A segment on chocolate. Specifically: The sustainable cocoa farming Dove supports in Brazil. And then a commercial for Dove chocolate, a sponsor of the show.

Attila's non-singing supernumeraries — the opera's extras — had been cast months ago. But when Prada met the supernumeraries in person yesterday, the designer allegedly told the producers that there was no way she could outfit them with her costumes. As Paper's Peter Davis reports, a tipster says she "took one glance at the women and groaned: 'I cannot clothe them! I need models!' "

The Metropolitan Opera swiftly fired the non-model extras and threw together a casting for models who would take their roles. "Employing models is ridiculous," says Davis' source. "Being a supernumerary is about how you move, not how you look." The Met confirmed the abrupt about-face to Page Six, saying the re-casting was "due to a change in concept."

Prada has long been a sort of intellectual hero for a certain kind of woman: those who, and I class myself among them, respect the craft, beauty, and artistry of high fashion even while being put off by its materialism, its insistence on acknowledging only the merest sliver of the world's supply of female beauty, its pageantry of excess.

With her doctorate in international relations, her self-awareness, her covetable pretty/ugly aesthetic and obvious design chops, Prada always seemed like she got it. The existence of someone so level-headed, so reasonable, in an industry of puffery was living proof that it was possible to love fashion without forgetting or ignoring that there are very solid grounds on which it can be criticized. That she did not see a flat-out contradiction between being a smart woman and working in her industry was heartening. In 2004, she told the New Yorker "Today I am having a crisis. And why? Because I can't match a dress with a pair of shoes. I am embarrassed to say that. But in the end I cannot forget what I do. I make clothes. It's silly. But it's my job."

She's a serious art collector; she had a slide installed in her office; she used to be a mime. She always sounded pretty damn cool. So why the hell, of all people, is Miuccia Prada telling actresses to step off and let the skinny, pretty people have their jobs? Surely she ought to recognize that the most important part of a stage production isn't how it looks, but how all the elements come together to make the audience feel something — and while one might argue that these are "only" non-singing roles, it still seems fundamentally short-sighted and wrong-headed to institute a beauty standard for a production like Attila. Miuccia Prada is the last person I would expect to see a roomful of women with non-model bodies as problems to be solved, rather than as people to be dressed. And what must it say about her confidence in her own design skills that Prada balked at adjusting her designs to suit a different physical ideal? Consider my girlcrush canceled until further notice.

Miuccia To The Met — Models Only! [Paper]
Curves Banned From Attila [P6]

In a piece for Newsweek's website, parenting writer Po Bronson explains that his 5-year-old daughter is excited for the Princess And The Frog. But:

My daughter's been infatuated with Disney princesses since she was 3, and she's also now showing some early concerns with her body image. It's important to her to "look pretty," or "look cute." She's said things like, "Those sneakers make my feet look fat."

Bronson admits that he doesn't know where the body-image stuff comes from, but wonders: "Do Disney princesses make young girls obsessed with thinness?"

A study released this week by Drs. Sharon Hayes and Stacey Tantleff-Dunn attempted to answer that question:

Hayes and Tantleff-Dunn brought 121 girls aged 3 to 6 into their lab and showed them video clips for 14 minutes. Half the girls watched princess clips; half watched nonprincess cartoons like Dora, Clifford, and Dragon Tales. Then each girl was given 15 minutes to enjoy herself in a play room, and the scholars recorded how many of those minutes were spent in appearance-related play, such as sitting at the vanity or changing clothes in front of the mirror.

You're probably thinking that the princess-inundated girls immediately went to play dress up and admire themselves, but they didn't. The reasearchers found no statistical difference between the girls who watched princess scenes and those who watched Dora and Clifford. Bronson writes, "Watching Anastasia and Cinderella and Belle didn't make them play longer at the vanity or try on more dresses afterward. It didn't make them more likely to pick the thinnest figure as the 'Real Princess.' It didn't exacerbate their desire to be thinner."

Despite the results of this study, staring at wasp-waisted cartoon ladies has to have an effect — maybe it's subtle, cumulative? Because 31% of the little girls said they always worry about being fat; 18% sometimes worry about it. If Disney's not giving them ideas, who is? Someone closer to home, perhaps? Bronson claims the girls said things like, "Being fat is bad." And, even more telling: "My mommy thinks she's fat."

The good news is that thinness wasn't the biggest concern on the minds of these 3, 4, 5 and 6 year-olds. The bad news is:

Asked what they would change about their physical appearance… these girls wanted to change their hair color, their clothes, and their skin color. According to these young girls in Orlando (40 percent of whom were nonwhite), it helps to be a princess if your hair is blond and skin is white.

Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty: Looking at you.





Do Disney Princesses Make Young Girls Obsessed With Thinness? [Newsweek]

Earlier: Disney Princesses Rely On Good Looks, Little People & Men For Salvation
"Practical Character Reader" A Lesson In Xenophobia, Racism & Disney Villains
Is The Princess Problem Even A Problem?
Age Of Innocence? 3-Year-Olds Think They're Fat
Addressing The Princess Problem
Researchers: Disney Movies "Elevate" Heterosexuality
Playing Princess Is Just A Phase... Except When It Isn't

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

I'm an American writer - I was interviewed for my first book on Sassy magazine the first day Jezebel went live and have another book on the ‘90s coming out this winter - and earlier this year, I swapped my Brooklyn apartment for one in Paris for three months so I can write, practice my French, and eat a lot of cheese.

It's la rentrée here in France, which is a kind of nationwide back to school season, where adults and children alike are encouraged to get back to business after taking all of August off. (One month of vacation! I dare to dream!) This return to real life translates into a lot of ads and articles about losing weight. Much of it is aimed at women, but no one gets to escape it. President Sarkozy has lost around 15 pounds-supposedly living on cottage cheese, fish, and mineral water-since marrying Carla Bruni and a Times of London article today says that he has asked would-be cabinet members to diet if they really want the job.

I should take a moment here to admit that I am something of a diet veteran. I grew up in a household where both of my parents experimented heavily with fad diets and the family obsession with weight loss extended down to me-I was signed up for Weight Watchers by third grade and sent to fat camp by fifth. I think I turned out okay, though; these days I like to think I have a fairly healthy relationship to food and my body-I've written a lot about body image and pop culture-though a guilty pleasure is my subscription to Shape magazine.

Being in France has made me realize that I hold some incredibly naïve assumptions about French women and weight that can probably be traced to too much exposure to Vogue Paris, Garance Doré, the GOOP newsletter, and the career of Juliette Binoche. In my mind, French women eat Camembert and Nutella and still look cute in leather leggings. In Mireille Guiliano's bestselling French Women Don't Get Fat, she claims that French women don't exercise that much, eat three-course meals, and don't, you know, get fat, which was apparently groundbreaking enough information to make it a bestseller. American women, on the other hand, are told to put down the pints of Chubby Hubby and learn to be a little more French.

But French women might not be as zen about their weight as I had thought. According to a study that came out last spring, France has a low ideal weight and that "by far the highest proportion of clinically underweight women in Europe, but only half of them think they are too thin."

As fascinated as I am by the American diet industry, I find its existence pretty exhausting. It promises happiness if we could just have enough willpower to overrun our genetic destinies and white-knuckle our way to a "goal weight." (Whatever that is.) It's a false promise, and one that I feel frustrated to see sold abroad.

I'm not looking for tips on how the French lose weight but rather how their weight loss industry is different from-and if it's as pernicious as-our own. So I spent the last few days reading piles of French women's magazines, talking to French girlfriends, and visiting pharmacies and dieticians in the name of greater cultural understanding. Allons-y mes chéries!


Exercise
Although it seems like there's an L.A. Fitness or Curves on every other corner of almost every midsize American city, in France gyms are considered a luxury and are way more expensive than at home in the US. And besides, working up a sweat is considered a little suspect here, as anyone who has gotten stared at while jogging down Parisian sidewalks will tell you. Grazia magazine even recently ran a story on how exercise will make you gain weight. Exercise is something you do because you like the way it makes you feel, which is how it should be, right? Prima magazine gets bonus points for the sheer breadth of things it considers exercise-they suggest trying darts.

"Yeah, but jogging and American-style exercise is on the rise," my French friend Jude tells me, noting that she has even started to lift weights at home a couple times a week. Of course, she's telling this to me while smoking, drinking a café crème, and eating chocolate covered almonds, so even if exercise is in, deprivation still isn't.


Water

We all know by now that we're supposed to drink eight ounces of water a day, but in France, there's a popular brand of water called Contrex marketed towards women for losing weight.

It comes in a curvy, hourglass shaped bottle (hmm, just what is that supposed to resemble?) with a pink cap and "my diet partner!" written in script on the label. It has more calcium and magnesium than tap water but the real allure for women, as Jude explains to me, is that it's supposed to make you pee more frequently, therefore losing water weight. Contrex's parent company is Nestle and it's proved so popular that Coca Cola has introduced its own version to the market.

There is of course no such thing as water that will magically make anyone lose weight. It will, however, magically make you lose a lot of money: the recommended program includes drinking a couple of bottles a day.


Pills
Just as at home, Alli is advertised in every magazine and pharmacy here. Here's what I think about diet pills: Gross, gross, and gross. But in France, diet pills - particularly the Oenobiol line - appear to be ubiquitous, far more so than at home, stacked in the windows of pharmacies or talked about in magazine articles. Top Santé even has a story on which pill is right for you: diuretics, so-called "fat burners," or appetite suppressants.

But I guess it goes with the whole idea that deprivation isn't very French: it's about taking a pill to change your body, not changing your habits.


Diets
From Photoshopping celebrities beyond recognition to surmising whether an actress's tummy fat is an unannounced pregnancy, most American magazines aren't exactly bastions of body-friendliness. And when it comes to diets, a typical US Weekly spread might gloss over the meals (salad! fish and vegetables!) in favor of talking about the Kardashian-like body it can help you achieve. My friend Aurélie tells me that women's magazines in France "emphasize the necessity of not feeling guilty about eating well – the idea being that pleasure and food are important if one wants to succeed in losing weight." I guess that's why there's a diet version of Little Schoolboy cookies here? (Full disclosure: I bought a box and ate it in one sitting.)

Fad diets are just as integral part of women's magazines here as there are in America. There's a grape diet, a celery diet and even a diet that is said to be chic in the United States… the apple diet! There are also many detoxes (using leek or cabbage soups) and microdiets where you cut back for a couple days.


I did come across one familiar ad while reading magazines. Weight Watchers, complete with the familiar rubric of before-and-after success stories (um, albeit in kilos) is in full effect here. But don't Weight Watchers recipes look a little more decadent in French?

Here's a universal truth: If you're a woman, you're going to be told to diet for a variety of reasons, chief among them that there's a ton of money to be made off of it. I should have known better than to think there was any kind of diet industry-free Shangri-La. (Though if you do know of one, I would love to take my next vacation there.)

Earlier: How Sassy Changed My Life

But they dragged that shit OUT. So. First Tali had a little chat with Luke's devout Christian grandma, who, upon hearing that Tali was from Israel, was like O RLY? But turned out to be cool, because she is cool like that. (Clip above.)

Then Tali had to endure conversation with Luke's dad, who wanted to talk about Jews and Christians and "conflict." All of his body language said, You mean to tell me my son is thinking of marrying a durn furriner and a JEW for cryin out loud? Dad: Let the kids be!

Luke's dog Max did not get enough screen time.

Next Luke's family met Malissa. You could almost see the relief in their faces: She's blonde, all-American, probably not Jewish, yay!

For Luke's dad, it was love at first sight.

When Luke's dad found out Malissa likes beer, he was all, WOW. Then he proclaimed that she had "Irish eyes," which I guess is a huge compliment? Or maybe she smiles with her eyes? Smeyes?

Next the ladies met Luke's mom, who is sharp as a tack and can smell bullshit a mile away. She talked to both ladies about why they would even be on a show called More To Love, and while Tali said it was because she wanted to prove something about big girls and size doesn't matter and so on, Malissa said "on a whim." Malissa also told Luke's mom that she wasn't a chubby kid growing up and had only recently gained weight.

Luke's mom's diagnosis: Tali = awesome. Malissa? Silence.

Later Luke went for his last dinner with Tali and they got a little boozy and so forth and she was like, "I love you. I love you so much. I wanted to wait, but I couldn't." Luke said, "I love you too."

They made out.

Then Luke went for his last dinner with Malissa, who was all, "If you ask me to marry you, yes, yes, a thousand times yes." Luke was like, "You're such an amazing woman, yadda yadda." Then she said: "I love you." And he said: "I love you too, Malissa." SCANDAL!

Next Luke went ring shopping, and because the producers wanted to fill two hours, he looked at TWO RINGS…

…And described TWO women to the sales clerk who was just excited to be on tee vee.

Finally, in one last ring ceremony, Luke said to Malissa — and I'm paraphrasing here — you're a great gal, but see ya.

He asked Tali: "Will you marry me?" She said "Yes." The moral of the story is that a 300 pound Christian dude can date a whole bunch of fatties and end up with a hot stacked Israeli Jew. The end.

Oh wait: Tali would like to shout-out "the big girls out there."

Stay tuned for More To Love Too: There's Enough Of Me To Go Around — Malissa's Journey or whatever crap Fox will almost definitely cook up next.

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]

But duh, of course it was. Luke and chunky dudes like Jack Black, Kevin James and Seth Rogen always get the ladies, where as women are supposed to be THIN THIN THIN! Anyway: Malissa doesn't care how much Luke weighs. So Luke took her back to his hotel room…

…Where his bed was strewn with flowers.

And they made out.

I really enjoyed this Frankensoundbite of Malissa saying that she was shocked that a dolphin could support their weight. Kudos to someone in the editing room for cobbling those sounds together, because those words may have come out of Malissa's mouth, but not in that order.

The next day, Luke had a date with Tali, who, can I just note, is STUNNING?

Hot. Period.

Luke informed Tali that they'd be going snorkeling, and Tali, though she'd been in the Israeli Navy, informed him that she had a fear of water.

So Tali was scared.

And sad.

But she went snorkeling anyway!

And somehow Luke talking her through getting in the ocean made Tali fall in love with Luke and so on. And even though he's dating two other women, which Tali finds "annoying and disturbing"…

Luke took Tali back to his hotel room, where the bed was strewn with flowers.

And they made out.

Lastly, Luke went out with Mandy.

He told her he could picture himself being married to her. Then they made out on a bed strewn with flowers.

The next day, he eliminated her from the show.

Only two ladies left: Who will Luke propose to?

Take Malissa, seen in the clip above. When Puke Luke took her out on a one-on-one date in last night's episode, he gushed, "we'd have some good-looking kids." My theory is that he will end up with Malissa at the end of the show, because all of the other women have jobs like stylist/model/fitness instructor, and Malissa is a waitress. He says he wants someone who has her own dreams, but it seems like he really wants a woman to be a kid-producing housewife.

And seriously, in which universe is this woman Malissa fat, unattractive, or someone who finds it tough to meet a man?

Let's face it: She knows that she is hot.

Here are the other ladies in the final four:

Mandy, who is not fat and is, in fact, a fitness instructor.

Anna, who is not fat, and makes her living as a plus-size model.

Tali, the simply gorgeous Israeli stylis/decorator who is not fat.

There's still some drama left in the show:Malissa also seems to have (or has been edited to have) an evil streak.

She let loose a barrage of questions on sensitive Mandy, which made Mandy cry and say, "I'm an emotional wreck."

Then again, when Luke met Mandy's parents, her mom called Mandy "crazy."

Actually, Luke went on four dates, and met with some family members with each of the four ladies, and came up with four things "wrong" with each. Malissa never babysat for her sister; Mandy might not be ready for marriage; Tali is Israeli; Anna travels a lot as a model. (Anna was eliminated last night. Awesome career? You're not for Luke!)

But the real problem is that the show that was supposed to be about the "real" or "overweight" people finding love is really about one guy with 3 gorgeous, busty women to choose from. Decisions, decisions!

But first: did anyone notice that this episode began with a close-up shot of waffles?
Just in case you forgot that fatties EAT.

There have been signs all along that Kristian is a bit cuckoo for cocoa puffs, but when she got an invitation to go dancing with Luke and Mandy and said, "Hopefully, Mandy falls and breaks an ankle…" that was more than a hint. I mean, the producers can edit footage to make you look kooky, or you can just talk to them and say wacko stuff. Your choice!

In addition, when Malissa got a one-on one date with Luke, Anna jokingly did a little "headdesk" move. Kristian took her "headdesk" a little farther, right down the path of self-abuse.

Malissa's date with Luke involved a helicopter ride to a vineyard, and then a ride on a bicycle built for two, which busted. Luke took responsibility for that, saying, "The fat kid broke the bike. I wish I could say it was the first time."

When Malissa came back from her date, she announced that she was in love with Luke. But Kristian wanted everyone to know that SHE was ALSO in love in Luke.

Luke invited Anna, Heather and Tali on a beach date, which annoyed Tali. She was like, great, "Another date in a bathing suit."

Of course, Luke had this to say: "I'm taking Heather, Tali and Anna to the beach. I feel anytime they can show off their bodies it's awesome; it kind of shows me how confident they are and that's a real turn-on for me." Yeah, it's awesome for you. When they got to the beach, none of the ladies took off their dresses, preferring to remain covered. But Luke went ahead and took off his shirt. And then asked the women to slather him with sunscreen.

At the mixer at the end of the episode, krazy Kristian did a krazy thing and told Luke that she loved him. In 3 languages. His response? "I'm flattered." Never a good sign. Then, as seen in the first clip, she was eliminated from the show. And she cried. A lot. And she also mentioned that she was "the biggest girl in the house," as if that had anything to do with it, and not the fact that she was delusional about her "love" with Luke.

Heather, who was also eliminated, also cried. But she had a better attitude about he experience on the show: she said she wore a bathing suit in front of people and didn't even care. And: "It's made me realize who I am despite what size I am."

Writer Neal Justin is trying to make the point that the rash of plus-size TV shows — Drop Dead Diva, Dance Your Ass Off; Ruby, More To Love and The Biggest Loser — are getting great ratings, and writes: "Fat is suddenly fabulous, at least on TV." Not in real life! In real life it's still totally gross, okay?

But what Justin wants to know is why. Why would people want to watch shows with plus-size characters? He writes, "Why this appetite for fuller-figured personalities?" But it almost sounds like: Why would you want to watch fatties?

You'd think, since according to one study, "adult obesity rates increased in 23 states last year," it's about American audiences seeing a reflection of themselves.

But Paul Telegdy, who oversees NBC's reality programming (including Biggest Loser) says: "I think it embraces a concern and a worry that keeps a lot of Americans awake at night." Hear that? You're lying awake at night, afraid to get fat, which makes you watch The Biggest Loser.

Yeah, I'll just go ahead and say: Bullshit! If you're watching these shows, it's because there's drama, and a human story. We love a personal story, and if it's personal, it's universal. Even if you've never been overweight, you can understand the range of human emotions showcased on these programs: Frustration, heartbreak, dedication, triumph. As Loser host Alison Sweeney says: "[The show] strikes at the heart of the human spirit.You see people being able to overcome this obstacle that seems insurmountable. Miracles can happen."

And honestly? It's not like plus-size, overweight, fat or large people all live sequestered from society. In many cases, they're your mom, your dad, your aunt, your uncle, you, me. It's not strange that people are interested in seeing plus-size people on TV; it's strange that up until now, plus-size people have been mostly ignored on TV.

A Growing Appetite for Plus-Size Personalities [WaPo]

Producers who zoom in on your breasts, for instance, when you are in a sudsy hot tub, as Malissa was with Luke when some of the ladies went on a spa date with Luke. Mandy found the spa date to be very stressful, since Luke was taking everyone aside and having intimate moments with them. Actually, the word Mandy used was "awkward." Indeed.

But let's go back to the beginning of the episode: The women were forced to play a game called "Good Wife/Bad Wife." They had to go around in a circle and declare who would be a good wife for Luke and who would be a bad wife for Luke.

Hearing criticism about how she's too emotional made Kristian cry.

During the game, the producers used creative editing to make things more interesting.

For instance, when the women were talking about whether Heather would make a good wife, it looked as if Lauren interrupted and said, "This isn't about good person/bad person…"

But if you look at the wide shot, when Lauren is saying this, Kristian, the curly-haired one next to Lauren, has her sign turned to "bad wife." And the person next to Emme is someone with dark hair, not Heather, who is blonde.

The tight shot of Lauren speaking about being a "good person" also has been manipulated: the "Good Wife" words on Kristian's sign were added digitally in post-production. Maybe you can't see it in the clip, but on my TV screen? The words were moving on some kind of added layer.

In any case, Luke went on a date with the one who was most voted "Bad Wife," Melissa B. They had Moroccan food and did a little belly dancing.

Luke also went on a date with the lady voted "Good Wife," Heather. I thought they went to Medieval Times, which would have been amazing, but it was just a castle.

During their dinner, Luke said: "I can't get over this view." Heather replied that yes, it was very pretty. Luke said: "I was talking about you." Eyeroll. Later, he said: "I have something to tell you. I have three kids." There was a pause. Then he said: "Just joking." He was just trying to liven things up. The man is a jackass!

Anyway, back to the spa date with the other ladies: Something intense happened between Luke and Mandy, but most of their date was edited away. Luke did say: "Sharing kiss with Mandy did something to my heart that I have never felt."

But maybe it was just her knee, pressing into his chest.

Earlier: More To Love: Worst Prom Ever
More To Love: Puke, Booze & Swimsuits
More To Love: Coercion, Kisses & Heavy Heartbreak
More To Love: Rooting For Plus-Size Singles "Like A Sporting Event"

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.

Last night's episode involved Luke inviting the ladies to a "prom," since, as he explained, many of them probably didn't enjoy their prom — or didn't get invited — the first time around. While that is true for some of the overweight women on the show, Luke said it in a way so that it seemed like he was doing charity work. (Also, when he talks about going through tough times and feeling excluded as a "bigger" person growing up, I've got to call bullshit on most of it, since A: He was a football player, so "included" on a team and cheered on by his whole damn school and B: girls have it harder than boys do. "Jolly" chubby guys are generally accepted - Varsity Blues, Kevin James, Jack Black, etc. - but plus-size women seldom enjoy that kind of experience).

In any case, the "prom" gave the producers an excuse to show the ladies squeezing and shimmying into dresses and saying things like "suck it in." Millions of women of all sizes struggle with their clothes, but showing overweight women trying to fit into clothes provided by producers seems predictable — and like a low blow. Unfair, and exploitative.

Luke invited two of his best college buddies to the "prom" to figure out who he should go out on a one-on-one date with. That woman would be crowned prom queen.


The dudes, sorta-hot-yet-mute-black-guy and guy-with-dumb-goatee, took their job seriously.

The prom itself — with waaaay more women than men, Luke kissing several different women on the dancefioor and then dancing like a fool — seemed awful.

Luke's friends chose Danielle as Prom Queen. It just so happens that she's one of the contestants that no one — including Luke — actually likes.

Luke took Danielle out to dinner, and she ordered a chocolate-and-peanut covered banana for dessert. Who does that?


It's a date. It's televised. And you're voluntarily putting a phallic object up in your face.

Later, Luke and Danielle had a boat ride which was painfully awkward, or at least edited to seem so.



At the end of the episode, she was among those eliminated.

As Time's John Cloud writes:

The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

Cloud cites a study from the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE (PLoS is the nonprofit Public Library of Science). The study, supervised by a colleague of Ravussin's, Dr. Timothy Church, chair in health wisdom at LSU, randomly assigned into four groups 464 overweight women who didn't regularly exercise. Women in three of the groups were asked to work out with a personal trainer for six months; women in the fourth group were the control and were told to maintain their usual routines. The results?

On average, the women in all the groups, even the control group, lost weight, but the women who exercised - sweating it out with a trainer several days a week for six months - did not lose significantly more weight than the control subjects did.

Cloud supposes, jokingly (?) "The control-group women may have lost weight because they were filling out those regular health forms, which may have prompted them to consume fewer doughnuts."

Of course, exercise has its benefits: Enhancing heart and circulatory health, helping prevent disease, improving mental health and cognitive ability. Cloud points to a study released by the University of Alberta a few weeks ago which found that people with chronic back pain who exercise four days a week have 36% less disability than those who exercise only two or three days a week.

But weight loss is a different issue. As is self-control. Cloud explains:

Many people assume that weight is mostly a matter of willpower - that we can learn both to exercise and to avoid muffins and Gatorade. A few of us can, but evolution did not build us to do this for very long. In 2000 the journal Psychological Bulletin published a paper by psychologists Mark Muraven and Roy Baumeister in which they observed that self-control is like a muscle: it weakens each day after you use it. If you force yourself to jog for an hour, your self-regulatory capacity is proportionately enfeebled. Rather than lunching on a salad, you'll be more likely to opt for pizza.

This strikes me as somewhat questionable, as I — and most people I know — tend to be quite loathe to "undo" any work put in at the gym with high-calorie snacks. But this working-out-makes-you-eat movement even has conspiracy theorists!

Steven Gortmaker, head of Harvard's Prevention Research Center on Nutrition and Physical Activity says, "If you're more physically active, you're going to get hungry and eat more." He's suspicious of the playgrounds at fast-food restaurants. "Why would they build those? I know it sounds kind of like conspiracy theory, but you have to think, if a kid plays five minutes and burns 50 calories, he might then go inside and consume 500 calories or even 1,000."

In any case, the key seems to be not to be total sloth and a lead a sedentary lifestyle but just to keep on moving. Cloud writes:

Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical activity - the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented - may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat. "You cannot sit still all day long and then have 30 minutes of exercise without producing stress on the muscles," says Hans-Rudolf Berthoud, a neurobiologist at LSU's Pennington Biomedical Research Center who has studied nutrition for 20 years. "The muscles will ache, and you may not want to move after. But to burn calories, the muscle movements don't have to be extreme. It would be better to distribute the movements throughout the day."

Of course, since none of this is conducive to working a desk job (blogging for a living included) we're gonna add: Good luck with that.

Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin [Time]

Earlier: Does Exercise Make You Hungry Instead Of Thin?

At the beginning of his first group "date," on a boat, a lady named Heather threw up. The ship hadn't even left the dock yet.

During the cruise, Malissa and Luke had an intimate moment, and a little kissing sesh. Malissa said that Luke makes her feel like a "size 2 supermodel." What does that even mean? Like you're wearing Balenciaga and jumping for Vogue? Are we really supposed to buy that this man makes her feel beautiful or thinner?

The problem with Luke is that he's the kind of guy who says "her body is bangin'." Meanwhile, the misty-eyed women on this show are saying romantic stuff like, "I feel butterflies." They're getting emotional; he's getting a hard-on.

But the absolute worst part of the episode had to be that the third group date was at a pool. Of course the producers wanted to show overweight women in swimsuits.

Hoping to make everyone feel more comfortable, Luke suggested they head for the bar first. Because what's better than being on TV in your swimsuit than being on TV in your swimsuit while drunk?

Really, he's the luckiest guy in America: He's living in a mansion with 20 women — well, 15, as he kicked out 5 he didn't like — he admits are "just his type." Oh, the world might find these women fat, but they still weigh around 100 pounds less than Luke does. This show mentions again and again that it's what's inside that counts, yet each contestant was chosen on appearances: How big they are. And their appearance is what Luke likes about them: He's a "chubby chaser"; big women are his favorite. Also, every time the womens' names came on the screen, so did their height and weight. Charming.

Luke gave each lady in the house a diamond ring, which had some hearing angels. Even though every chick got a ring, one woman said getting one "made her feel special." Later the rings were taken away, and only 15 got the rings back.

But first: Alcohol-assisted partying. Ladies did shots. One woman jumped into the pool with her evening dress on and proclaimed it was "Luke warm." There was an obligatory mention of Spanx, and shots of women eating. Within the first 10 minutes of the show, we heard the words "fat," "plus size," "big boned," and "I want to bake a pie for my man." When one young lady who told Luke, "I'm a rocket scientist," he replied, "That's intimidating." She was not one of the 15 chosen ones.

Anna, who, at 5'11", can look 6'3" Luke in the eyes, was chosen — perhaps because she was coerced in to kissing him?

Nervous nellie Melissa, 21, was also chosen, but her self-esteem is so fragile she believes this is her "one chance" at love.

This blond Melissa was also chosen and also coerced into kissing Luke.

The worst part of the show was having to watch shot after shot of women with tears in their eyes as they spoke about their terrible love lives. The fact that Luke is "in heaven" surrounded by voluptuous ladies — some with shaky self-esteem — is great for him, but you end up feeling horrible for the women. You can't help but wish that each of them could get to go to a mansion and be surrounded by 20 curve-loving men. Because those guys are out there! And you want to root for these women — not for Luke, who just ends up looks like a greedy kid at a buffet… one of the worst stereotypes about the overweight.