The bad news: A new study, reported today in Eurekalert, confirms what everyone already knew, that increasingly younger girls are worried about their weight and appearance. And we do mean young: while the statistics were already depressing, this study dealt with children aged 3-to-6. Indeed, according to a study by University of Central Florida psychology professor Stacey Tantleff-Dunn and doctoral student Sharon Hayes, nearly half of these pre-schoolers "worry about being fat." And a third of those tested said they were dissatisfied with their appearance. According to Vernisha Shepard, a psychotherapist and clinical coordinator for the eating disorders clinic at Texas Children's Hospital"It is getting more and more common for young girls to begin to have concern regarding their bodies," she says. "Girls as young as 8 are now talking about their bodies and show a concern related to their weight and shape. When summer comes and people begin losing the layers of clothing, more attention is drawn to how we look. Young girls are learning this and basing their entire self worth on their bodies and beauty."

Here's how the test worked:

After chatting for several minutes, the playmate asked each girl how she feels about the way she looks. Thirty-one percent indicated they almost always worry about being fat, while another 18 percent said they sometimes worry about it....Half of the girls watched parts of animated children's movies such as Cinderella that featured young, beautiful characters and appearance-focused comments, such as Gaston telling Belle in Beauty and the Beast that she is "the most beautiful girl in town, and that makes her the best." The second group watched parts of animated children's movies such as Dora the Explorer and Clifford the Big Red Dog that do not contain any appearance-related messages....In a room that featured a dress-up rack of costumes, a vanity, dinosaurs and more, children then spent about the same amount of time on appearance-related play activities, such as brushing their hair at the vanity, regardless of which set of movies they watched.

The good (sort of) news? The kids weren't more affected by a film featuring a svelte princess, like the Princess and the Frog, than by anything else. So limiting princesses and Barbies alone isn't going to do the trick; indeed, they seemed to feel equally bad regardless of what they watched. And one can't help but wonder if conversations like those the children engaged in for this study weren't one more confirmation that this stuff is Important.

I'm glad, though, that this study got the princesses off the hook a little: it's always seemed to me too easy to blame Snow White when the pretty princesses are a constant that pre-dated the dramatic upswing in young kids' eating disorders. Do such films promote a conventional standard of beauty and equate it with virtue? Sure. But it's this in combination with Bratz, Pussycat Dolls, Obese and Pregnant and Man Versus Food that conspires to create a world of what the Atlantic aptly termed "moral panic." Ironically, if the problem with fairy tales is that beauty was "good," we need to realize that obesity has become even more resoundingly "bad," nowadays, and if kids pick up on one, they'll pick up on the other.

'Too Fat To Be A Princess?' [Eurekalert]
Bikini Babies [Recipes Today]
America's Moral Panic Over Obesity

Earlier: Girls And Body Image: It's Apparently Worse Than Ever

Researchers asked 5,893 people, 54% of them women, to choose their present body size and ideal body size from a chart depicting nine human figures. The discrepancy between the two was used to measure how satisfied the participants were with their bodies. Two to three percent of the subjects overall chose an "above-normal" size as ideal, but close to one in 10 obese people apparently felt that their size was normal and healthy.

However, say the study authors, 35% of obese people who felt this way had high blood pressure, 15% and high cholesterol, and 14% had diabetes. Time to freak out, right? If these people only knew they needed to lose weight, they'd be so much healthier. Except according to lead study author Tiffany Powell, these problems occurred at comparable rate in obese people who did feel like they were too fat. They just occurred along with a "healthy" dose of guilt.

The study did reveal a few benefits of "knowing you need to lose weight." Those who wanted to drop pounds were more likely to have seen a doctor in the past year (and yearly checkups are smart for many people), and also more likely to exercise. But since neither exercise nor going to the doctor has been proven to result in weight loss, isn't it time we stopped using fat-shaming to force people into these behaviors? Couldn't we find some way of promoting a healthy lifestyle that doesn't start with classifying people as abnormal?

Some Obese People Perceive Body Size As OK, Dismiss Need To Lose Weight [EurekAlert]

Tyra asked Scott and his girlfriend about their sex life, but you can tell by the faces that she's making that she didn't really want to know the answer.


Eventually, Tyra gave up and had the audience ask the sex questions. Things got inappropriate from here.

[Reedley, California; October 21. Image via Getty]

REEDLEY, CA - OCTOBER 21: Seventeen year-old Marissa Hamilton (L) and her friend Mary Healy sprint during a timed one mile run during fitness training at Wellspring Academy October 21, 2009 in Reedley, California. Struggling with her weight, seventeen year-old Marissa Hamilton enrolled at the Wellspring Academy, a special school that helps teens and college level students lose weight along with academic courses. When Marissa first started her semester at Wellspring she weighed in at 340 pounds and has since dropped over 40 pounds of weight in the first two months of the program. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 16 percent of children in the US ages 6-19 years are overweight or obese, three times the amount since 1980.(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Her larger point is that fashion, that many big-headed hydra, is merely going to act out like a rebellious teen against the world. They represent the ideal, they don't make it. And if we're getting fat, and hate it, fashion's going to reflect an opposite and aspirational extreme. Because that's what fashion does, it's unattainable - and it never pretended to be anything else. Our hatred of fashion-as-scapegoat is, she's basically saying, about self-loathing, adding, "And some horribly airbrushed photos notwithstanding, the main focus of the complaints isn't that the look is unpleasant but that it's unattainable for most people."

In short,

With that in mind, maybe all of the protesting about deluded designers has been wrongheaded. Maybe all of the demands that editors and photographers just use heavier models have been misguided. Because before fashion models will get any bigger, people in general will just have to get smaller...Fashion tells us something about ourselves and our culture. It does that by reflecting a heightened or twisted reality. It may be that the only way to change the fashion industry's portrayal of women is not by trying to make sense of the funhouse reflection but reconsidering the original subject matter.

Salon's superbly-named Sady Doyle challenges Givhan's central assumption, sagely pointing out that

the backlash isn't always about health or body image, but about wanting a standard of beauty that actually seems semi-attainable. At least you could buy a corset (good luck carrying that Photoshop eraser tool around with you at dinner)...The culture" isn't insisting on emaciated models and greeting larger ones with hostility; the fashion industry is, and as such, it seems increasingly out of touch with consumer demands.

To this I'd add that whatever we think of the insanity of corsets, belladonna and foot-binding, never in the course of sartorial history have we been father from the natural ideal: all these things, however grotesque, emphasized characteristics that are associated with health and fertility in some way. Big eyes? A dramatic hip-to-waist ratio? You don't need Anthro 101 to point out the antecendents. (Maybe damaged said health along the way, but you get where I'm going with this.) Design critic Stephen Bayley's new book, ‘‘Woman as Design: Before, Behind, Between, Above, Below," deals with exactly this: the enduring, subconscious - and universal - appeal of the feminine body.

Givhan's argument, while it surely contains a kernel of truth, also denies something obvious: modern fashion isn't about beauty, and that's new. It's redefining beauty, and taking out health, which goes against our quite literal instincts. Maybe that's why we rebel, and object in ways we don't even fully understand.

Yes, Thin's In — But Why Is That A Surprise? [Washington Post]
Are Models Too Thin? Or Are You Just Too Fat? [Salon]

The Anatomy Lesson [NYTimes]

Maybe, sorta. Times Magazine writer Jon Gertner profiles a group of human guinea pigs whose feed seems a lot less spartan than the Quorn-and-asparagus regime Julian Dibbell described in his 2006 New York article. Participants in the Calerie (Comprehensive Assessment of Long-Term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy) study are supposed to reduce their caloric intake by 25% for two years, so researchers can measure the effects on the aging process. But they still get to eat potatoes, pasta, even Häagen-Dazs. And most of the subjects say their biggest problem isn't hunger, but the fact that counting and reporting calories is a pain in the ass.

Then again, Gertner talks to Jeffrey Peipert, who occasionally woke up in the middle of the night because he was so hungry, and couldn't go back to sleep without a bowl of cereal. These incidents, researchers determined, were caused by his active lifestyle, and their advice was just to move around less. While calorie restriction is apparently better at increasing lifespan than exercise, it seems a lot less entertaining. And, of course, a few people had to drop out of the study because of anemia or bone loss. Everybody needed sweaters. People deemed prone to eating disorders were excluded at the outset.

This exclusion, along with a number of others, may point to the biggest problem with the Calerie study. Not only do participants have to be of "normal" weight and free of any tendency towards anorexia or bulimia, they also have to be the kind of people who are willing to restrict their diet for two years for only a few thousand dollars. In fact, those who were motivated by even this small amount of money were excluded from the study, so basically everyone participating had to kind of want to eat way less for a long time, which sets them apart from most people.

One investigator in the study, John Holloszy, says 99% of people aren't capable of calorie restriction. He also thinks the participants will quit doing it when their two years are up. And neuropsychologist Robert Krikorian says, "I don't think humans are designed to pay attention to how much they eat." Participants in the Calerie study have enviable blood pressure and cholesterol readings, and other research indicates that if they stick with it, they may enjoy longer live. But they're also the kind of people who say things like, "I've never gotten so much pleasure in my life. I'm wearing a medium shirt now. I haven't worn a medium since high school." Some people may get more pleasure out of not having to weight their potatoes.

Back in 2006, the media cliché about calorie restriction was that it was so unpleasant it wasn't worth the added lifespan. The Calerie study may be less extreme than what hard-core, arugula-counting restricters do, but its participants' diets are still pretty rigid and circumscribed. And if anything, this now seems unfashionable. Three years ago, eating next to nothing might have seemed like a cool rebellion against excess. But now excess is harder to come by, and eating like a pauper seems a lot less hip if you are one. Not only that, but the obesity crisis has been so variously trumpeted and debunked that the Times Magazine's whole Food Issue (tagline: "putting America's diet on a diet") seems a little dated. Diet is such a dirty word now that even Weight Watchers won't admit it is one, and something as, well, restrictive as calorie restriction just seems pretty passé.

This doesn't mean America isn't still obsessed with weight and weight loss, just that the buzzwords now tend to be things like "sustainable" and "lifestyle changes." And while one calorie restricter claims the practice just "teaches you how to eat normal foods but make better choices," it's pretty clear that it's not sustainable for most people. Which might be fine. American food culture is still pretty fucked up, but in the last couple of years there has been a little more emphasis on eating food you enjoy with people you like. This may not increase anyone's lifespan, but compared to a lot of recent diet fads, it seems pretty healthy, not to mention fun. Holloszy says hard-core calorie restricters are motivated by "fear of death," but someone once told me that people fear death more if they're not enjoying their lives. And except for a select few, logging every calorie just isn't enjoyable.

The Calorie-Restriction Experiment [New York Times Magazine]

• It's believed that Hitler took a cyanide pill and shot himself in his Berlin bunker in April 1945. The Russians said they dug up his burnt and buried corpse, with a bullet in the head, and finally cremated it in 1970, saving the jawbone and a fragment from the skull. American archaeologist Nick Bellantoni, who was allowed to examine the fragments in Moscow, says, "The bone seemed very thin - male bone tends to be more robust. It corresponds to a woman between the ages of 20 and 40... There is no report of [Hitler's wife Eva Braun] having shot herself or having been shot afterwards. It could be anyone's." • Several California domestic violence shelters have closed in recent months because Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger eliminated financing for the state's Domestic Violence Program due to a budget gap. "The governor understands how difficult these cuts are," said Schwarzegnegger's spokesman. "But he can't promise money we don't have." Many shelters have had to cut back on staff, counseling services, safe visitation centers, and legal services like help obtaining restraining orders. • A 14-year-old British girl died today after receiving the Cervarix vaccine as part of a national immunization program in the U.K. Doctors say no link can be made between her death and the vaccination before the post-mortem is performed, but the batch of vaccine used has been quarantined. • Couples in Chonqing, China's biggest provincial municipality, will not be allowed to divorce during an eight day holiday beginning on Thursday celebrating 60 years of communist rule. Officers at marriage registration centers said they can't cope with the high demand for weddings during the holiday and issue divorces. • University of Washington researchers found that depression, obesity, and alcohol abuse or dependency are interrelated conditions among young women but not men. Carolyn McCarty, the study's lead author, says, "Body image is particularly important for women. There seems to be a transfer that when women feel bad they eat more. That can have devastating effects emotionally and physically. But for men experiencing obesity, the reverse is true, and obesity seems to be protective against depression. It's the so-called 'jolly fat man' theory, which suggests that overweight people are actually happier." • Scottish researchers found the transmission of HIV among heterosexuals is slower than among homosexual men, "The slower dynamics of the heterosexual epidemic thus offer more opportunity for successful intervention, but it is essential that diagnosis is achieved as early as possible," said study leader Andrew Leigh Brown. • A Malaysian religious court appeals panel upheld the sentence of Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno, who will receive six cane strokes for drinking beer. The 32-year-old mother of two had refused to appeal her sentence, saying she wanted to serve as an example to other Muslims. Her father said, "She is ready to face her punishment and all she hopes for now is that it be done professionally and according to procedures set out in Islam." • Author Annette Gordon-Reed won the $25,000 Frederick Douglas Book Prize for her history book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. The prize is awarded every year by Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition for "the best book written in English on slavery or abolition." • 92-year-old Jane Bockstruck of New Hampshire completed a "flawless" skydive earlier this month. "I must have read it someplace and all of a sudden, 'I'm going to go skydiving.' So I did," Bockstruck said. "I've done so many things in life, I figured I'd just try something different for a change."

1) "Renehan and colleagues designed a model to estimate the number of cancers that could be blamed on being fat in 30 European countries. In 2002, they calculated that 70,000 cases of cancer out of about 2 million cancer cases were attributable to being overweight or obese. By 2008, the number had jumped to at least 124,000." Renehan is Andrew Renehan, of the University of Manchester, a cancer researcher who "presented his findings to a joint meeting of the European Cancer Organisation and the European Society for Medical Oncology in Berlin on Thursday."

In an extremely useful article, "How to Read Articles about Health and Healthcare," Dr. Alicia White of the Behind the Headlines team writes:

Research presented at conferences is often at a preliminary stage and usually hasn't been scrutinised by experts in the field. Also conference abstracts rarely provide full details about methods, making it difficult to judge how well the research was conducted. For these reasons, articles based on conference abstracts should be no cause for alarm. Don't panic or rush off to your GP.

The research here might be rock-solid for all we know, but at this point, we should take a moment to remember how much we don't know. How, exactly, did they design a model for estimating how many cancers can be blamed on fat? How much of the blame does fat get, and on what basis? What do they believe caused that leap between 2002 and 2008? And perhaps most importantly, what the hell does Renehan mean when he says, "Obesity is catching up at a rate that makes it possible it could become the biggest attributable cause of cancer in women within the next decade"? Is that prediction dependent on the obesity rate continuing to rise and if so, at what rate? Or does he believe (based on the 70,000 - 124,000 jump we're currently just taking his word for) that we'll see a similar leap in the next decade, regardless of whether the population gets fatter?

Also, when you say it's "possible it could become" blah blah blah, it would be helpful if you indicated how possible you think that is. Highly plausible? Quite possible? Eh, could happen? And how much does that prediction depend on "major causes of cancer, such as smoking and hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women" continuing to "drop dramatically," which would give obesity a leg up on becoming a leading risk factor without it necessarily becoming any more of a crisis than it already ostensibly is?

2) "Renehan said that in the U.S., some studies found obesity was responsible for up to 20% of cancers." No word on whether he added that in 2007, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study by a group from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute that found obese people have a lower risk of dying from several other forms of cancer, which made the overall cancer risk among the fat population a draw. As Gina Kolata wrote in The New York Times:

[C]ontrary to expectations, the obese did not have an increased risk of dying from cancer. They were slightly more likely than people of normal weights to die of a handful of cancers that are thought to be related to excess weight - cancers of the colon, breast, esophagus, uterus, ovary, kidney and pancreas. Yet they had a lower risk of dying from other cancers, including lung cancer. In the end, the increases and decreases in cancer risks balanced out.

The fact that breast, uterine and ovarian cancer are all correlated with fatness probably accounts for the fact that Renehan's warning is specifically to Western women; sucks for us that a lot of lady cancers fall in that group. If you're fat and have a family history or other risk factors for cancers considered obesity-related, it absolutely makes good sense to be extra vigilant. (Meaning, from my perspective, watch for symptoms and get screened, since permanent weight loss is likely to fail.) But do keep in mind the "slightly more likely" part, as well as the "thought to be related." When you take those qualifiers on top of the evidence that overall "the obese did not have an increased risk of dying from cancer," it puts the alarmist headlines about fat causing cancer in a somewhat different light.

3) Even the mainstream media bothered with a bit of balance for once. Despite Renehan's dire pronouncements, cancer expert Jan Coebergh tells the AP, "It is not likely (obesity) will have as severe an effect as smoking." Which isn't to say it won't have any effect at all, of course, but trust me on this one: I have read approximately a gazillion articles about how obesity kills in the last few years, and it is incredibly rare to find one that includes an expert saying, "Nah, that's overstating it."

Also, credit where it's due, Renehan himself notes that "Just telling the population to lose weight obviously hasn't worked," so if we want to see a drop in obesity rates, "We need to find the biological mechanism to help people find other ways of tackling obesity." That's the point you almost never see in articles about the dangers of fat — that there's still not much individuals can do about it, other than watch for symptoms and get screened. (And, of course, try to eat a balanced diet and get regular exercise, which once again, are good ideas for everyone who's able but will not necessarily cause permanent weight loss.)

I'm not saying Renehan and his colleagues are wrong. Fact is, I don't know and have no way of knowing. But I am saying, as I always say, that it's irresponsible for the media to whip up panic about fat causing X,Y and Z when a closer examination of their sources reveals that the evidence supporting the headlines is far from conclusive. As White puts it:

If you've just read a health-related headline that's caused you to spit out your morning coffee ("Coffee causes cancer" usually does the trick) it's always best to follow the Blitz slogan: "Keep Calm and Carry On"... The most important rule to remember: "Don't automatically believe the headline". It is there to draw you into buying the paper and reading the story. Would you read an article called 'Coffee pretty unlikely to cause cancer, but you never know'? Probably not.

Obesity Could Become Top Cancer Cause For Western women [USA Today]

Related: "How To Read Articles About Health" – by Dr Alicia White [Bad Science]
Causes Of Death Are Linked To A Person's Weight [NYT]

• Iranian police warned shopkeepers today not to use any mannequins with visible curves. Mannequins are also barred from appearing in windows without a headscarf. • In response to an abysmally low conviction rate for reported rapes, British officials have ordered a review of how rape victims are treated by authorities from the moment they report the assault onward. • Elizaveta Mukasei, who, with her husband, Mikhail, spied during the cold war for the KGB, has died at 97. The New York Times calls the Mukaseis "one of the most famous husband-and-wife duos in the history of espionage." • A new study reveals that more adults than previously thought (three out of five) have suffered from depression, anxiety disorders, alcohol addiction or marijuana abuse at some point in their lives. Previous studies had placed the number much lower, but they also did not follow participants over time, which doctors believe has lead to a more accurate picture of American's mental health. • Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor, who is a Yankees fan, is scheduled to throw out the first pitch on Saturday before New York's game against the Boston Red Sox. • A three-year custody battle over Dexter the pug has finally come to a close. A judge ruled that the dog will spend five weeks at a time with each of his owners. • Swedish female soldiers are demanding that the military provide them with combat-tested bras because the sports bras they're forced to buy unhook too easily. Men are provided with military-issue underwear, but there are no military-issue bras, so women have to buy their own. • According to the Census Bureau, 27% of gay couples say they are in a relationship "akin to husband-and-wife." This number is much higher than the number of gay couples who have been legally married, and analysts say it reflects the couples who would get married if they were granted equal rights. However, there were fewer same-sex couples reported this year than last, but that may be because fewer straight couples checked the wrong box on their forms. • Researchers have found that mice who are fed alcohol at a young age are more likely to make stupid decisions when they reach adulthood. Although this does not mean people who drink as teens grow up to be risk-takers, it does open up the possibility that the two things are related. • Tanning salons generally do not allow minors to visit without parental permission, but once they are in the door, they do not limit the number of tanning sessions allowed, a recent undercover operation found. •  A girls school in Pakistan was the target of another terrorist attack this Tuesday. Authorities believe the building was blown up by Islamist militants. • Researchers say when people are stressed they actually choose less familiar foods rather than "comfort foods." Study participants were asked to rate the level of change in their lives, then choose between American potato chips and British chips with odd flavors like Camembert and plum. Those experiencing more change were more likely to choose the unusual chips. • Australia's parliament will debate a bill that will decide whether two Kenyan woman can stay in the country as refugees, or if they will be forced to return and undergo female genital mutilation. Grace Gichuhi is seeking asylum because the Mungiki sect that killed her mother for refusing FGM wants to murder her for the same reason. She and fellow Kenyan Teresia Ndikaru Muturi both fled the country, but they'll be deported unless the parliament votes to expand refugee protection laws. • Researchers say people who are dieting should beware of naturally skinny friends who eat too much. 210 students participated in experiments in which a thin or overweight researcher ate snacks with them while watching a movie. The subject's portion choices mimicked the researcher's, but they adjusted and took a smaller portion if the researcher was overweight. • British Attorney General Baroness Scotland has been fined £5,000 for employing a housekeeper who wasn't allowed to work in the U.K. She didn't know it when she hired the housekeeper, but didn't keep a copy of her documents as required by law. • More women are murdered by men in Louisiana than anywhere else in the United States, according to a report from the Violence Policy Center. The national rate of women being murdered by men is 1.3 per 100,000, but in 2007 Louisiana's rate was 2.53 per 100,000. Alaska and Wyoming had the second and third highest rates. • A 19-year-old Indian girl confessed that she and her 20-year-old boyfriend strangled seven members of her family who opposed their relationship. They are charged with murdering her mother, father, grandmother, and four other relatives after lacing the family meal with a sedative. The family wouldn't let them marry because they belong to the same gotra, a group descended from a common ancestor. • Ron Paul on his appearance in the film Brüno: "I don't feel good about it because I was the subject of a trick, and nobody likes to be tricked. I understand they're not making a tremendous amount of money off this movie, so maybe the American people aren't as cynical as they assumed." •

According to a study of British women's measurements interpreted with great nuance and restraint by the Daily Mail's Victoria Lambert, women are bigger in almost every dimension than they were the last time such a study was conducted, in 1951. With measurements of 37-27-39, the average British woman in 1951 "was the classic hour-glass, not far off Hollywood standards." But now "our hour-glass has rolled into a barrel-like 38-34-40." Says Lambert, "our vital statistics don't just carry implications for how we look - they are crucial to our health."

She goes on to write pretty much the obesity-panic piece you might expect. Despite the fact that average BMI has actually gone down in Britain over the past 60 years, and is still in the healthy range, British ladies still need to worry about those "vital statistics" because their waists are now unhealthily large. Even an increase in foot size is apparently cause for concern: "It's definitely a bad thing if the reason is weight related because it can lead to increased pressure exerted through the foot and lower limbs and back, causing additional wear and tear on joints and soft tissues such as ligaments." And of course, men don't make passes at girls who look like barrels — British hips haven't kept pace with waists, and "wide hips have been traditionally seen as attractive to men because they denote fertility."

British women's life expectancy has risen by 10 years since the 50s, but Lambert's message is clear: the average female body is unhealthy, and unattractive. By all rights, it seems, women should be filled with self-loathing. But at least according to her fellow Daily Mail writer Lucy Taylor, women today are totally full of themselves! Taylor uses a painfully oft-cited US study on narcissism as a jumping-off point to make some questionable claims about women and their egos. Did you know that narcissism has grown by 67% in the last 20 years, "mainly among women?" Or that a full 10% of the population now "suffers from narcissism as a full-blown personality disorder?" Apparently all this self-regard is bad for women, because we actually kind of suck, and will never get a man if we don't acknowledge it.

Dating service founder Margot Medhurt tells Taylor she's seeing more and more women who don't understand where they fall in "the eligibility stakes." She says,

They tend to be in their 30s, and there is a wide discrepancy between how they perceive themselves and how others see them. They are often very plain, but see themselves as being absolutely fabulous, exceptional people. They invariably reject every guy's profile I send them. But if a guy rejects their profile, there is all hell to pay. There is disbelief. They are really saying: "I'm so fabulous. How dare he turn me down?"

Men are noticing this "phenomenon" too. Says management consultant David Baxter, who admirably admits that "he's not perfect, but is told he's an eligible and pleasant guy with a lot to offer," says,

I've had three successive dates recently with ladies in the late 30s to early 40s age bracket that have left me dumbfounded. [...] You sensed that they absolutely worshipped themselves, though none of them was drop-dead gorgeous or had amazing personalities, jobs or anything else to set them apart and elevate themselves into some superior position. I also thought it was quite telling that none of them had ever been married, engaged or had recently - or perhaps ever - been in a long-term relationship. I got the feeling that these women were living in a Sex And The City-inspired fantasy world. I also sensed that nobody would ever be good enough for them.

If you're a woman, being overcritical or getting angry at rejection makes you narcissistic. But if you're a guy, it makes you a sociologist. Taylor lets "professional golfer-turned-financial consultant" Neil Hay close out her article. He says,

I spent three hours on a date with one woman. I thought we got on brilliantly, but then she said she didn't want to meet again. This has happened a few times. It makes me think that if you don't live up to their perfect fantasy, then that's it. It's game over before you've even had any chance to begin to get to know each other. It does dent your confidence. I'm left thinking either that there's something wrong with me or that I'll just never be whatever it is that these women are looking for.

It's tough to be a man these days, forced to live up to impossible standards. If only there were some way to make women feel a little worse about themselves, so they'd recognize how plain they were and stop turning down perfectly good blokes. Perhaps some sort of study that scrutinized every aspect of their bodies, all the way down to the feet, and pronounced their very measurements dangerous and unappealing. Then again, those deluded women would probably just ignore it — as Hay says, "it's easier for them to believe their own myths than to face reality - that they are completely ordinary."

How Women's Bodies Have Been Transformed In The Past 60 Years... With Huge Implications For Our Health [Daily Mail]
The Ego Epidemic: How More And More Of Us Women Have An Inflated Sense Of Our Own Fabulousness [Daily Mail]

If you've ever read a word I've written, you've already guessed that I come down on the side of the second argument. Which is basically this, in the words of Jeffrey Friedman, who wrote the op-ed:

The heritability of obesity — a measure of how much obesity is due to genes versus other factors — is about the same as the heritability of height. It's even greater than that for many conditions that people accept as having a genetic basis, including heart disease, breast cancer, and schizophrenia. As nutrition has improved over the past 200 years, Americans have gotten much taller on average, but it is still the genes that determine who is tall or short today. The same is true for weight. Although our high-calorie, sedentary lifestyle contributes to the approximately 10-pound average weight gain of Americans compared to the recent past, some people are more severely affected by this lifestyle than others. That's because they have inherited genes that increase their predisposition for accumulating body fat. Our modern lifestyle is thus a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the high prevalence of obesity in our population.

But Friedman had already pissed me off before he even got to that. In an apparent effort to prove that he's a Serious Person and not just some delusional fatass with an axe to grind (hi!), he acknowledges that obesity is a risk factor for a bunch of diseases, claiming it has "consequences that include diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, and that cause nearly 300,000 deaths in the United States each year."

Y'ALL, THE 300,000 DEATHS THING WAS DEBUNKED IN 2005. By the CDC, not delusional fatties with axes to grind. Same folks who came up with the original stat, in fact. They just fucked up the first time:

According to the [second] study, obesity and extreme obesity cause about 112,000 deaths per year, but being overweight was found to prevent about 86,000 deaths annually. Based on those figures, the net U.S. death toll from excess weight is 26,000 per year. By contrast, researchers found that being underweight results in 34,000 deaths per year.

Emphasis added.

Seeing that error — four years after that crucial revision came out — automatically makes me think I can't take the person talking seriously. Which sucks, because in this particular debate, Friedman is, generally speaking, the one dealing in reality.

Ken Thorpe and Christine Ferguson, on the other hand, get it wrong from the headline: "We Have the Power to Change Our Weight" (And no, they probably didn't write the headline, but they wrote the op-ed that made that a logical summary.) Sure, most of us have the power to change our weight, temporarily. I was a champion dieter for a while there, losing 65 lbs. the first time I got serious about it, and 45 lbs. the second time. Haters will go to their graves believing that's because I gave up, both times, and started mainlining powdered sugar delivered to me via an elaborate pulley system constructed so I'd never have to leave the couch, but those who have even a passing interest in facts might consider looking at the research on long-term weight loss. Such as the 2007 UCLA study (PDF), in which researchers reviewed 31 earlier studies and concluded that on the whole:

[D]ieters were not able to maintain their weight losses in the long term, and there was not consistent evidence that the diets resulted in significant improvements in their health. In the few cases in which health benefits were shown, it could not be demonstrated that they resulted from dieting, rather than exercise, medication use, or other lifestyle changes. It appears that dieters who manage to sustain a weight loss are the rare exception, rather than the rule. Dieters who gain back more weight than they lost may very well be the norm, rather than an unlucky minority."

The part about not being able to identify which variables actually produced the (few demonstrated) health benefits is crucial. Thorpe and Ferguson write, "We know that as little as a 5 to 10 percent weight loss can significantly reduce risk factors for chronic disease, including lower blood-glucose levels, lower blood pressure, and reduced cholesterol levels," but they don't question how those studies proved it was the weight loss itself, as opposed to the lifestyle interventions that elicited it. In fact, other research suggests that a Health at Every Size approach — focusing on intuitive eating, exercise and (wonder of wonders) self-acceptance, all without regard to weight loss — delivers better health outcomes than dieting. No one disputes that a steady diet of junk food and a sedentary lifestyle are bad for your health. But A) Many fat people can and do eat balanced diets and exercise just as much as thin people without losing weight — that's where the whole genetic thing comes in — and B) plenty of thin people suffer from health issues related to lifestyle choices, but the default assumption is that they're "taking care of themselves" because they don't happen to have fat genes. Eating a balanced diet and exercising can be beneficial for all of us, but they will not cause permanent weight loss in most of us — and there's no real proof that we'd be markedly better off if they did. (Even if being thinner is theoretically advantageous — and again, "overweight" people win the longevity game — we must keep in mind that a fat person who's lost weight is not the same thing as a person who's always been thin.)

Friedman gets this mostly right:

There is no evidence that obese individuals need to "normalize" their weight to reap health benefits. In fact, it is not even clear whether there are enduring health benefits to weight loss among obese individuals who do not suffer from diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, or liver disease.

But then, once again, he blows it, basically reiterating Thorpe and Ferguson's point about losing 5-10% of your weight:

What is known is that the obese who do suffer from these conditions receive a disproportionately large benefit from even modest weight loss, which together with exercise and a heart-healthy diet can go a long way toward improving health.

Apart from what I've already said about the variables involved in weight loss and the fact that permanent weight loss is a pipe dream for all but a few statistical outliers, here's the obvious question about the "just lose 5-10%" thing: What happens when I do that and am still fat? Losing 10% of my weight (+/- 19 lbs.*) would leave me squarely in the obese category, not improving their statistics one little bit — so even if my health improved, would anyone actually quit bitching about the "obesity crisis"? Oh, but wait — enough people are on the cusp of BMI categories that if we all lost 5-10% of our weight, we'd see a dramatic drop in "obesity" and "overweight" population-wide, at which point we could all congratulate ourselves on no longer being a nation of embarrassing fatties who are going to die younger than our parents, even though individual losses would generally be quite small. The important thing is, on paper, that would look fantastic. At least until everyone gained it back.

Thorpe and Ferguson argue for many of the public health interventions I addressed in an inexplicably controversial post last week, and as always, I'm in favor of several of them, e.g., "lowering copays on preventive care... reinstating physical education and requiring school lunches to meet nutritional standards... ensuring that all Americans have access to a place to be physically active and purchase healthy foods." What I'm not in favor of are undefined "programs to help overweight Americans" (unless they mean programs to help us overcome the ill effects of relentless fat-hatred, see above about diets not working) and "tax credits to employers that offer wellness benefits and encourage health inside and outside of the workplace" — which sound fairly unobjectionable until you consider that this is what leads to demeaning "Biggest Loser" competitions at the office, employers badgering their workers to join specific commercial weight loss programs, and hysteria about a plate of cupcakes in the break room. If we're talking about tax credits for offering employees free or discounted gym memberships — and then leaving them the hell alone to work out as they please, or not — then great, have at it. But that's never all we're talking about. We're talking about diet culture invading the workplace even more than it already has, and a whole new layer of shame for fat people who aren't interested in joining Weight Watchers — probably because they've already been on it multiple times, and gained back everything they lost.

"[T]o win the fight against obesity," Thorpe and Ferguson write, "all of us need to be individually committed." Really? All of us? What role do people who aren't fat play in this, exactly? If you mean they need to be constantly reminding fat people that we're disgusting, unlovable, smelly, lazy, undisciplined, and above all, unhealtheeeeeee, then as a whole, they're doing a bang-up job already. (This does not, of course, apply to all thin people. Some of my best friends are thin!) So I'm pretty sure what you mean is "Fat people need to be individually committed" to fighting their own bodies. To which I'd point out: Most of us already are. Who the fuck do you think is keeping the $50 billion dollar weight loss industry afloat? Magic sprites?

Oh, and about that. You know that population-wide weight gain that happened in the last 30 years? (Friedman says the average is about 10 lbs.; I've heard anywhere from 7 to 20). Check out that last sentence from the UCLA researchers I quoted above: "Dieters who gain back more weight than they lost may very well be the norm, rather than an unlucky minority." Not only does dieting not work, but a lot of times it makes you fatter. And the weight loss industry has been growing right along with our asses all that time. Is that the only reason for the gain over that period? I have no idea, probably not. But it's something obesity alarmists never, ever factor in, even though common sense suggests somebody really ought to explore that correlation.

If you're a regular reader of mine and you feel like you've heard everything in this post a million, billion times, you have my apologies. I am so sick of making these arguments, I cannot even tell you. Unfortunately, people can't even get it through their heads that diets don't work — despite both a mountain of scientific evidence to that effect and a friggin' "results not typical" disclaimer on every ad — let alone that it is possible to be fat and healthy, that it is equally possible to be thin and unhealthy, that correlation does not equal causation, that there is strong evidence that obesity is highly heritable, that calories in/calories out is a ludicrously simplistic equation unless you think human beings are Bunsen burners, and that, above all, fat people are human beings. Which means we can hear you. And our continued fatness is not a personal attack on you or our country or our healthcare system, but the result of complex factors science is only beginning to understand, and in very many cases, something we have already tried our damnedest to change.

Or, as Friedman puts it:

While research into the biologic system that controls weight is moving toward the development of effective therapies for obesity, we are not there yet. In the meantime we must change our attitudes toward the obese and focus less on appearance and more on health. In their efforts to lose weight they are fighting against their biology. But they also are fighting against a society that wrongly believes that obesity is a personal failing.

I've stopped fighting against my biology, but I am still fighting against that society every goddamned day. And I don't just mean the trolls who swing by to tell me things like,

My fear that a woman with the legal power to take half of my possessions might some day become so fat and sexually unappealing that I'd sooner cut my own penis off than have sex with the manatee that used to be my wife is unfortunately all too common and blogs like this one that dangerously suggest to naive future fatties that it's ok are only leading your victims down the primrose path to a battle they can't win."

Or:

I personally dislike most fat people for their lack of will power or mental strength. If fat people would just have a strong mental will power, then they would either be able to deal with the jokes, or become skinny by actually sticking to their dieting and exercise plan without giving up.

Or:

FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS FATTIES ARE GROSS

(I truncated that one. By a lot.)

It's not just those shitheads, who are incredibly easy to dismiss. I'm talking about the people who swear they are really only concerned for my health, without ever having heard of Health at Every Size. The people who write screeds on how much obesity (theoretically) costs our healthcare system, and exhort individuals to fix that problem, without acknowledging that pile of research showing permanent weight loss is virtually impossible. I'm talking about the people who try to sell good ideas for improving public health as cures for childhood obesity, making fat kids feel like enemies of their entire communities, and yet not making them noticeably thinner. I'm talking even about people like Friedman, who are starting to get the message about the basic intractability of fat — and kudos to him for spreading it — but still repeat debunked, alarmist statistics in an effort to boost their own credibility before daring to suggest that fat people might not be a bunch of lazy slobs. I'm talking about everyone who's ever said, "I don't think we should treat fat people badly, but..."

Because that right there? Is treating fat people badly. It's still treating us as a problem to be solved, not as human beings.

To win the fight against fat hatred and discrimination, we all must be individually committed.

*I've said many times that I weigh around 200 lbs., though I haven't weighed myself since I jumped on a dog scale at the vet's office to prove a point 2 years ago. I weighed 185 then, after which I gained a pants size, which probably represents 10-15 lbs. But as it happens, I have recently dropped a pants size, so am probably somewhere around 190. Yes, the Queen of the Fat-o-Sphere has lost weight! And because I love you, I will share the secret of how I did it: I went off the pill.

The Real Cause of Obesity [Newsweek]
We Have the Power to Change Our Weight[Newsweek]

• Researchers have found that the children born to mothers that have undergone weight loss surgery are healthier than older siblings born before the procedure. The younger siblings were found to have improved heart health and a lower risk of obesity. • A Sudanese judge has ruled that journalist Lubna Hussein, who was arrested in July for wearing pants, will not be flogged (flogging is a legal punishment for indecency). Hussein is still facing a $200 fine, which she is not planning on paying. "I will not pay a penny. I won't pay, as a matter of principle," she said. •  Health workers at a clinic in rural Peru were frustrated at the low rate of births taking place inside the clinic (only 6%), and so they decided to ask local women what they were doing wrong. The mothers were happy to help. The clinic will now respect traditional practices, ensure that they have a doctor on hand who speaks the local language, and allow relatives to stay and help with the birthing process. • Celebrity polar bear Knut is getting a new pal: Giovanna, a female polar bear from Munich. However, since both bears are not yet sexually mature, there is little chance they will consummate their relationship. • Scientists are attempting to pin down gender differences in brain function, yet even the study of the brain does not provide an easy way out of the "old nature/nurture dilemma." What they found is something many have long suspected: "Individuals' gender traits-their preference for masculine or feminine clothes, careers, hobbies and interpersonal styles-are inevitably shaped more by rearing and experience than is their biological sex." • Al Franken has a cool party trick, which he recently displayed at the Minnesota State Fair. Click here for a video of Franken drawing the entire US map from memory. • Women in Australia are in luck: the Bluetongue Brewery plans to hire 10 to 15 professional beer tasters in the next year. And since women apparently make better tasters, they are looking for boozy broads to fill the open positions. • This weekend, Linda Rice became the first woman to win a training title at Saratoga. Rice has been training since 1987, but this is the first time she has taken home a title. • An op-ed from this Sunday's New York Times argues that the cyberbullying laws under which Lori Drew was tried are "too vague to be constitutional." • The mayor of German border town Vierlinden has announced plans to deter prostitutes from gathering on the B1 motorway through the use of butyric acid, which apparently smells like vomit and body odor. • In October 2007, Afghan journalist Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh was jailed for blasphemy after she was caught downloading an internet article about women's rights. A few weeks ago, President Hamid Karzai finally pardoned Kambakhsh, and she has since been freed. • The Justice Department is urging a Santa Ana court to toss out a lawsuit that challenges President Obama's Constitutional qualifications to be president. The birthers' suit claims that Obama was not born in Hawaii and is a citizen of Indonesia, and "possibly still citizen of Kenya." • A Jewish community leader has condemned the AIDS awareness ad that features a man intended to represent Hitler in the throes of passion, saying that it both unsuccessful and offensive. We agree. • Feministing features an interesting video about gender and language. The Hariri Foundation introduced a program that replaced words that are generally read as masculine with accents that mark them as feminine. More here. • As of today, Girl Scouts will now be able to earn a new patch for "preparedness." "This new preparedness patch will increase citizen preparedness and enhance our country's readiness for disasters," said Homeland Security Department Secretary Janet Napolitano. • Farmers in India are facing increasing hardships as crops fail and debts pile up, which has caused many impovrished farmers to take the drastic measure of selling their wives. According to some reports, as many as several thousand men have sold their wives to money lenders, who then transfer the marriage contract to a third party. •

The study looked at fifth-graders, whom UPI.com calls "part of the age group increasingly known as tweens by those in media marketing" (you don't say!). 7.3% of girls and 7.8% of boys disagreed with the statement "I like the way I look." For girls, the higher their BMI, the more likely they were to be dissatisfied — 5.7% of "normal weight" girls disliked the way they look, compared to 10.4% of overweight girls and 13.1% of obese ones. Boys' body satisfaction was a little more complicated — boys with the lowest and highest BMI tended to feel more dissatisfied than those in the middle. Study author Bryn Austin says, "Poor body satisfaction among males with a low BMI may reflect the cultural ideal for males to attain both muscularity and leanness."

Interestingly, girls whose parents had low levels of education, and those who lived in rural areas, were more likely to be dissatisfied with their bodies — even after researchers controlled for BMI. Austin speculates "that appearance-related pressures may be higher within rural areas, or perhaps that girls in urban areas benefit from existing programs that may protect against decrements in body satisfaction." This goes against the conventional notion of eating disorders and pressure to be thin as urban, middle- and upper-class problems, faced by white girls at prep schools and colleges. Given that urbanites sometimes subscribe to the stereotype that rural people are fat and eat poorly, it's possible that girls in rural areas feel extra pressure not to conform to this stereotype. Whatever the case, it's important to note that body dissatisfaction isn't just a problem for fashion-obsessed women in LA and New York. It hits young girls far from media hubs as well — and, it seems, it hits them harder.

10- And 11-year-olds Feel Pressure To Have A Perfect Body [ScienceDaily]
'Tweens' Feel Pressure For Perfect Bodies [UPI.com]
As Early As Age 10, Kids Feel Pressure To Have A "Perfect Body" [Time]

In a PsychCentral article, Margarita Tartakovsky quotes eating expert Ellyn Satter's definition of normal eating:

Normal eating is going to the table hungry and eating until you are satisfied. It is being able to choose food you like and eat it and truly get enough of it-not just stop eating because you think you should. Normal eating is being able to give some thought to your food selection so you get nutritious food, but not being so wary and restrictive that you miss out on enjoyable food. Normal eating is giving yourself permission to eat sometimes because you are happy, sad or bored, or just because it feels good. Normal eating is mostly three meals a day, or four or five, or it can be choosing to munch along the way. It is leaving some cookies on the plate because you know you can have some again tomorrow, or it is eating more now because they taste so wonderful. Normal eating is overeating at times, feeling stuffed and uncomfortable. And it can be undereating at times and wishing you had more. Normal eating is trusting your body to make up for your mistakes in eating. Normal eating takes up some of your time and attention, but keeps its place as only one important area of your life.

Some of these things — eating until you are satisfied, for instance, seem so basic that it's sad we need permission for them. Others almost sound like sacrilege: it's really normal to eat because you are "happy, sad or bored"? Isn't that "emotional eating," something women do that sabotages them and makes them fat? Satter's definition acknowledges something few diet articles ever will — that having a piece of cake because you want it, or even because you're in a bad mood, isn't a stupid mistake only someone with no willpower would make. It's normal.

Contrast that with this advice Tartakovsky quotes from Fitness Magazine:

Make a plan and stick to it. Consuming the same simple, locally grown or organic foods week to week will help prevent you from resorting to last-minute fast-food (and unhealthy) meals. Avoid using treats, such as ice cream or other sweets, as a reward for a hard day.

Nutrition researcher David Katz, MD, won't overexcite his taste buds while trying to lose weight. ‘The more variety of foods and flavors you introduce, the more appetite is stimulated,' Dr. Katz explains. ‘If your diet resembles an all-you-can-eat buffet, you're going to eat a lot.' Dr. Katz also says that restricting meal options will help eliminate temptation. Redundancy is the safest bet.

Tips like this one — which basically boils down to "bore yourself thin" — may seem normal because magazines tout them so much. But eating to avoid exciting your taste buds is actually counterintuitive and difficult. Maybe one reason so many diets fail is because they ask people to eat in ways that are, frankly, pretty weird.

Of course, Satter's prescription for normal eating might not make people thin. But it probably wouldn't make them gain a million pounds either. The idea that you'll be morbidly obese if you let yourself eat until you're full, and don't beat yourself up about overeating occasionally, is based on an invalid principle: that fat people eat way too much of all the wrong things, while thin people carefully restrict all their food. Overweight people who don't live on a diet of donuts already know this. So why is America, which is now 66 percent overweight or obese (at least according to the CDC) still full of fat hatred?

In an article titled "America's War on the Overweight," Newsweek's Kate Dailey and Abby Ellin blame, in part, something called "the fundamental attribution error, a basic belief that whatever problems befall us personally are the result of difficult circumstances, while the same problems in other people are the result of their bad choices." They also quote Marlene Schwartz, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, who says, "A lot of people struggle themselves with their weight, and the same people that tend to get very angry at themselves for not being able to manage their weight are more likely to be biased against the obese." Interestingly, her research shows that young women, who may experience the most weight pressure, have the most negative thoughts about fat people.

But there's yet another explanation for America's rage against the overweight. According to psychologist Ryan Martin, "People actually enjoy feeling angry. It makes them feel powerful, it makes them feel greater control, and they appreciate it for that reason." Dailey and Ellin mention snarky Internet comments, one of the most popular mediums of fat hatred — and also, perhaps, one of the easiest ways to gain a feeling of control with no consequences. When Tara Parker-Pope of the Times Well blog asked her readers what they thought normal eating was, they were actually pretty well behaved. But one commented,

As long as "registered dieticians" and registered politicians subscribe to the "I'm OK; you're OK" school of health, our population will get fatter and fatter. Personal responsibility? It's so passe.

And another added,

Clearly the "norm" in America is to overeat to the point of degrading health by consuming excessive amounts of salt, fat and sugar and insufficient amounts of complex carbohydrates. The article seems to be much more a discussion of what "feelings" about eating are desireable rather than what would lead us to eat in a manner that is desireable from a health standpoint.

Discussions of food tend to make emotions run high, here as everywhere. But we'll risk it — do you agree with Satter's definition? What does normal eating mean to you?

What Is ‘Normal' Eating? [NYT]
America's War On The Overweight [Newsweek]
What Is Normal Eating? [PsychCentral]

It's believed that Suman suffers from a hormonal imbalance, but her family has been unable to afford to travel to Calcutta for expert medical treatment. WWKAD? What Would Katy Abram Do? • Margaret Bush Wilson, a civil-rights activist and head of the Missouri NAACP, has died in St. Louis at the age of 90. • Jose Garcia-Perlera, who tied up and gagged widows living alone in a series of attacks in 2007 and 2008 in Maryland, was sentenced today to life in prison without the possibility of parole. • The mom in North Dakota who was busted (heh) for breastfeeding while intoxicated can't stay out of trouble: She's been arrested twice since her sentencing. • Poor Tyler Barrick and Spencer Jones. They paid a Utah newspaper to run their wedding announcement, only to have it rejected. The same-sex couple were legally married in California in June and wanted the announcement to run in Jones' hometown before a family get-together next week. "After all, our marriage is just as real and legal and entitled to celebration as any of the others that are announced each week in the pages of The Spectrum," Jones wrote to publisher Donnie Welch. Welch replied: "This simply is not true. While that may be the case in some states it is not the case in the state of Utah. As our policy is to run marriage announcements recognized by Utah law, I have made the decision not to run the announcement." • Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota has asked a judge to prevent the state from suspending its license to perform abortions in Sioux Falls. • A 35-year-old woman known only as Carole — a convert to Islam — was banned from her local pool in Paris for trying to go swimming in a "burquini." She bought the garment because: "it would allow me the pleasure of bathing without showing too much of myself, as Islam recommends." But officials claim the "burquini" is a possible public health risk. Daniel Guillaume, a regional official in charge of swimming pools, says: "These clothes are used in public, so they can contain molecules, viruses, et cetera, which will go in the water and could be transmitted to other bathers." • "Everybody used to say how radical I was. I just thought I was pragmatic." — Billie Jean King, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Wednesday, the "the highest honor a civilian can receive in the U.S." • Scary, but not surprising: Pregnant women who underwent female genital cutting as girls are at increased risk of needing an emergency Cesarean section or suffering serious tears during childbirth. • Filament, a UK magazine for women featuring semi-naked men, is have problems pleasing its audience, which wants pictures of erect penises; its printers, which refuse and object to working with such content; and distributors which won't handle a women's magazine with a man on the cover. Writes Kristina Lloyd, "When set against the plethora of men's lifestyle and top-shelf magazines featuring scantily clad and open-legged women, the struggles faced by Filament highlight a deeply entrenched sexism: Men can look at women but women cannot look at men… The sexism is in the inequality. • Wow: Women's boxing will be added to the 2012 Olympic Games. Boxing was the last all-male Olympic sport.

"...(most of all) they are a strain not only on their clothing but on NHS resources. The secret of their size? Their outsized appetites are matched by a lack of self-control and even less self-respect."

It is hardly worthwhile to debunk Platell's argument point by point: the knowing assumptions based on casual observation; the reflexive equation of size with health; the assumption that anyone not matching a certain weight profile is filled with self-loathing and incapable of self-respect; the normative standards; the rhetoric which, directed at any other group, would qualify as blatant hate-speech.

People like Platell (think Meme Roth on steroids) couch their disgust in a disingenuous concern for the health of the lazy slobs they so deplore. Each one talks, pityingly, about the "fatties" in their own families. Are there obesity epidemics in America and the UK? Yes. Do people eat badly and not exercise enough? Definitely. Are some of these issues tied up with economics and complex issues of social injustice? Of course. But this isn't what Platell is actually talking about; this merely becomes a justification, in her mind, for conflating her issues and ugliness with a fig leaf of conscience. She doesn't want to help these people. Get rid of them? Shrink them? Sure. But let's not pretend it doesn't come down to the fact that she finds them "unattractive" and that something about overweight people frightens her.

In order, however, to explore the issue like the objective, serious journalist she is, Platell travels to the West Midlands, England's "Fat Central," an economically-depressed area with rising obesity rates. What she finds, shockingly enough, disgusts her.

Everywhere, there were fat people. Men with stomachs so large it must have been decades since they'd seen their toes; women so overweight they had rolls of fat cascading down their backs, their thighs so large they couldn't walk, they waddled. More troubling still were the huge number of people on motorised buggies - every one of them obese. Others staggered along supporting their bulk by leaning on shopping trolleys. It doesn't take long to see that immobility is the inevitable outcome of a lifetime of obesity. Saddest of all, though, were the young kids, just teenagers, with arms so fat they stuck out from their sides, legs so large their feet pointed outwards. I'm sorry if that sounds cruel. But until we recognise the reality of the problem, we'll have no hope of beating it.

Yeah, she sounds really sorry. This is clearly the way to address the issue. In her investigation, she arrives at several highly bizarre conclusions: the government is throwing its money away on "arts centres" instead of facilitating, fitness and, oh yeah, people want to be fat because of - wait for it - social pressures. "In other words, being a normal size is abnormal around here. If you want to fit in (as most of us do, wherever we live) then pile on the flab. And so the problem gets steadily worse, generation after generation." Now, on the one hand, stopped-clock-style, she's not wholly wrong; those parents with unhealthy eating habits are probably more likely to foster them in their kids. But her larger point - that the problem is people feeling too good about themselves - is among the most disturbing in the whole disgusting piece.

So, how does the trip leave her feeling? Take a wild guess. "I had thought the sight and plight of people in Britain's fattest town might soften my attitude to the obese, but while I have sympathy for the individuals I spoke to, I'm sorry to say my overall thinking has only been hardened by what I witnessed." Shocker, that. She went amongst a group of people she despised based on their appearance, stared at them like a particularly crap nature documentarian, found that, yes, they were fat, and hated them even more. Her point, I guess, is that...well, I don't know what it is. That she hates fat people? We got that. That she feels morally superior? Check. That she's a loathsome human being? Because that's what I took away from it! Without resorting to Godwin's Law, Platell's language is that of racialist justification - the dehumanization, the reflexive contempt and, yes, the naked hatred. That she feels comfortable writing this filth in a national publication - even a rag like the Daily Mail - is shocking and sobering. There are those who will condemn my even giving her the virtual ink, or giving the Mail the credence. But I think it's important to acknowledge that this is how a lot of people feel - and feel comfortable stating - and expose it as the ugliness it is wherever we see it. If her concern is really for improving people's health, well, she's undermining it. If she's trying to harden a hateful, irrational fattist fringe, well, good job.

My Visit To Fat Central On A Mission To Find Out Who's Really To Blame For Our Obesity Crisis [Daily Mail]

In the first study, kids were paired with either a friend or a stranger and told to eat as much as they wanted. Both overweight and "normal" weight kids ate more with a friend, but overweight kids ate more if their partners were overweight, whether they knew them or not. ScienceDaily says the study "demonstrates that friends may act as 'permission givers' on children's food intake." And study author Sarah Salvy says,

Overweight children are more likely to find food more reinforcing than non-overweight youth. Being in the company of overweight peers may give them the permission to eat more or may decrease their inhibitions, increasing what are seen as the norms of appropriate eating, or how much one should eat.

The study doesn't appear to address whether overweight children actually "find food more reinforcing," but it does manage to moralize eating by talking about it in terms of "permission." It's not odd that kids felt more comfortable eating with a friend than with a stranger, but it's interesting that coverage of the study implies that the higher intake is the disordered one. Isn't it possible that kids consciously or unconsciously eat less than they normally would when they're with a stranger, because they're uncomfortable? And isn't it also possible that overweight kids eat less with a skinnier partner because they're embarrassed about being heavier? As someone who loses my appetite when I'm stressed, I've relied on friends to cook with me and encourage me to eat during difficult times, and I have to object to the notion that eating more at a shared meal is a bad thing.

The second study examined groups of monkeys, and found that the ones who were lower in the social hierarchy — who "are often the target of aggression and aren't included in group grooming sessions as often as dominant monkeys" — gained more visceral fat, or fat in the abdominal cavity. This type of fat contributes to atherosclerosis and heart disease. In women and female monkeys, hormones can protect against these conditions, but researchers also found that monkeys with more visceral fat had lower levels of protective hormones. Study author Carol A. Shively wisely points out that "obesity is directly related to lower socioeconomic status in Western societies, as is heart disease. So, the people who have fewer resources to buffer themselves from the stresses of life are more likely to experience such health problems."

Not only do people of lower socioeconomic status have fewer material resources to cope with stress, they may also have more "social stress" as a result of being lower in the economic hierarchy. And perhaps there's a feedback loop here, in which overweight people are socially stigmatized, causing them to build up more visceral fat and increase their risk of heart disease. Visceral fat is much more dangerous than fat in other areas of the body, and the stress of being overweight in a sizeist society might cause people who don't have a lot of this type of fat (not all overweight people do; not all skinny people don't) to develop it.

So might some of the vaunted health risks of obesity actually be the result of stigma? It's possible. It would be interesting to see how overweight people fare health-wise in societies that don't look down on them (although some of these societies, like Mauritania, have their own problems). Failing that, scientists could take a more nuanced look at childhood social influences, rather than telling us that eating with friends makes kids fat.

Friendship Influences Eating Behavior, Particularly When Friends Are Overweight [ScienceDaily]
Overweight Friends Alter Eating Patterns, Study Shows [Softpedia]
New Research Links Social Stress To Harmful Fat Deposits, Heart Disease [EurekAlert]

That was Gail Zweigenthal, a former editor who covered things like important cruise ship christenings for Gourmet, and who lives — of course — on the Upper East Side. Zweigenthal proudly tells the paper that she lifts weights and walks three miles every single day.

New York, which is already one of the thinner states in the country, is home to Manhattan, where overweight people comprise just 42% of the population. (The national average is 67%.) These data are, of course, derived from the Body Mass Index — and strangely, the fact that while obesity is a serious health problem, BMI is an unreliable indicator of a person's health, goes unmentioned in the Times story. In any case, the reason Manhattan is New York's thinnest county is undoubtedly because it is also one of the state's, and the country's, wealthiest places. In poorer neighborhoods of Manhattan, like Harlem, obesity rates and the prevalence of obesity-linked diseases, like Type 2 diabetes, are higher.

Maybe the fact that food choice — not to mention the choice to join a gym — is in America largely a function of social class and income level is what led reporter Anne Barnard to concentrate exclusively on interviewing skinny rich ninnies for this piece. We have:

• Brian Ermanski, a 28-year-old "slender yet muscular painter" who lives in SoHo and, from a bench outside the restaurant Balthazar, says things like, "It's probably more like 20 percent overweight down here." Ermanski smokes to stay thin.
• Manager of the Madison Avenue Intermix — a store which does not sell clothes above a size eight — Lynne Bacci, who works out "to fit into skinny jeans and tank tops."
• The aforementioned Zweigenthal, who continued, "If I feel fat, I can't enjoy eating. This is unhealthy — that if I gain a few pounds, I'm not happy — but it's the truth of me."
• Exhale Gym and Spa director Susan Tomback, who calls exercise for her clients "a lifestyle thing. It's like a club. They go to brunch afterwards at Sant Ambroeus." Sant Ambroeus is a restaurant whose brunch menu includes a filet of sea bream that costs $39. Exhale Gym and Spa is a gym and spa where membership can cost up to $285 a month.
• One denizen of the Upper East Side who says that she was raised to explicitly connect social class with weight. "My mom always says, 'The smaller the dress size, the bigger the apartment.'"

Then Barnard quotes a 52-year-old plumber from the Bronx named Chuck Ortiz, who, at 6' and 220 lbs, would be classified as just under obese according to the BMI. Ortiz, who eats a $5 chicken gyro for lunch, doesn't understand why wealthy New Yorkers pay for a gym "when there's a park right there."

That's the sort of outer borough logic that doesn't get much play in the land of lunches at Balthazar and $285/month "lifestyle" gyms and stores that abjure a size 10 dress.

Where Thin People Roam, And Sometimes Even Eat [NYTimes]
Top 10 Reasons BMI Is Bogus [NPR]