puhleeze!

Bob Greene can suck it.

(I’m intentionally not addressing the sex/gender aspect here, just working with Greene’s words at face value.)

I’m too tired, yet sleepless, to read the whole comment string, so apologies if this has already been covered. A quick word search didn’t turn up anything, and I’m going with that as due diligence. ; )

I caught Dr. Nancy Sniderman (sp?) hawking her new “anti-diet” book on the View this morning… she claimed that the premise of yo-yo dieting being harmful is a MYTH.. !! I couldn’t hear the exact info on the study since there was a lot of cross-talk going on (!), but i’m wondering about this study since all searches I do on yo-yo dieting and canadian study come up with articles on how to stop it as it’s bad for you. Go figure.

BTW: I just got Kate and Marianne’s book delivered from Amazon today, so will be reading it soon!! :)

Thanks!!
Lilpeadot

I’m not in the US, where I imagine things are worse, but this just came to me reading these comments about children in school. This was a good fifteen years ago, when I was around ten or so: we were measured and weighed something like yearly by the school nurse. I don’t remember the nurse ever saying I was overweight, but remember always thinking of myself as fat. I distinctly remember that it was “cooler” the lighter you were (being a girl, not so much for boys). Nevermind that I grew to my current height (168 cm) mostly before my 13th birthday, and was always the tallest girl in my class before then (with a good margin to the average height). To me, I was fat, and fat=bad. Looking at pictures of myself back then, I’m thinking wtf, I wouldn’t even say I was chubby. And even if I had been chubby, still wtf, I was ten!

My niece goes to a smaller school that does not have a cafeteria (or vending machines of any sort), so ALL of the kids have to bring lunch from home. And you guys are right, that’s also totally classist – I hadn’t even thought of that. :(

I just hope my niece will survive high school without an eating disorder of some sort, although with this sort of training it seems unlikely that she WON’T follow in her mom and aunt’s footsteps.

I was the ONLY kid in my elementary school who got sandwiches on whole wheat bread (other than my brother). And the whole wheat bread then (1970s) was disgusting. (Eventually even my mom agreed that it was inedible and bought “unbleached white” bread instead, which was a little better.) The other kids in school got Wonder Bread with bologna and yellow American cheese on it, Fritos, Twinkies…EVERYONE had Twinkies. But not me. If you actually had anything in your lunch sack resembling vegetables, other than a piece of wilted iceberg lettuce on your sandwich, you’d never hear the end of it. I bet they’re all thinner than me now, too.

As for weight and mental health, it’s doubly cruel to pile that on fat people, given that most psychotropic medications have weight gain (often lots of it) as a side effect. I was a lot thinner before I ever took the drugs. So if I have to “prove” I don’t have “mental health issues” by maintaining a thin body…yeah, okay.

Yes, it was Mickey Stunkard, I’m pretty sure, who said in Rethinking Thin that if you listed some anonymous people of different sizes at random just by personality traits, you would not be able to tell from that list who was fat and who was thin. That pretty much sums it up.

I probably shouldn’t mention to them that I’m bulimic and anorexic, should I? That might burst their bubble or something.

Weight=! health

Dude, yes! Back when I went to WW I finally finally finally pointsed my way down to my goal weight, which was the highest “acceptable” weight for my height (which for me was VERY THIN and I was hungry always) and I was sort of expecting a party and permission to go on the maintenance plan (three extra points! so hungry!) Instead, the leader was like well, maybe you should consider lowering your goal, then. I mean you don’t want to be the on the high end of acceptable, right? You’re in the acceptable range, but on the fat end of acceptable, ew.

So we revised my goal down to the lowest weight allowed for my height and I thought I was going to cry thinking about trying to shave off another 15 lbs. I starved for another few months before my poor, nutrition-impaired brain was like, “Wait, this is a total scam! Why am I paying for this?” I mean now it’s like duh, but at the time I was just so vulnerable and easy to manipulate. It’s gross what they do.