big questions
Wellspring Academy of the Carolinas costs $6,250 a month, which means staying there a year costs more than a year at Harvard,
according to the
Washington Post. Wellspring is a "highly structured therapeutic boarding school for rapid weight loss and intensive behavior therapy." It's fat camp meets boarding school, and kids there do lose weight: Terry Henry enrolled in September 2004 when he was 15. At the time, he weighed 558 pounds. He left 15 months later weighing 253 pounds and today weighs about 278 pounds. But not all stories are success stories. And author Stephanie Klein has a new book,
Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp, in which she recalls the awful reality of being an overweight teen. The most surprising thing about fat camp, Klein tells
Newsweek, was that "They weighed us on meat scales. The kids who were too heavy got weighed on a truck scale at the truck stop." It was, in a word, "Humiliating."
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womb raiders
A week or two ago I glanced up from my laptop long enough to catch my first glimpse of a commercial whose audio I had heard dozens of times before. It was for Nutri-System, and the audio consisted of a woman's claim to have lost 41 pounds following the weight-loss regimen.
Is that Jillian Barberie? I wondered, unaware that the morning television personality I had watched habitually for years as a resident of Los Angeles in the earlier part of this century had since changed her name to Jillian Barberie-Reynolds or, more to the point, that she had
become fat. (And, mercifully, thin again.) I consulted Google: indeed, she had gained 41 pounds. And what unfortunate fate had occasioned this traumatic bloat in Jillian's trademark svelte frame? Oh,
pregnancy. Hmm. Well, then. It is now a few weeks later, and I find myself mulling the merits of Lisa Marie Presley's
libel lawsuit against the
Daily Mail for a related phenomenon, the equation of the weight gained due to one's pregnancy with weight gained due to eating an excess of food.
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health shmelth
Do your attempts at fitness always end in failure? Perhaps the
problem is in your head. "Exercise itself isn't rocket science," Pete Cohen, a health and wellbeing coach trained in psychology tells the
Guardian. "It's getting people to enjoy it and stick with it in the long term that's the real challenge." Yeah, how does that happen? What if you work out and you're like, "Well, that was interesting, but I don't feel the need to do
that again?" Keep talking to yourself, say experts. Behavior modification techniques like "self-talk," explains well-being consultant Jeff Archer, encourage "the belief that you're already living a healthy life rather than being on the way to one." As of way of driving that point home, the
Guardian article includes some self-talk tips in the form of seven "steps to mental fitness", seven steps we couldn't help but annotate with some exercise-hating answers...
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losing it
Isn't the whole "idea" behind weight-loss about increasing self-esteem and happiness in this image-obsessed world? The
Wall Street Journal is reporting that a weight-loss drug manufactured by Sanofi-Aventis SA increases the the rate of suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
The FDA reviewed clinical studies of the drug as well as post-marketing reports of the drug from Europe. The agency said the 20-milligram dose of Acomplia "statistically, significantly increased suicidality" compared to placebo or a fake drug.
Normally we equate weight-loss as an unintended but secretly-welcomed side-effect of major depression (we get skinny after breakups!) but it looks like things could work the other way around, if Big Pharma has its way. But seriously, what is it with suicide being a side-effect of things that are supposed to make us
happy? First
antidepressants, now weight-loss? Can some people just not cope with happiness? Or maybe there's a collection of rogue agents determined to bring ruin upon the pharmaceutical industry by infiltrating clinical trials and sacrificing themselves in their happiest and most svelte moments? In which case, we'd totally kind of love that.
Sanofi-Aventis Weight-Loss Drug Increases Suicidality, FDA Says [WSJ]
Related:
FDA Urges New Antidepressant Warnings [MSNBC]
pussy whip
Some men prefer their cars to smell of panties, not pine trees. One question: Is this panty-smell smell freshly washed or just-worn? [
Feministing]
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orlistat
We fully expect that, at some point in the next 30 years, American women will be able to eat whatever they want yet remain thin, thanks to a combination of greedy drug companies and women's continuing self-hatred of their bodies. The first shot across the bow came today:
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Jezebel
