fat build-up. The fattest people in the study only drank sometimes. Maybe they should look into drunkorexia! [NYT]
the bushnell administration
How Women's Television Is Just Like Sex And The City
Slate's TV columnist Troy Patterson parses the programming on the three women's television networks today, and, reading Patterson's descriptions of each lady network, I had to wonder: could the networks be categorized using the ultimate post-modern archetypes, Sex and the City characters? It is the Most Important Show of Our Time, after all. The answer I came up with?:Of course they can.
With its rude, slutty and unapologetic programming, Oxygen is clearly Samantha. Strippers fellating beer bottles, plastic surgery advocating Janice Dickinson and her modeling agency, and re-runs of Absolutely Fabulous just scream Samantha with their combination of glitter, foul mouths and trash. (Remember when Carrie caught Samantha blowing the UPS guy? Total Oxygen material.)
More »
clips
Spoiler alert! If you haven't seen last night's Project Runway and you DO NOT want to know who got "aufe'ed" stop reading now. Okay, now that we've got that over with: We are super sad that we lost Chris March (aka 'Fat Chris') so early in the season. Dude was hilarious. Last night's challenge was presented to the designers Nina Garcia, who told the designers that they were to create collections incorporating three outdated trends (shoulder pads; fringe; dancewear; overalls; neon) into a collection of three looks to be done in teams of three. Fat Chris helmed a team filled out by the genius Steven Rosengard (who becomes more and more brilliantly deadpan each week) and the possibly-bipolar Sweet P. Their collection? Sucked. Fat Chris? Laughed maniacally and continued to insist on the genius of his design. His fate? Sealed. An homage to Fat Chris's last stand, above.
How Do You Make It On 'Project Runway' If You Don't Know What A Collection Is?
Spoiler alert! If you haven't seen last night's Project Runway and you DO NOT want to know who got "aufe'ed" stop reading now. Okay, now that we've got that over with: We are super sad that we lost Chris March (aka 'Fat Chris') so early in the season. Dude was hilarious. Last night's challenge was presented to the designers Nina Garcia, who told the designers that they were to create collections incorporating three outdated trends (shoulder pads; fringe; dancewear; overalls; neon) into a collection of three looks to be done in teams of three. Fat Chris helmed a team filled out by the genius Steven Rosengard (who becomes more and more brilliantly deadpan each week) and the possibly-bipolar Sweet P. Their collection? Sucked. Fat Chris? Laughed maniacally and continued to insist on the genius of his design. His fate? Sealed. An homage to Fat Chris's last stand, above.
who gives a fat's ass
Breaking News! Jennifer Love Hewitt Is A Human Being.
I really can't fault the news media: aside from the war and the mortgage crisis and the oil crisis and the twelve billion wars preoccupying Africa right now, what is there really going on besides Jennifer Love Hewitt's blog entry addressing the subject of her ass? Yesterday it was all over CNN, and today I switched to MSNBC only to be treated to an entire segment featuring plus-size model Emme on a scandal I guess I'll call Badonkgate. Here's a quick summary:SIZE ZERO NEWS ANCHOR: I don't know, there was just something that REALLY pissed me off about this!More »
EMME: blah blah blah why do we buy into this blah blah blah magazines.
SZNA: blah blah
EMME: blah blah acceptance
SZNA: You go girl!
EMME: You go girl!
