While I feared pat and tired "love your body" platitudes, I decided to read the book anyway. And just as Rachel said, it was full of humor and honesty and emotional depth, and it made me want to interview Frankel (who conveniently lives a ten minute walk from my apartment). The main reason Frankel decided to finally tackle what she calls her "dieting addiction" once and for all was because her two daughters, Maggie and Lucy, were reaching puberty. "It’s my goal to instill this happiness and comfort in my daughters’ skin so that they’re never distracted from their real goals with this shit," Frankel told me. "The decades I have lost on negative thoughts and negative behaviors with the self-loathing, it’s just a waste of time." More insight from Valerie on body image, lady mags, mothers and daughters below.

Jezebel: You worked at Mademoiselle and wrote about both positive and negative experiences you've had with women's magazines. At Jezebel we seem to love and hate women's magazines in equal measures, and I wonder if it's possible to consume that sort of media in a way that's not destructive.
Valerie Frankel: As awful as it was at the beginning (see Dodai's earlier post about the coked-out calorie counting), once the original editor who hired me left, working at Mademoiselle was really was awesome at the end. It was amazing and that’s why it probably didn’t last. I think of my daughters reading women's magazines, I try to teach them to be a little cynical about the way the material is presented, to be a little savvy about the relationship between editorial and advertising. And they learn that because of living with me and my having been in this business so long. That being said [my daughter] Maggie loves all of it. Teen Vogue and Seventeen, the number of teen titles is dwindling daily but she loves it all and wants it all. And she probably reads the way that most people read it, for the fashion and the beauty. She did say this one crazy thing she wanted to take swim lessons because she read in one of the teen magazines that guys consider girls who swim, 'hot.' This is why you want to take swim? She said it wasn’t, but it was part of the package. And in terms of my consuming women’s magazines, I’m sort of aged out of a large portion of them. I don’t read them for fashion and beauty. It’s going to sound dowdy and ridiculous but at this point I really do read them for the recipes.

Jezebel: In the book, you do an experiment where you count the number of negative thoughts you had about your body in a single day. I wanted to try that experiment before I met with you, but I was too scared.
Valerie Frankel: I started writing this book when I was 41, and now I’m 43, and I definitely felt like in the process of writing the book I had to reach a certain level of maturity to deal with this stuff. It was also having kids of a certain age and not wanting them to make the same mistakes, and I didn’t want to make the same mistakes my mother made [Frankel's mother criticized her weight endlessly].

Jezebel: I know you wrote a lot about being teased mercilessly about your weight in middle school, and I wonder if things are worse for girls your daughters' age because the ideal has become smaller and smaller since you were a tween.
Valerie Frankel: As the nation gets fatter, the ideal standard gets smaller, because it becomes that much more impossible to attain. There are the girls for whatever reason are the targets, and I still see that in my daughters' school. And it seems to be established pretty early, I was a target in the seventh grade, and it stuck, even regardless of what my weight was in any given year. I wrote about it in the book. My parents forced me to go on optifast, which is this experimental liquid protein diet, and I did lose weight. I was officially underweight, but I don’t think anyone ever saw me with any kind of perspective. I was still the target, the fat girl. There were fat girls at my school who became full-blown anorexics, like walking skeletons, scary ass shit. And they had been targets about being fat, and then when they lost all that weight they were targets for being skeletal and too thin. That’s just the way it was forever.

Jezebel: You talked earlier about having to reach a certain level of maturity before being able to work on your body image. How long did that process of purging the negativity take?
Valerie Frankel: The writing process was a full year, and it’s been a year since then. I would say I feel stronger all the time, and more conscious. You go in and out, and sometimes I feel like I’m losing control of it again, but then I wrest control back. Because I did a shitload of work. Emotional work, and my goals were emotional. Just reframing it that way. My goals were not about losing weight or running a certain distance, they were wholly emotional.

Jezebel: Sometimes I watch the Biggest Loser and it seems like with that show and most of the other weight loss shown in pop culture, it's all about image. They never address any of the emotional stuff.
Valerie Frankel I watch it too! They never focus on it on The Biggest Loser except for this one episode. Did you see the one, with Jillian’s mother who is a shrink? It was such a crazy episode. Jillian’s mother is a shrink who deals with eating issues and body image, and her mother came on and did little sessions, which of course were taped. And one guy went on and admitted that he had been abused sexually and physically and probably verbally, and hello! It was way too intense. They never did it again. My theory was to get to the root of everything about body image for me, and get square on that, and move forward. And I think it’s great and everyone should do it. It really works.

Jezebel: I have to be honest, when I first read about your book I thought it was just going to be another book about weight loss touting the same superficial "love yourself" message that is never helpful. I mean, obviously if just telling people to love themselves worked, the dieting industry would be out of business. But your book wasn't like that.
Valerie Frankel:There’s nothing about dieting in it. It’s not about food, it’s about body image. This is a true memoir, it’s not a real time memoir that are so popular now, like “my year of losing weight” or something. It’s about everything, the present and the past and melding the two. Just in terms of the writing of this book as a discovery process, I knew that body image had been a major theme of my life, but I was shocked when in the course of writing I discovered that it had influenced every major decision in my life. Marriages and career, and parenting, and just everything. I mean everything. Everything I wore, everything I did. Just everything. And that alone was such a shock, and made me want to live the rest of my life differently.

Jezebel: How did the thought process go?
Valerie Frankel: I went back for the earlier chapters, I took a deep breath and plunged into those painful things from my past. Despite the fact that I had been a writer for 25 years and have probably written millions of words, have never written about the mother stuff, or the junior high stuff. And it was interesting to hear the reaction of friends. They were all 'I can’t believe you were such a loser in junior high.' It was so this part of my past that I suppressed, and all the mother stuff. I mean, my old friends who were there, they knew. But my mother and I have such a close relationship despite this one area. It just seemed so weird, so many people were like, how can you even talk to her? But it’s complicated.

Jezebel: Mother daughter relationships always are.
Valerie Frankel:It made me think about my fiction too. A lot of the mother daughter relationships I’ve written about have kind of been one-dimensional because I hadn’t been able to deal with the anger part of it. I had to unlock it. I’m working on a novel now and I’m finding it much easier to go to those dark places. I had written comedy for so many years and I wondered, why? It also helped me get to those dark places that I had suppressed when my husband died [Frankel's first husband died of cancer in November 2000]. I don’t know if you have anyone close to you who died, but it’s very difficult to let yourself think in terms of anything being insincere about the relationship or the relationship having any flaws. It’s like as soon as somebody died, everything has to be wrapped in this sort of golden glow. I idealized that marriage for a long time because I couldn’t go there. Not just writing about, but thinking about, things I just had not allowed myself to deal with. And it was crazy, just typing and crying and everything built on itself.

Jezebel: Anytime we bring up issues of weight at Jezebel I read the comments from our readers and they're always so deeply sad. There is a lot of self-loathing there, and I just wish there is a way we could all — myself included — discuss these issues without being so hard on ourselves.
Valerie Frankel: I think in this culture it's impossible to not care about your weight. But you have to understand, one of the key themes in the book, and it was a major, light bulb moment for me, is that weight is a distraction from the real problems, and what really matters in your life. It’s a convenient distraction. It’s not going to go away. You think about your weight instead of your abusive boyfriend or your job that’s not going anywhere or that you don’t know what you want to do with your life. And I realized it through a lot of really bad times in my life, obsessing about weight was a way to not deal with other issues.

Jezebel: It sounds like it was almost a comfort for you.
Valerie Frankel: It is a comfort. I wasn’t an emotional eater, I was an emotional dieter. Like dieting itself was the addiction I thought that if I went cold turkey on dieting, I would just be lost in a store. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. And I think when all that stuff goes away, when you stop dieting and stop obsessing, you create an emotional vacuum and something has to rush into it. It can be positive things. I think you can strengthen your relationships or get somewhere in your career or write that novel or run the marathon or whatever your real goals are if you just stop obsessing about your weight. And you might gain five pounds, but you’ll have written a novel. My bad self-image hasn’t affected too much of the trajectory of my life overall, but I just would have been a lot happier for a long time. I would love it if my daughters' generation of girls weren't distracted from their goals by thinking about this shit. Just think of what you all can do if you don’t have this one thing.

Thin Is The New Happy [Amazon]
Valerie Frankel's Palace Of Love [Valerie Frankel Official Website]

Earlier: The Last Days Of Mademoiselle: Cocaine, Cigarettes & Calorie Counts

Though the explanation may be unclear, this research is the epitome of a "no shit" study to many female bloggers in the Fatosphere. Kate Harding at fat acceptance blog Shapely Prose posted an awesome rant about attractiveness earlier this year, and how unfortunate and untrue the equation thin = sexually attractive is.

Kate writes:

The world is not full of Attractive People and Unattractive People. It’s full of people who are attractive to some and not to others. I hear from trolls all the time who complain that they don’t want to be “forced” to find nasty, ugly fat women attractive–which utterly baffles me, since the last thing I want to do is encourage fat-hating dicks to date fat women. You don’t find fat people attractive? Fabulous. Don’t date them. I will find a way to pick myself up and move on without your love. But to assume your lack of sexual interest in fat chicks must be universal–or that the mere existence of self-confident fat people having healthy relationships somehow “forces” you to find fat attractive–is the height of fucking narcissism.

Rant on! It's sort of bizarre to me that researchers would choose to study this in the first place. "This study indicates that all women deserve diligence in counseling on unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease prevention, regardless of body mass index," Dr. Kaneshiro said. Uh, no shit? I mean, did they really need to do a study to prove that all women need to learn about their bodies, even if they're fat? I guess when the news "World's heaviest man marries in Mexico" makes headlines the world over, many people are still baffled by the idea that fat and sexuality can go together.

Overweight Women have More Sex [UPI]
In Which I Ramble About Attraction [Shapely Prose]

Earlier: Tyra Tackles The Weighty Issue Of Fatsploitation

I have a pair of vintage track pants that I've worn for the last 10 years, and I've been anywhere from a size 8 to a size 16 during that time. These pants always fit, no matter what; the best part is that they were purchased for $5 at a street fair. While it's true that track pants and sweat pants and all kinds of stretchy, comfortable clothes can be dangerous, if you wear them all the time — it's hard to gauge if you're gaining weight when you do — there's definitely an upside to "magical" clothes. I like to think of these pieces as friends, who embrace you no matter what size you are.

Of course, the truth is that there isn't really any "magic" in magical clothes. There are just dresses with A-line shapes; straight-cut, elastic-waist pants, forgiving fabrics and deceptively roomy Halloween costumes stitched with love. But it's fun to imagine that a garment that's always there for you is infused with mystical, supernatural powers. It just sounds so much better than "stretch."

• "I am genuinely sorry for all the times I fed us a Luna bar and called it food."
• "I apologize for wanting a nose job in the seventh grade."
• "Three words: nine dollar pedicure. Okay, four if you count 'infection.'"
• "I am also sorry for all the times that I decided to save time and money by skipping dinner and going straight for the after-dinner drinks. Well, maybe not all the times, but any of the times I ended up vomiting, blacking out or being violently hungover the next day. The rest of the times were a success, I think."
• "I apologize for 20 years of smoking cigarettes."
• "I'm sorry for the time I got drunk and ran in flip flops and stubbed my toe on the sidewalk so hard that the toenail had to be removed and i had to get a tetanus shot. I have a picture if anyone wants to see the bloody toenail bed."
• "I'm sorry for the time I fell down an escalator while living abroad and broke my clavicle and shoulder and was too nervous about my poor language skills to seek proper physical therapy once I had healed. Now one of my shoulders slopes and my back looks weird."
• "I apologize for asking my hairdresser for 'the Rachel' in 1996."

Now you go!

[Image via NOW and Anand McCorquodale]

A Letter To My Body For Love Your Body Day 2008 [BlogHer]

I took Mariska's self-assessment in a different light. I sincerely doubt that Hargitay is trying to tell Self readers that she's at all overweight. I think it's more that terms like "full figured," "curvy," "plus-size," and "big-boned," have become so obfuscated by the dieting industrial complex that their original meanings are essentially moot at this point.

In mag parlance, Gisele Bundchen and Jennifer Hudson are both "curvy," (which these days means "possessing breasts") and Whitney from America's Next Top Model is "plus-size." We got an angry email after New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis described Keira Knightley as "a big-boned beauty" because the reader had assumed that Dargis was calling Knightley fat. The thing is, Knightley is "big-boned" according original definition of the word, which is "having a bone structure that is massive in contrast with the surrounding flesh." Her shoulders are broad and her clavicle protruding, but she has little flesh on her bones.

It's gotten to the point where one can't describe any form, male or female, without being accused of body snarking. However, fat prejudice is still insidious and rampant, as a new study in the U.K. shows 46% of people have referred to or thought of an overweight person by by a derogatory name, according to The Independent. Are we being over-sensitive about value-neutral words, or understandably concerned about weight messages sent from celebrities?

Mariska Hargitay's Skewed Self Assessment [Glossed Over]
Georgiana and Her Dull, Dallying Duke [NYT]
Many Britons Fattist Bullies, Survey Shows [Independent]

The International Journal of Eating Disorders study was conducted with 274 female students at a large southeastern university and compared the eating-related behaviors and attitudes of varsity athletes, club athletes, independent exercisers, and non-exercisers. Researchers are recommending that university coaches and athletic departments consider prevention and monitoring programs for female athletes and exercisers at universities. "As women's participation in athletics increases, so too does the need for awareness of the link between eating disorders and sports participation among women," says Jill Holm-Denoma of the University of Denver, lead author of the study.

Eating Disorder Symptoms More Common Among Female Athletes And Exercisers [EurekAlert]

Voigt, who was above a size 28 before her gastric bypass, said, "My mom had always fought with her weight, been on one diet or another. She had self-esteem issues around her weight. We were constantly going on diets. She'd say, 'You need to take some weight off.' I felt very self-conscious." My mom was always good about not commenting on my weight, but I do remember her maligning her own looks as nothing special on several occasions. The rub? My my mom and I look almost identical. Can you pinpoint any "fat ballerina" moments from your traumatic childhoods?

You're The Fattest Ballerina [CNN via O: Oprah Magazine]

Earlier: Opera Singer Is Rehired After She Loses Over 100 Pounds Through Gastric Bypass

Now, surely the Daily Mail can argue that Lisa Marie's pregnancy may have occasioned her to consume an excess of food — indeed, that she was using pregnancy as an excuse to do so — but the truth is that for some time we have been watching a steady erosion in the customary grace period allotted to a female celebrity's figure maintenance to account for her part in the creation of a new human being. And while both Ms. Barberie-Reynolds and Ms. Presley stand to gain financially from the blurring of the lines between the two forms of weight gain — and that is to ignore the myriad other ways female celebrities have managed to line their own pockets, in addition to those of the celebrity-industrial complex, through the conception (or failure to conceive) children — I am beginning to wonder if the whole thing isn't a little, well, degrading to the very culture of human life the media is supposed to be celebrating when we fetishize fertility/eschew the subject of abortion in all consumer magazines and blockbuster movies/pay seven-figure ransoms for baby pictures.

No, seriously, actually, whatever. It's just this week's sign of the apocalypse etc. etc. But you know.

Related: Parents In Denial About Children's Weight Problems [Science Daily]

The Utne Reader reports that the summer issue of food and culture publication Gastronomica, a writer found that the more money you make, the less likely you are to be called fat: A Google search for "portly" resulted in descriptions of doctors, lawyers, and professors, but rarely for janitors and plumbers. Plus! Bonus race/gender discrepancies:

Although "white man," "white woman," "black man," and "black woman" all got around the same number of hits when the phrases stood alone, adding "fat" skewed the results. The phrase "fat black woman" got eight times as many hits as "fat white woman," while "fat white man" got 12 times as many hits as "fat black man." And black women were dubbed fat, obese, and overweight at far higher rates than the others.

Your Momma's So Portly... [Utne]

Before we made the video, I had accepted that it would be less than flattering, but I thought that it would be more empowering than soul crushing. I thought it would be saying a big fuck you to the celebrity-sartorial complex which requires everyone to be a size 0. I thought I could quell my vanity to make a point that I felt strongly about. It turns out, not so much! In the weeks that have elapsed since the we put up the video, I've been more self-conscious about my size than ever. Lemme tell you: Having thousands of internet trolls write about how gross you are — even when you've already likened yourself to a "fat hooker" — does a number on the old self-esteem. And I'm not the only one — Tracie felt similarly. She was only less upset than I was because she had prepared herself to be "devastated" before the video went up, whereas I thought that I could handle it.

I read the comments you readers write. Every time an issue comes up relating to weight on the site, everyone rushes to post her measurements. Even anonymous internet commenters feel the need to somehow prove they're not fat. I thought about doing that after the video, but I realized that would be destroying all the things I hoped to stand for by making it in the first place And yes, I realize how shallow and ultimately useless it is to obsess about your weight, and every time I think about how much time I've wasted hating myself for my unwaiflike proportions I hate myself even more.

The way we scrutinize our own bodies — and others' bodies as well — is almost impossible for some of us to get beyond, no matter how hard we try to will ourselves beyond it. I don't have any solutions. Maybe someday I'll be able to pull a stunt like that and be invigorated instead of cowed into size-submission. But for now I'm settling for never, ever seeing myself in a gold lamé tube dress ever again.

Real Naked Ladies [The New Yorker]
Fifty Nude Women [Fifty Nude Women Official Website]

Earlier: American Apparel Will Make You Look Like A Fat Hooker

• According to a new government study, a few extra pounds won't kill you! [ABC News]
  
• Or they will kill you! Science daily says the overweight risk dying from cardiovascular disease, and the underweight have increased mortality from a shitload of other diseases! [Science Daily]
  
• Guess what? A TON of other things besides your weight can make you kick the bucket. If you're angry a lot, you'll probably have stroke. If you pee in the ocean, you'll get eaten by a shark. Here's a list of 48 other things you probably shouldn't do unless you want to die. [MSNBC]
  
• Your kids could die if they eat the beads from an Australian toy called Bindeez. Ingesting the toy was found to mimic the effects of roofies! [Wall Street Journal]

• Oh hey guys, that HIV vaccine we gave you? Yeah, it might make you more susceptible to the disease. Whoops! [Wall Street Journal]
• Hm, you probably shouldn't go abroad either, because you might get stabbed by your roommate and/or her sketchy Italian boyfriend and/or someone else. [ABC News]
• Or you might just get bedbugs. Amazingly itchy! [USA Today]
• Well at least there are still adorable puppies out there, and apparently 86% of people spend more time with their puppies than they do with their children. Awww. [Pet Health Care]

But don't go crying because you're a Column when you'd rather be a Vase... Today is the day you have to look in the mirror and smile. Because today is Love Your Body Day! The National Organization For Women has 10 ways to love your body, including having ice cream, doing some yoga, listening to positive music and having safe sex. We're gonna take our Cello ass to the store and get some Häagen Dazs.
Trinny And Susannah Reveal 12 Women's Body Types - Which Are You? [Daily Mail]
Love Your Body Day 2007 Is October 18 [NOW]

Lowri's experiences in non-televised "slimming clubs" weren't much better:

We were pitted against one another, albeit more subtly. Forget the idea that it's a communal effort — this is dog eat dog (even if that is all you get to eat all week). At the center of a slimming club meeting is the weigh-in. This involves queuing up for either a pat on the head by the group leader or a disapproving click of the tongue...As you inch towards the scales...you feel yourself metamorphosing from an adult with a job, a family and a life into a pathetic five-year-old begging for a "well done" from the teacher. There is usually a "slimmer of the week" prize for the most well-behaved dieter, and although stories about forcing those who have "failed" to wear piggie masks may be apocryphal, these days at least, those slimmers who have gained flab do not get to stand up and take a bow.

Big Losers, But Can Viewers Keep the Pace? [New York Times]
Friends, Dignity, Self Respect ... Weight Wasn't All I Lost At My Slimming Club [Daily Mail]
Earlier: Your Coworker With The Candy And Cookies Is Trying To Make You Fat
Related: Why do women Feel OK About Their Bodies Until Other Women Show Up? [Psychology Today]

A tall, curvy woman falls in the obese category. Harding's friend Laurie, who is 5 feet tall and wears a size 4, is "overweight." The pictures highlight not only what a failure a "standard" index can be, but also challenges what we expect to see when we think of terms like "morbidly obese." The World Heath Organization claims that there are over 1 billion overweight adults on our planet. And clearly, not all of them are both "morbidly obese" and triathletes, like Sarah, the woman pictured. But people around the world come in so many different shapes, sizes and proportions — does having a standard index help the ones who actually need it?

The Obesity Epidemic, In Pictures [Feministe]
Why BMI Is a Crock, In Pictures [Shakesville]
Related: BMI Calculator [CDC]
Obesity and Overweight [WHO]

Back in 1977, the National Institute of Health hosted its second conference on obesity and weight control. "The importance of exercise in weight control is less than might be believed," the assembled experts concluded. And still, the workout culture of the 80s exploded, aerobics, Jazzercise and all.

But, Taubes argues, it's not exercising that affects your weight. It's the way your body is wired.

The key is that among the many things regulated in this homeostatic system—along with blood pressure and blood sugar, body temperature, respiration, etc.—is the amount of fat we carry. From this biological or homeostatic perspective, lean people are not those who have the willpower to exercise more and eat less. They are people whose bodies are programmed to send the calories they consume to the muscles to be burned rather than to the fat tissue to be stored—the Lance Armstrongs of the world. The rest of us tend to go the other way, shunting off calories to fat tissue, where they accumulate to excess. This shunting of calories toward fat cells to be stored or toward the muscles to be burned is a phenomenon known as fuel partitioning.

The Scientist and the Stairmaster [New York]
Exercise Will Make You Healthy, But Probably Not Thinner [WSJ]

• The man convicted of killing Brandon Teena has recanted part of his confession and is now claiming he was the lone murderer. (Teena's story was the inspiration behind the 1999 film Boys Don't Cry, for which Hilary Swank won the Best Actress Oscar.) One thing kinda irks us about this news story: CNN insists on using his birth name "Teena Brandon" even though he lived and died as Brandon Teena. [CNN]
  
• That Planned Parenthood in Aurora, IL that was at risk of never opening because of some silly regulation violations? Well, a judge has ruled that the clinic will remain closed. As PP said after the ruling, "We wouldn't be here if this was a foot-care clinic." [Feministing]

• New York State has given the heave-ho to the abstinence-only education-funding the Bush Administration will not stop ramming down our throats. [NY Times]
• A judge in Kansas rejected State Attorney General Phil Kline's mission to require health care workers and counselors to report all underage sexual activity, including kissing. Seriously, dude, just read Penthouse Letters to get your rocks off, okay? [Ms. Magazine]
• Isn't the BBC supposed to be of higher quality than the junk we watch on American TV? The news network has decreed that only good-looking women will be reading the bite-sized news bits aimed at their younger audience. [Daily Mail]
• Donald Trump has hired Miss Teen South Carolina to model for Trump Model Management at a rate of $25,000 a day. Because everyone knows that there's nothing prettier than an empty brain cavity. [WorldNetDaily]

The Huffington Post's Hannah Seligson published an interesting piece today on the issue of women — particularly those in the public eye — and their weight.

Seligson argues that culturally, we engage in a dizzying pas de deux when talking about weight, moving between "ogling over rail-thin models" and "overcompensating with a bizarre brand of body empowerment that seems gratuitous."

In some ways, our cultural dialogue about weight resembles yo-yo dieting. On one hand we indulge our appetite to talk about weight, ad-nauseum, and then loudly and all too conspicuously applaud women, like [Jennifer] Hudson, who aren't a size two.

Seligson goes on and calls out Vogue editor Anna Wintour for describing March cover girl Jennifer Hudson as "...a style icon whose happiness in her own skin is something we can draw strength from." While we agree with Seligson's argument, what she doesn't address is the fact that the media's new lovefest with "normal"-looking women seems to be specific to women of color...or women over 50, a focus which feels unsettlingly patronizing, at least to us.

Take Glamour editor Cindi Leive's March letter from the editor, which featured a prominent picture of Jennifer Hudson in her role as Effie in Dreamgirls. Citing Hudson and Ugly Betty's America Ferrera, Leive wrote:

...it was such a pleasure to turn on the Golden Globes and watch as one after another, women with all manner of bodies took the stage to claim their awards.

Are we the only ones not only sick of the cultural obsession with weight but with magazines applauding the normal-sized (and usually black or Hispanic) women who sometimes appear in their pages? Magazine editors rejoicing in the fact that women like Jennifer Hudson, America Ferrera and Tyra Banks don't suffer from eating disorders sounds suspiciously like those patronizing, clueless people (John McCain, are you listening?) who refer to Barack Obama as "articulate". It's an easy way for them to take something normal (i.e. having a healthy relationship to food, or speaking clearly) and give a person of color a pat on the back.

Almost makes us want to stick our fingers down our throats and...well, you know.

Weight: Not A Weighty Topic [Huffington Post]

Probably not such a mystery when it comes to these gals, The Big Ballet troupe of Russia, average weight: 252lb.

Yup, they're big, they're beautiful and they're ballet dancers. Currently touring the UK, these girls love their food so much, their manager had to hire a catering van to accompany them from venue to venue.

In our dreams, we kidnap Victoria Beckham and force her to watch the Big Ballet troupe perform over and over again, while we forcefeed her two daily raisins instead of one. Bitch will have nightmares for years.

[Big Ballet Troupe Tours the UK] The Sun