Size | Adios Barbie

Dare to Resolve to Ditch Dieting

December 27, 2011 By Sharon 6 Comments

Dieting is toxic to your health.

Aside from bikini season, late December and early January is the other time of year that we’re especially susceptible to feeling bad about our bodies. Special thanks to the media and the diet industry for ensuring we do by reminding us that we overindulged during the end-of-year festivities and we must resolve to lose (at least) that holiday weight come the new year. Weight Watchers in the UK is making certain you hear that message loud and clear. On January 1, 2012 almost all the major UK television networks will simultaneously air a three-minute Weight Watchers commercial aka music video worth over US$23 million. In it, Weight Watchers proudly parades 180 clients, mostly women, who have lost a total of 5908 pounds using its trademarked ProPoints program launched just a year ago.

What I’d like to see is how many of those slimmed-down success stories will have kept the weight off by New Year’s Day 2016. According to the studies, within four to five years most of them will have regained the weight, and at least 60 to 120 of them will weigh more than their pre-diet weight. Yes, I said diet. Regardless of what Weight Watchers (or SlimFast or Jenny Craig or any other system or product designed to lose weight) calls it, a diet is a diet. And diets don’t work. Sure, if you eat only protein and avoid carbs or measure your portions or adhere to a system of points that limits your caloric intake, yes, you will lose weight… initially. But research[1] clearly shows that any weight lost is sure to creep back within five years.

Researchers at California’s UCLA sought out specific evidence on the long-term results of dieting by analyzing every published diet study—31 in total[2]—that monitored participants’ weight from two to five years after their initial weight loss. The study’s lead author, Traci Mann, summarized their results:

“You can initially lose 5 to 10 percent of your weight on any number of diets, but then the weight comes back. We found that the majority of people regained all the weight, plus more. Sustained weight loss was found only in a small minority of participants, while complete weight regain was found in the majority. Diets do not lead to sustained weight loss or health benefits for the majority of people.”

You may have already heard this information but you may have very well just resigned yourself to playing the losing and gaining game. It’s understandable considering how barraged we are with the message that fat will kill you. But the truth is fat can actually protect you against certain diseases including osteoporosis, chronic bronchitis, and some cancers.[3] Furthermore, the evidence strongly supports that continued yo-yo dieting or losing and gaining weight repetitively does real damage to your body, not to mention the mental and emotional self-abuse that dieting demands. The research is clear: weight cycling plays a large role in various ailments, ironically often attributed to obesity: high-blood pressure, congestive heart failure, diabetes, and even premature death.[4] Unfortunately, the studies that attract the most press are those that support weight loss as a means to health; such studies are substantially funded by the pharmaceutical [5] and weight loss industries. And these industries are certainly not lacking in profits; in only two more years, the worldwide weight-loss market is predicted to be worth a staggering US$586.3 billion.

It’s time to say “No” to big business making money off our bodies. Enough of believing the propaganda that fat is the enemy. Enough of trusting that the label ‘overweight’ or even ‘obese’ obtained from an unsound BMI chart translates to ill health. As the year comes to a close and you compile your list of New Year’s resolutions, dare to do something different. Dare to listen to your body. Dare to ditch dieting. And know that you don’t have to do it alone. Across the pond, the Endangered Bodies campaign, launched by the Endangered Species International March 2011 Summit, is in full swing. The Endangered Bodies (EB) team in the UK [6], led by Susie Orbach, launched its Ditching Dieting campaign last month at UK Feminista’s national conference where they invited attendees to “speak out against the misery caused by the diet industry.” And you can, too.

Anyone, anywhere can hold a SpeakOut in the name of Ditching Dieting. You can organize a few friends around your kitchen table or you might fill an auditorium. The point is to create a safe space where the suffering caused by dieting can be expressed and validated. A SpeakOut and the subsequent support group that can emerge from it offer similar peer support that diet clubs such as Weight Watchers provide; however, instead of focusing on working against your body’s natural impulses, a SpeakOut club facilitates strong bonds as you explore collaboratively with other members how to truly take care of yourself. In the words of the UK EB team:

“In general, the aim is to become really aware of where dieting puts you, and to start making important choices about how much you want to play along with a game that is making you miserable… It is about taking on the challenge to accept and understand how natural it is to eat happily, in response to your hunger, and without guilt.”

Learning how to eat intuitively is a process that takes time, especially if you’ve historically relied on external factors, such as a meal plan or a point system to guide you on when and how to eat. Diets teach us to ignore our internal cues, which only contributes to eating disorders and obesity. As Susie Orbach has asked many times,

“If dieting worked, why would we need to do it more than once?”

Let’s kick off the New Year off by Ditching Dieting and move toward eating “happily ever after.”

* * *

Whether you’re in the UK, the US, Canada, or Europe, consider hosting your own SpeakOut. For more information visit www.ditchingdieting.org and write to info@any-body.org to obtain a SpeakOut package.

Currently in the UK, a Body Image Inquiry is underway looking into the causes and consequences of body image anxiety. If you’re based in London, take the day off work on January 16, 2012 and join the UK EB team in speaking out against the diet industry at Parliament. Full event details here.

[1] Gina Kolata, Rethinking Thin, New York: Picador, 2007, 188.

[2] Contrast that with the fact that the obesity “crisis” was primarily borne out of four studies. See Paul Campos’ The Obesity Myth, New York: Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2004, pages 13-20 for more details.

[3] Linda Bacon, Health at Every Size, Dallas: BenBella Books, Inc., 2008, 138-139.

[4] Paul Campos, The Obesity Myth, New York: Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2004, 32-33.

[5] Special thanks to Sue Thomason’s Anti-Diet blog for uncovering this article.

[6] Also known as the Any-Body team.

________________________

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Filed Under: Science, Health and Research, Size & Weight Tagged With: Any-Body, body image, diet, diets don't work, ditching dieting, eating disorders, Endangered Bodies, Endangered Species, fat, research, size, Size & Weight, SpeakOut, Susie Orbach, UCLA, weight, weight watchers, Women

Remembering Ruby

November 15, 2011 By Sharon 3 Comments

By Sharon Haywood

Fifty-something-old Barbie[1] might be middle-aged but she sure doesn’t show it. When she was in her 30s, her manufacturer Mattel sent her for plastic surgery, not to maintain her youthful appearance, but rather in response to market demands to morph her into a more realistic-looking doll. In 1992, Barbie’s waistline slightly expanded. Then in 1998, Mattel altered one version of the doll—Really Rad Barbie—giving her a decreased cup size and slimmer hips. Currently, her estimated measurements—38-18-34—contrast greatly with the American woman’s average of 41-34-43[2]. Barbie’s curves fall several inches short of what typical women possess today.

Considering that the average woman in the U.S. is a size 12/14, a doll that wears a double-digit dress size would be a much more accurate reflection of American women. The late Anita Roddick (1942-2007), the founder of The Body Shop, thought the same. In 1997, the socially-conscious international cosmetics franchise and Host Universal created Ruby: a chubby-cheeked, chestnut-haired, computer-generated figurine. Ruby was the brainchild of The Body Shop’s self-esteem campaign, “Love Your Body.” Her size 16 image was accompanied by the caption, “There are 3 billion women who don’t look like supermodels and only 8 who do.” She sent the message that you should love what you’ve got, not loathe it.

If you’re familiar with Ruby, you know that she’s not easy to locate. So, where’s this confident and curvaceous character been hiding? You can find her here, alongside other rejected and banned ads.[3] We can thank Mattel for Ruby’s label of “Banned.” The U.S. toy manufacturer thwarted the innovative campaign in its early days by serving The Body Shop with a cease-and-desist order; all posters had to be removed from American shops. Why? In Roddick’s own words:

“Ruby was making Barbie look bad, presumably by mocking the plastic twig-like bestseller … Mattel thought that Ruby was insulting to Barbie.”

Outside of Roddick’s explanation on her website, no other information regarding Mattel’s specific legal grounds can be found online. We can surmise that Ruby’s rolls and less-than-perky breasts were the offending culprits.

This year Ruby would have turned 14. But imagine if she had grown from being a self-esteem campaigner into a three-dimensional doll in direct competition with Barbie. Do you think that when she would have reached her 30s, she would have gone under the knife, too? Would the folks at The Body Shop have decided she needed a tummy tuck, a breast lift, and some lipo to give her a competitive edge? The Body Shop’s global communications head told the New York Times that Ruby represented “a reality check” in contrast to the “stereotypical notions of unattainable ideals.” Odds would tell us that the Rubenesque beauty wouldn’t have any part of her body nipped or tucked; in fact, like many women approaching middle-age, she might even have gained a couple of pounds. Regrettably, we’ll never know for sure.

Although Ruby’s existence was short-lived, her presence generated controversy. She caused Mattel to sit up and take notice. Along similar lines, consider that Barbie underwent cosmetic surgery to appease consumers’ demands. Although Mattel was conservative in its alterations of Barbie’s figure, the company did respond to the public. Furthermore, with sales of the blonde figurine consistently dropping,[4] the toy manufacturer has even more incentive to cater to the customer. If more and more women let corporate giants like Mattel know what they really want, who’s to say that Barbie’s waistline (and the rest of her) can’t fill out as she eases into her fifties? Something to ponder in memory of both Ruby and the visionary Roddick.

Originally published at Any-Body on June 21, 2009. Cross-posted with permission.

[1] When Any-Body originally published this post in 2009, Barbie had just turned 50 years old.

[2] I cited body measurements for White women ages 36 to 45 to reflect Ruby’s race. For the same age group, the average measurements for Black women are 43-37-46; 42.5-36-44 for Hispanic women; and 41-35-43 for Asian women.

[3] In 2009, I cited www.bestrejectedadvertising.com as my original source. The website is no longer active.

[4] After several years of declining Barbie sales, Mattel saw an increase in Barbie sales during the first quarter of 2011.

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Filed Under: Beauty Standards, Body Image, Size & Weight Tagged With: Anita Roddick, Barbie, Beauty, body image, fat, Host Universal, media representation, Ruby doll, size, Size & Weight, The Body Shop, weight, Women, women in advertising

How Diets Decrease Your Self-Esteem and Not Your Size!

August 18, 2011 By pia 3 Comments

Dieting and Body Image: The Facts

By Maddie Ruud from hubpages.com

Raking in $40 billion every year, the diet industry is one of the most profitable areas of our economy today. One out of three women and one out of four men are on a diet at any given time. With these statistics, you well may wonder why the so-called “Obesity Epidemic,” has not yet subsided. Surely, with such a wide consumer base and high profit margin, diets must be helping somebody… But what those before and after pictures don’t show you is the other side of the coin. Of all their customers, two thirds of dieters regain the weight within one year and virtually all regain it within five years.

So? No harm done, you say. They’re back where they started, minus a few dollars (or hundreds, or thousands…). Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there. Dieting has actually been shown to be counterproductive, taking a toll on both your self-esteem, and your body. Food deprivation slows your metabolism, making it harder to lose weight in the future, and easier to put it back on, plus some. The average weight change per diet today is not to lose weight, or even break even, but to gain seven pounds. And failing, time and again, does nothing for your confidence in yourself.

Perhaps you’re still not convinced. You have more discipline than the rest. You want it bad enough. I do not doubt your determination, or your desire. After all, two out of five women and one out of five men would trade three to five years of their life to achieve their weight goals.

However, the diet industry, like most others, is dependent on repeat customers, on bringing back your business.

You are set up to fail, simply to afford the opportunity to re-enroll you, and make another few bucks off of your misery.

New Study Proves Dieting Ineffective

A two-year study at UC Davis highlighted the difference your attitude can make in losing weight. The participants, all obese, were divided into two groups for monitoring: dieting and non-dieting.

The dieting group was told to moderately restrict their food consumption, maintain food diaries and monitor their weight. They were provided with information on the benefits of exercise, on behavioral strategies for successful dieting, and on how to count calories and fat content, read food labels and shop for appropriate foods.

The non-dieting participants were instructed to let go of restrictive eating habits, and pay more attention to their internal cues, both physical and emotional, such as hunger, satiety, anxiety, sadness, and anger. Instead of diet propaganda, they were given information on healthy nutrition, and participated in a weekly support group focused on addressing the particular concerns of the obese person in an intolerant society.

The Results

Almost half of the dieting group dropped out before finishing the treatments, while 92% of the non-dieting group completed the program. While the non-dieters did not lose any significant amount of weight, they experienced numerous health benefits that the dieters did not: lowered bad cholesterol levels and systolic blood pressure, quadrupled their physical activity, and felt significantly better about themselves and less depressed at the end of the two-year period.

Yes, you say, but the dieters lost the weight. Not so. While the members of the dieting group lost 5.2% of their initial weight in the first 24 weeks of the study, by the end of the program, they had regained nearly all of it. That first boost of self-confidence due to the rapid weight loss deteriorated as the pounds piled back on, leaving participants with lower self-esteem than when they had started.

“We have been ingrained to think that seriously large people can only make improvements in their health if they diet and slim down,” said nutrition researcher Linda Bacon, who conducted the study along with Judith Stern, a UC Davis professor of nutrition and internal medicine. “But this study tells us that you can make significant improvements in both metabolic and psychological health without ever stepping on the scales or counting calories. You can relax about food and eat what you want.” Now, wouldn’t that be nice?

Read more by Maddie Ruud on hubpages.com

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Filed Under: Science, Health and Research Tagged With: diet industry, dieting in effective, diets don't work, Maddie Ruud, self-esteem and dieting, size, UC Davis study on dieting, yo-yo diets

Can Kharma Crush Stereotypes in Women’s Wrestling?

June 8, 2011 By Sharon 5 Comments

Kharma in the ring. Photo via www.ultimatesportstalk.com

By Ashley-Michelle Papon

For as long as I’ve been playing the dating game, I’ve witnessed how wrestling (the fake kind) has a hold on the people of my generation. In fact, of all the people I’ve dated (or, in a select few cases, married) wrestling seems to be the only unifying thread. I had never understood the attraction to watching half-naked grown men pummel it out with story lines that obviously had been ripped from the mock-ups of “All My Children.”

My attitude changed somewhat after former star Mick Foley became an outspoken advocate for the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network. The actions of a man who made his career in an industry not exactly renowned for empowering women certainly caught my attention, both as a member of the RAINN Speaker’s Bureau and as an individual who would have preferred watching cat food commercials to the awkward Sparta-meets-Susan Lucci experiment that wrestling delivered. So, for the last year and a half, I’ve been tuning in, and taking notes.

What’s come across my clipboard this week is a wrestler by the name of Kia Stevens, who goes by Kharma, formerly known as Awesome Kong. Currently appearing on the Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment’s Raw brand, Kharma has been an active wrestler since 2002, even earning the number-one spot in Pro Wrestling Illustrated’s inaugural list of top 50 female wrestlers. She’s the largest woman to wrestle for the WWE, and she’s a woman of color. And, according to at least one WWE fanboy, Kharma was handpicked to begin her career with the WWE this month by the heir apparent to the empire, Triple H.

With all that in mind, I have just one question: how could the WWE be so close to getting it right (for once) and ultimately fail?

Obviously, the WWE doesn’t generally tend to be on board with advancing the agenda of women’s empowerment. One quick glance at the championship belt for the Diva’s brand, with its curlicue letters, shimmering rhinestones and butterfly-shaped emblem is all it takes to set some viewers back a century in their perception of women as athletes. And if that doesn’t seal the deal of sexism on screen, watching as women battle it out in the ring with pillows while screeching about the “disrespect” they’ve experienced probably will. Here’s a hint, Chairman McMahon: if you can’t tell the difference between your show and ‘Jerry Springer,’ neither can your audience.

This is also why Kharma’s inclusion into the WWE could turn the world of Diva wrestling on its ear. To begin with, Kharma’s attire reflects something very different. Kharma’s revolving line of costumes is seemingly channeling the wardrobe of some ancient culture’s warrior. Not exactly original, but a refreshing departure from the typical ware of bikinis and bondage straps favored by many of her peers, and it helps build on her gimmick (in wrestling lingo, ‘gimmick’ refers to the identity of a character and their basic back story) as this phenomenon from another culture. It forces the audience to pay attention to her behavior in the ring, versus getting lost in the flashes of bare skin across the screen.

Additionally, Kharma is a woman of color, something that was a rarity in the WWE until the last few years. But the real kicker is that Kharma is also a person of size. According to the WWE’s website, Kharma is almost six feet tall and nearly 300 pounds, the largest Diva ever on record.

It would be easy to conclude the article here with a paragraph praising Kharma’s feats and congratulating the WWE for joining the rest of us in the 21^st century. But it isn’t that cut and dry, because the introduction of Kharma also highlights some of the most troubling aspects of race and sex that have long plagued the WWE.

In her three-week tenure as a WWE Diva so far, Kharma has chewed through half a dozen of her Diva peers. With the notable exception of Alicia Fox and Ever Torres, each Diva Kharma has destroyed in the ring is not identifiably of color.

The racial aesthetic can’t be ignored, particularly with how the matches have been executed. The visual is striking, and intentionally so: Kelly Kelly, with her gold lame wide-belted boy shorts and perfectly straight blonde hair, a shrinking violet to the large, menacing advance of the multi-braided Kharma. It doesn’t help that Kharma enters to a theme music composed of the sudden strike of a piano, and her own maniacal laughter against an electric guitar riff fit for a haunted house. The idea of the savage (Kong?) is complete.

Perhaps it’s a failure of the writers behind the WWE, who have given us stereotype after stereotype to disservice people of color. Whether it’s the duo of Cryme Tyme talking about boosting cars or Yoshi Tatsu appearing to speak in only broken English, the WWE continually exposes our worst perceptions and promotes them. As Daniel Douglass writes at Inside Pulse, the WWE remains unapologetically racist, questioning, “Why waste time with character shading and depth, when we can simply seize a ready trait, inflate it and hope to Christ they don’t notice they are cheering a cardboard cut-out?”

For women, the lack of character depth is part and parcel of being involved in wrestling. A year and a half ago, WWE fans witnessed as Mickie James, a spunky, bright-eyed Diva with real talent, got demoted to the Smackdown brand. Not long after, James was thrown into a Mean Girls-esque rivalry that left her re-christened ‘Piggie James’ and defending her (healthy) body size to her competing Divas, and the millions of WWE fans who tune in every week. As Kit MacFarlene concludes over at PopMatters, “The fact that it’s just about impossible to find a word to describe the not-extremely-thin Mickie that doesn’t essentially imply ‘fat’ says a lot about how far we haven’t come with cultural body image problems.”

The treatment of James also exemplifies why Kharma’s presence should be a welcome one to confront and shake up the notions of what makes a WWE Diva, and also hammers home why the limited performance of her character so far is a profound disappointment. It’s not as though the WWE is the first or even the worst offender in terms of the intersectional prejudices Kharma represents, but given that the WWE is showcasing women doing something that is traditionally a man’s activity, is it wholly unreasonable to expect more than what they’ve delivered so far?

No, it isn’t.

In order to create change within a faulty system, it is important to work within it. Kharma’s had a disappointing show so far, but it isn’t too late to turn around and portray Kharma as a woman who is intimidating because she’s one hell of an athlete, not because she happens to be a person of size and a person of color.

It goes without saying that wrestling is never going to be the hotbed of intellectual discourse, and that’s fine. We’re talking about a genre that banks on mixing comedic punch lines with impressive acts of athleticism—but for the minority voices in wrestling, we want to see them do more of the latter and stop being the former.

UPDATE June 10, 2011:

On May 30, the character of Kharma was dealt another blow when Stevens announced her real-life pregnancy. For the first time since the introduction of her character, fans were introduced to the voice that had previously been reduced to maniacal cackling while the mouth bit off the heads of Barbie dolls. With restrained passion and emotion, Stevens discussed her dreams of becoming a WWE superstar, only to be told by one of the largest names in the business that she was too fat to succeed.

Her poignant speech might have served as something of a wake-up call for the audience, but in characteristic WWE fashion, the surface-level enlightenment is immediately dismissed by the real men behind the curtain. Out pop Kharma’s earlier pummeled rivals, the Bella Twins, to deliver a hat trick distracting from social awareness.

In a 90-second promo, they make 10 individual references to Kharma being too fat to wrestle or to sleep with, concluding her partner must have had to use a seat belt. Although the send-off will serve to hold fans over for the duration of Stevens’ pregnancy, it’s nevertheless the same misogyny and warped body messages being rehashed to a character that might have risen above them otherwise.

Caster Semenya’s True Identity Is Up to Her

Filed Under: Representation and Identity Tagged With: Black, Ethnicity and Culture, Kharma, media representation, Objectification of Women, Race, Ethnicity and Culture, size, Size & Weight, Stereotypes, Women, WWE

Scale Back: It’s International No Diet Day!

May 6, 2011 By Sharon 15 Comments

SupporterUS

By Sharon Haywood

“I worked out today so I can treat myself to a piece of cake.”

“When I lose these last ten pounds, I’ll go to the beach.”

“Next week I’ll eat more. I’ve got to fit into that dress this weekend.”

“I can’t eat that! It’ll go straight to my hips.”

Sound familiar? Have you put any thought into the actual quantity of time that you spend thinking about your body and/or food? Pay attention. You might surprise yourself at how much brain space is devoted to calculating calories, self-loathing, and deprivation. Have you ever imagined the relief you would feel if you could abandon the quest to obtain the ideal body? If you haven’t, it’s time to liberate yourself from the no-win game of dieting. May 6^th is the perfect day to start.

Since 1992, May 6^th has been designated International No Diet Day (INDD). This body-loving campaign is associated with combating eating disorders and honoring the people who have suffered because of one. For this day, we can thank Mary Evans Young, a UK feminist, the founder of the British anti-diet movement, Diet Breakers, and author of the best-selling book, Diet Breaking: Having It All Without Having To Diet (Hodder & Stoughton, 1995). She started INDD after recovering from anorexia, although the day isn’t just about eating disorders. This movement draws attention to the fact that a great many of us suffer from disordered thinking regarding food and our bodies, not just those afflicted with anorexia and bulimia.

INDD is more about not depriving yourself for a 24-hour period. It beckons you to make peace with your body and your relationship with food. And not only for your mental health. Various studies show that yo-yo dieting has been found to be damaging to one’s physical health in conditions such as congestive heart failure, hypertension, and clogged arteries.[1] What’s more is that investigators have evidence that illustrate a significant correlation between thinness and shorter lives.[2]

As you savor in the freedom and pleasure of eating exactly what you please this May 6^th, contemplate that every single day could be diet-free. Easier said than done. Chances are, if you diet you’ve been counting calories for a long time. Abandoning the habit isn’t going to happen overnight. It’s a process – one that leads to greater self-acceptance. Start small. If you need some help, choose one of the following actions to start creating a new diet-free reality:

If you regularly weigh yourself, cut down how often you do with the goal of getting rid of your scale completely. Celebrate by throwing a scale-smashing party.
Stop asking, “Do I look fat in this?” Make the commitment to stop questioning your friends, your lover, and especially yourself for a full week. Then, at the end of that week, commit for another week and then another, until you have deprogrammed that question out of your awareness.
Listen to your body. If it asks for a brownie, don’t give it a carrot. You’ll just end up eating a bag of veggies before succumbing to your true craving. If you deprive yourself, you’ll probably eat not just one brownie, but rather, a plateful. Your body knows what it needs. Learn to respect its innate wisdom.
Eliminate one diet food from your grocery list. Anything labeled fat-free and light falls into this category. Choose another low-calorie item to phase out of your food choices until your fridge is filled with exactly what your body wants, not products that you think will get you thinner.
Do at least one thing that you’ve been postponing until you have lost weight: Buy that new outfit, sign up for dance class, or ask your crush out on a date.

Although May 6^th helps raise awareness regarding eating disorders, use it to take a look at your own body and your relationship with it. Take the INDD pledge and spread the word. The more of us that reject the pressure to diet, the less it will be touted as the norm. And that will translate to a happier – and healthier – society.

[1] Paul Campos, The Obesity Myth (New York: Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2004, 33.

[2] Crespo et al., “The Relationship of Physical Activity and Body Weight with All-Cause Mortality: Results from the Puerto Rico Heart Health Program,” AEP 12, (2002): 543-52.

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Filed Under: Body Image, Self-Esteem, Size & Weight Tagged With: diet, INDD, International No Diet Day, size, weight

Body of Lies: Debunking the BMI

May 4, 2011 By Sharon 13 Comments

By Ashley-Michelle Papon

It’s that time of year again: swimming pools are opening, students are jogging, and if you’re a mom, you’re probably getting fat. According to a new study released in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, young mothers are more likely to make poor dietary decisions, less likely to exercise, and have a higher Body Mass Index, most commonly known as the BMI.

The United States has a firm history of economically punishing teenage mothers by denying them access to better resources including healthier food. Still, the most troubling pretext of the article has little to do with the gender disparity or economics skewed to keep the poor poor, but the implication that the BMI of young mothers is an indication of just how unhealthy they are.

Though the BMI has long been touted by medical and athletic communities as the greatest tool of measurement to determine someone’s health, stricter academic scrutiny and authentic scientific study is finding that the BMI as a gauge of health is flawed. Contrary to what you have probably heard several times over, the BMI is not an accurate indicator of how “overweight” you are. And it’s certainly not a viable indicator of your health.

In July of 2009, Keith Devlin of the National Public Radio shared with the world 10 reasons why the BMI is bogus. Urging listeners and readers to take the BMI—and their next meal—with a grain of salt, he patiently explained that, at its core, the BMI was a nonsensical, physiologically inaccurate formula created by mathematician Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet in the early 19^th century. Quetelet’s method to create a measurement was calculated by dividing one’s weight in kilograms by the square of their height in meters.

Although it may seem scientifically sound at first blush, the methodology creates no distinction between the weight of muscle versus the weight of fat, despite the fact that fat takes up roughly four times the space of muscle. In other words, there can be quite a difference in your weight and size based on your body type. By failing to evaluate the two body features separately, the BMI delivers faulty results that make being classified as overweight a virtual certainty. And though BMI has some level of success with whole groups of people, its use to determine how healthy one adult can be is questionable at best.

But the biggest weakness with BMI would have to be how it attempts to lock people into rigidly defined categories for underweight, ideal, overweight, and obese. The scale, ranging from 1 to 100, becomes overweight at 25 and obese at 30; it is transfixed in such a way to suggest that when individuals reach 25 or above, they’ve crossed into the territory of being unhealthy. This conclusion begs the question of what unhealthy actually looks like. By relying solely on the BMI for the numeric answer to this question, the aesthetics often don’t bear out to compliment the BMI’s ranking.

And although people think they can eye it the way they can parallel parking, a true visual assessment of one’s physique isn’t something that can be winged. In one of her earliest criticisms of the BMI, blogger Kate Harding launched a photo project showcasing woman with their height, weight, BMI, and a commentary about the accuracy of the BMI’s rating. One volunteer, Laurie, 5’0 and 130 pounds, carries a BMI of 25.4 percent. According to the BMI, Laurie is “overweight,” despite being a size 4. For emphasis, Harding showcases several curvier women, warning viewers not to get too attached because the BMI’s validation that they’re unhealthy suggests they will drop dead of heart attacks and diabetes soon.

Harding’s point was drastic, but the photographs of everyday women unable to meet these unrealistic body standards hammer home the damage done by the promotion of outdated rubrics employed to shame our bodies. What was pioneered in the interest of helping advance medicine has become a modern tool of extremely organized bio-power. The cultural and social obsession with weight management for women has always gone hand-in-hand with the desire to render them less powerful. In a very real sense, the physical reduction of their size is a stripping down of their agency. Since Kevin Smith gave up directing movies and became a factivist following his ejection from a Southwest flight for being “too fat,” this schism has widened to keep persons of size from inheriting power, often out of concern for their health.

Except that that brings us back, full circle, to why the BMI is completely bogus. The BMI is billed in a way that if someone has a BMI that places them in the “overweight” range, they are immediately considered unhealthy. Yet new research is finding that heavier people actually have more protection against a number of illnesses and chronic conditions, from kidney failure to infectious diseases and lung issues.

Despite this, it’s not going to stop the diet industry from using the BMI to keep pushing their products. Social attitudes notwithstanding, sources like the International Obesity Task Force and the American Obesity Association are treated as completely legitimate entities when they use the BMI to explain how we, as a society, are doomed because of our size. Despite authoring the majority of the World Health Organization’s obesity reports, both organizations are primarily funded by pharmaceutical and weight loss companies. Is it any wonder that these folks (and others associated with them) have been aggressively campaigning to have obesity classified as a disease? As Paul McAleer over at BigFatFacts concludes, “The ‘obesity epidemic’ is worth billions to the pharmaceutical, diet, weight loss, media, and government agencies fueling it.”

This should leave every person asking themselves: do I want to keep banking my health on a tool designed to tell me my body is flawed so that the companies employing that tool can continue creating a billion-dollar industry?

Filed Under: Science, Health and Research Tagged With: BMI, body image, Body Mass Index, diet, fat, size, Size & Weight, size discrimination, sizeism, weight

The Sizing Nightmare: What do Labels Tell Us about Ourselves?

April 29, 2011 By valerie 15 Comments

By Valerie Kusler

A recent article at the New York Times has the web buzzing with rants about the inconsistency of women’s clothing sizes, which, as any woman who has ever bought clothes in the U.S. knows, is nothing new. Five years ago, Newsweek did an article on vanity sizing (manufacturers’ practice of putting a smaller number on a label to encourage more sales), and since then, the phenomenon has become even more commonplace.

The Times provides a stark example:

Take a woman with a 27-inch waist. In Marc Jacobs’s high-end line, she is between an 8 and a 10. At Chico’s, she is a triple 0. And that does not consider whether the garment fits in the hips and bust. (Let’s not get into length; there is a reason most neighborhood dry cleaners also offer tailoring.)

Jill at Feministe adds that, “There’s a class aspect to this as well. Higher-end brands, I’ve noticed, are sized much smaller than middle-market and mall-store clothes. The cuts, too, are different — mall-store brands like Ann Taylor, Banana Republic and J Crew are not only wildly over-sized as a general rule… but also cut wider in the waist.”

Although I agree with Jill’s point for the most part, I have certainly seen exceptions: for example, I have one pair of Target pants that’s two sizes up from anything else in my closet, and I can barely squeeze into them. Not to mention that I have a lot of pants from Target, which illustrates how rampant the un-standardized sizing problem can be even within the four walls of a single retailer.

Several entrepreneurs have used this issue as an opportunity to provide their own solutions. The latest, a body scanner called MyBestFit created by Tanya Shaw, allows shoppers to step into the kiosk, get a free 20-second full-body scan, and receive a print-out of the sizes that would be the best fit at participating retailers such as Old Navy and Talbot’s. Although many shoppers might see the scanner as a welcome time-saving device to find their best sizes, I can’t shake the T.S.A Big Brother feeling to take it very seriously – and furthermore, Shaw comments on how women often attach their self esteem to the number on the tag and I don’t see how her scanner changes that.

The Times mentions that, due to a lack of agreement between apparel manufacturers and retailers about finding a solution, some brands are taking matters into their own hands, like Levi’s. The company launched its Curve ID brand last year, which offers three different fits in each size and has already sold over one million pairs of jeans. Of course, Levi’s is far from the first to offer a curvy jean: The Gap has been selling its Curvy fit for at least a couple of years, in addition to its other styles such as “Always Skinny” (don’t even get me started.)

Still, Levi’s VP of women’s global marketing hit it on the head when she said, “When we try on 10 pairs of jeans to buy one, the reason you feel bad is because you think something’s wrong with you.”

I can’t help but think of a passage from Portia de Rossi’s new (and already acclaimed) memoir, Unbearable Lightness about her near-fatal battle with anorexia. Toward the beginning, she recalls her intense insecurity after being offered her breakout role on “Ally McBeal” and realizing she didn’t have the first clue about how to be a famous person. She begged a more fashion-forward friend to take her shopping to buy some outfits that were less grunge and more glam – or at least something besides t-shirts and holey jeans – because she didn’t know what U.S. size to try. Rather than picking something to try on based on rough appearance, Portia asked her friend,

“What size should I be?”

“What do you mean?” She looked at me with an inviting smile on her face, like we were about to play a game. She had no idea that her answer to my question was going to change my life.
“What size are models?”

“Well, a sample size is usually a six.” Kali knew a lot of things like this.

“Then I’m a six.” As it turned out, I actually was a 6. Mostly. The Capri pants that were a size 6 were too tight, but I bought them anyway as incentive to lose a few pounds. It didn’t occur to me to go up to the next, more comfortable size because as far as I was concerned a size 8 didn’t exist.”

This is a woman who thought that something was inherently, ineffably, and irreversibly wrong with her — and this was just the very beginning of her struggle. How many other millions of women face this body-bashing, self-berating test every time they try something on and the number on the tag doesn’t match the number in their heads that tells them whether or not they have value that day? How many times do we have to do this dance, even though we recognize that the numbers on the tag are arbitrary and not at all consistent – when we know that a brand has preyed on our insecurity by lowering the number on the tag, and yet we buy the pants anyway because they make us feel better about ourselves?

Sure, it would be nice if we didn’t have to try on four different sizes of everything we wanted to buy if clothing brands decided to be more consistent – that’s 15 minutes fewer in fitting room hell. But even if that day were to come, I suspect that women would feel the same shame and devaluation if the number of the size that fits didn’t match the number they feel they needed to be. At least with the current system, we can blame it on the retailer – “their sizing is just super tiny” or “it’s just a weird cut, I’m a smaller size in the other style.” That’s not to say that brands should keep confusing the hell out of us to make us feel better – it’s just that the inconsistency is only part of the problem, and standardization is only part of the solution. I may be talking about two different things altogether, but they’re irrevocably intertwined nonetheless.

So then, what is the solution to this part of the problem: the shame when the number is too high, and the rush when it is smaller than expected? Personally, I would love to see a world in which size tags didn’t even have to exist — but obviously that’s not a realistic solution. I do like to cut mine out after I buy something when it’s possible, and then I ask myself, is that courageous or cowardly? Am I rejecting the label, or so afraid of the emotion and fear attached to it that I can’t bear to look at it? I like to think it’s the former, but I won’t deny I have done that fitting room dance many times myself.

We’d love to hear from readers about ways you are rejecting size labels or neutralizing the emotions attached to the numbers – and about whether you think it would help both parts of the problem if sizes were standardized. Also, have you ever been guilty of buying an item of clothing expressly because the number on the tag made you feel good? (I’m looking sheepishly at a pair of Old Navy jeans in my closet right now that are not even very cute.) I am convinced that there is no easy solution to this piece of the sizing problem, because the real solution lies in learning to love and value ourselves for who we really are – which, for most of us, is a lifelong journey.

Read the full New York Times article

Read the full post at Feministe

Filed Under: Size & Weight Tagged With: body image, Feministe, labels, measurement, New York Times, number, Portia de Rossi, sample size, shopping, size, Size & Weight, standardization, tags, vanity sizing, Women

The Truth About Celebrity Weight Loss

March 22, 2011 By Sharon 8 Comments

By Claire Mysko

In Hollywood, female stars who shed pounds get glamorous photo shoots and breathless “How She Did It!” cover stories. But not all slimmed-down celebrities are falling over themselves to shout their new stats from the rooftops and share their diet and exercise tips with the world. Their reluctance to do so points to the reality that weight loss is not the unequivocal triumph the diet industry would have us believe it is.

Sure, smaller numbers on the scale get validated and celebrated in our thin-obsessed culture. But all the fanfare can be overwhelming. Suddenly, it’s The Weight Loss that takes center stage. The red carpet pictures are everywhere. The new form-fitting outfits become big news. Never mind that the person wearing them has a lot more to offer the world than a thinner body.

Three stars recently opened up about the complexities of losing weight under the spotlight.

Jennifer Hudson

As a spokesperson for Weight Watchers, Hudson is being paid to talk a big game about her smaller size. Yet she didn’t seem entirely comfortable in this role judging by her Oprah appearance last week. She (and her WW leader) tried to avoid the question of exactly how many pounds she had lost, but relented* after Oprah rejected the idea that a fixation on pounds might not be healthiest approach, insisting that she claim her number as a “victory.” Because we’re all waging war with our bodies, naturally.

“You have never looked better in your life, I think…Do you feel like this is the best you’ve ever been in your life?” Oprah asked giddily [emphasis mine]. Whoa, see how that happened? The weight loss quickly got conflated with who Hudson is on some existential level? Let’s keep in mind that this is a woman who experienced a family tragedy just two years ago, when her mother, brother and nephew were murdered. She’s also a new mother. To say that she’s faced some life-altering emotional upheaval in recent years would be quite the understatement. But back to The Weight Loss! Hudson sheepishly answered that yes, she believes this is the best she’s ever been, although it’s not easy getting used to the body changes. She admitted that sometimes she doesn’t recognize herself and feels conflicted about the attention she’s getting.

“I’m like, ‘Don’t look at me—listen to me. I want you to hear me sing because that’s all that ever really mattered to me,’” she said.

*My episode cut to the breaking news of Mubarak’s speech at the precise moment that Hudson was about to cave and reveal how much weight she’s lost, so I missed the big moment. Nothing like a history-making revolution to put the diet talk in perspective.

Raven Symone

The expectation that any star who loses weight must be just bursting with more confidence than ever before also ignores the fact that said star might have been feeling just fine about herself all along, thank you very much. Raven Symone has been on top of her game since she was a wee little one stealing laughs on The Cosby Show. She went on to star in her own mega-hit show, That’s So Raven!

Symone has built a hugely successful career on her talent, so she’s not thrilled that everyone’s focus has now shifted to her size. The gushing praise of her new look stings like a backhanded compliment. She has never lacked confidence in her appearance. However, it’s clear to her now that others obviously had issues with her weight.

“I thought I looked fabulous before and nobody else did,” she told People magazine. “So, whatever… Actually, now I wear bigger clothes because I don’t like the way people stare at me,” she says. “I liked it before. Now, you’re just looking at me for the wrong reasons. Before, you were actually looking at me for a real reason.”

Crystal Renn

Model Crystal Renn has a different kind of problem. Her recent weight loss has actually sparked some pretty harsh criticism. Renn made a name for herself as the leading plus-size models in America (she used the term “plus-size” to describe herself in the bio included in her book, Hungry: A Model’s Story of Appetite, Ambition, and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves), but it’s pretty hard to find her curves these days.

She first signed with a modeling agency at the age of sixteen and developed anorexia and exercise bulimia with the words of a modeling scout echoing in her head: You could be a supermodel. But you’ll have to lose a little weight. Her disordered eating went on for years, she writes in Hungry:

“Until one day I realized that if I wanted to live, I could no longer starve. I had to get off the crazy-making treadmill. I had to nourish my body and feed my soul. So I ate and ate. And I returned to my natural size 12—the size of the average American and the size I was when I really made it big.”

Now that she’s considerably slimmer than a size 12, Renn is rejecting categorization altogether. In an interview posted on the Ford Models website, she details her frustration with people’s need to have her conform to the image they want her to be.

“I feel pressure from, more than anyplace…the public, and the media. I think by placing a title on my head, which is “plus size,” and then the picture that these people have created in their mind about what plus size actually is, I basically fail you. I couldn’t possibly live up to that.”

Of course Renn is not likely to admit to feeling any industry pressure in a video produced and distributed by the modeling agency that cuts her checks, but the fact remains that speculating about the motivations for her weight loss won’t get us very far. At the end of the day, Renn is the only one who can shed light on that question. And as she correctly points out, it’s impossible to get the full picture of her physical and emotional health just by sizing her up.

Body changes of any kind can bring up complicated feelings. When what we see in the mirror looks different than it did before (even if those changes move us closer to some “ideal”), accepting a new reflection requires some work–the kind of work that can take a minute. And that just does not compute with the glossy media formula: thinness = instant happiness, no strings attached.

* * *

Claire Mysko is the author of You’re Amazing! A No-Pressure Guide to Being Your Best Self and the co-author of Does This Pregnancy Make Me Look Fat? The Essential Guide to Loving Your Body Before and After Baby.

Three Cheers for Kate!

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Annoying Trend: Celebs Play Dumb About Body Image

Michael Jackson: Another Victim of the Fame Game

Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way”: Racist or Revolutionary?

Body image gets animated: What The Simpsons and Family Guy say about beauty

Music’s New Bold and Bountiful

Filed Under: Body Image, Self-Esteem, Size & Weight Tagged With: Celebrities, celebrity, Crystal Renn, diet, fat, Jennifer Hudson, Raven Symone, size, Stereotypes, weight, weight loss, Women

Discrimination and EDNOS: One Woman’s Story

February 9, 2011 By Sharon 29 Comments

By Kath at Fat Heffalump

My name is Kath and I suffer from an eating disorder.

Officially, I have what is known as an Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Diagnosed (EDNOS). This means that I do not have Anorexia or Bulimia, but another set of behaviors that do not have a name. An unspecified eating disorder if you please.

I am mostly in recovery at this point in my life, but I still have issues with food, and behaviors and thoughts regarding my body.

I have an eating disorder and I am fat. Very fat. I am what in medical terms is known as “morbidly obese.” I personally prefer the term Super Fat. It means I get to wear underpants on the outside.

I wasn’t fat until I was about 11 or 12, and then it happened very quickly with puberty. However, my parents had told me that I was fat for as long as I could remember.

On learning that I am fat, most people assume that my eating disorder is binge eating or overeating because I must have been gorging myself to get this way.

Until a few years ago, every single doctor or medical professional I went to diagnosed me with overeating, often without ever asking me what I eat, or if they did and I told them, they didn’t believe me. They said I must be cheating, or lying, or not counting some things that I ate. I simply had to be an overeater to have “let myself get that fat.”

However, my disordered behavior was all about starvation. Restriction. Purging. Punishing. I started when I was about 13 or 14. Some bullies (girls) forced me to stick my fingers down my throat and make myself vomit because, “That’s what fat ugly bitches like you should do.” A year or so before this incident I had actually been shown what to do by another slightly older girl. I worked with her at an after-school job, and she thought she was being kind to the fat kid. She did it and it kept her slim, so she showed me how to stick my fingers down my throat and how to disguise that I was doing it. But it really wasn’t until the bullies forced me and humiliated me that I attempted to actually do it regularly myself.

I got very good at it. Nobody knew. I could vomit almost soundlessly. I could find reasons to disappear to the far corners of our yard to vomit behind trees. I started stealing laxatives from the medicine cabinet. I would take lots of Sudafed (a sinus decongestant that used to contain pseudoephedrine) because it made me manic and I could go through bursts of exercise. I learnt to “chew and spit” when I was eating in company. Sometimes I would stop for a while, particularly if I had spent time away from home and school where the pressure was always on.

However, I stayed fat. In fact, I got fatter.

The behavior continued after I left school. I became an obsessive vegetarian for several years as another way to exert control over my eating. I moved out of home at an early age and the independence afforded me a whole new range of opportunities for restriction, purging, and exercise binges. I lost some considerable weight at 18, only to have it come back with a vengeance some later, despite continuing my eating disorder. In hindsight, the weight loss was an indicator of severe illness.

I struggled with depression and anxiety all this time. I went to doctor after doctor, with both physical and emotional issues, but was repeatedly put on diets, usually without the doctor doing nothing more than looking at me and deciding I was too fat. If they did ask me to keep food/exercise diaries I would usually lie on them and say I was eating more and exercising less than I usually did. Even then, they didn’t believe me. If I told the truth they didn’t believe me either.

Remember, I was fat. I *must* have been overeating.

For 20 years, I kept presenting doctors with the same physical issues: An irregular menstrual cycle that manifested itself as constant bleeding, amenorrhea (absence of menstrual cycle), or dysmenorrhea (pain during menstrual cycle). In my early 30s, I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS); I discovered I had been showing symptoms and characteristics of it since I was 12. I was told yet again that the way to “cure” PCOS is to lose weight.

By the time I was 33, I was physically and emotionally exhausted. I had been put on Duramine, an amphetamine-based appetite suppressant, which made me cycle between mania and depression, and stopped me from sleeping or consuming anything, including water for days at a time. I was exercising between six and eight hours per day. I had lost over 50lbs (about 25kg) and dropped five dress sizes. I was desperately unhappy and my physical health was failing. I was not coping at work and it was suggested that I should see the counseling service through the employee assistance program. I saw a few different psychologists—they all focused on my weight. Eventually, out of desperation I begged one of them to help me, told him of my suicidal thoughts and explained my obsession with diet and exercising. His response was to suggest that I add another half hour to the six to eight hours I told him I was already doing, “To get you over the plateau.”

That night, I attempted suicide, only to be halted by a dear friend contacting me because he was worried.

On the recommendation of another friend, I went back to a doctor I had liked (even though she had previously suggested weight loss), and told her how I was feeling. Thankfully, she listened and recognized I needed further help. She helped me get the medical support I needed, both physically and mentally. She referred me to a psychologist whom I clicked with almost immediately. Through cognitive behavioral therapy, I began to work on my self-esteem and self-worth. In 2008, I decided I was not going to diet anymore. Soon after I found the Fat Acceptance movement, and discovered that I could be healthy, and that I know my own body if I only take the time to listen to it.

My GP, psychologist, and I work together on my physical and mental health. They both accept that I know my own body better than anyone else, and trust that I will tell them if I feel something is not right. I trust them to guide me through any medical issues that arise with the best professional advice. I have an agreement with them that they will not focus on my weight, but instead on my health, and I have introduced them to a Health at Every Size method.

It is important to me to talk about having an eating disorder as a fat person. Where thin or normal weight patients often get sympathy and understanding, and even simple recognition of their disorders, fat patients are ignored, considered lying or “cheating” somehow. So often disordered behavior is sanctioned in fat people simply because there is a belief that fat people must have got that way through inactivity and gluttony.

How many people have to suffer, or even die, because of the belief that no matter what the cost, thinner is always healthier?

Expressing Disorder: Art Therapies for Eating Disorder Treatment

Celebrating Eating Disorder Recovery: Inaugural NEDA Walk in Texas

Study: Black Girls 50% More Likely to be Bulimic than Whites

Multicultural Women & Body Image

You Don’t Have to Have an Eating Disorder to be Image Obsessed

Filed Under: Self-Esteem, Size & Weight Tagged With: anorexia, bulimia, bullying, discrimination, eating disorder, EDNOS, fat, Health at Every Size, size, sizeism, Stereotypes, weight, Women

Seeing Beauty in All: Over-40 Nudes

January 24, 2011 By Sharon 8 Comments

By Sharon Haywood

In the summer of 2010 photographer Keith Seat gave life to the project “Seeing Beauty in All: Over-40 Nudes” based out of Washington, DC. He has compiled a wonderful array of black-and-white photos, using non-professional models over the age of 4o. (The oldest models to date are in their mid-70s). He explains his motivations:

My Over-40 Nudes project seeks to expand conventional concepts of physical beauty beyond people with bodies that are youthful and conventionally near perfect. I believe we can enhance that definition by seeing older bodies – complete with imperfections and evidence of aging – as beautiful because they have been lived in and have experienced life with all its joys and sorrows. My goal is to help us reclaim our bodies – to see ourselves in our fullness, to expand our view of beauty to the reality around us, and to appreciate the glory of bodies that have fully lived.

His commitment to producing images that celebrate diversity is also reflected in his approach when working with the models:

My interactions with the people I am photographing goes well beyond the basics of the environment and poses, to help them feel relaxed and un-self-conscious, and to discussions of their perceptions of their bodies and the experience of being seen and seen as beautiful. This causes many participants to feel more self-acceptance and satisfaction with their bodies, and sometimes even a deep sense of healing.

We are thrilled with the level of diversity, not only with size and body type, but also with the varied representation of models of different races and sexual orientations. And that’s not the only reason we’re happy to highlight his work. Additionally, Seat states that he is “not about significant retouching or ‘photoshopping.’ Instead, my project celebrates the beauty that is actually present in over-40 nudes.”

Because Seat does not use professional models, he invites women and men over the age of 40 in the Washington, D.C. area to participate in this ongoing project, which he also hopes to publish as a book.