NYT has had some great coverage of eating disorders lately. I don’t think one can critique eating habits, nutrition trends, etc. without addressing what the obsession with diets and body size does to people. Kolbert missed this in her New Yorker article.

2. Here’s another source for yoga stuff. Sizes up to 6x and good quality:

http://www.sandiegofit.com/newpage2.htm

I recently bought some sassy yoga/bellydance pants, and was horrified to discover that the denim-look fabric went very see-through when stretched, and of course my butt stretched it the most. If you can not only tell what colour my knickers are, but also discern the pattern from a few feet away in poor light…not suitable for public consumption. I was pleased that my response boiled down to “man that’s bad fabric for stretchy pants” and no flagellation about my bum being too big, or wrong etc etc. I commented on facebook that my hips were just too magnificent for the pants to handle, and was a bit disappointed when a friend responded along the lines of “don’t worry, keep shimmying and your butt will shrink into the pants!”. So not the point. I decided it wasn’t worth pointing out to her that the goal of belly dancing may very well be to ENJOY my hips, not REDUCE them.

Meh. Where’s my teaspoon?

A charming video about the world being turned into origami. I’m posting it here because the only human character is an affectionately drawn fat man.

I love the erudite comments on this site! I’m also an archaeologist and I would like to quibble the quibble a little further. Several of those studies on workday length don’t take into account processing of raw materials (something that would probably be done by women in many cultures), so take those with a grain of salt. However, general workday length was shorter and easier than agriculturalists.

Considering how hunter-gatherers ate, ethnographies point out times of starvation and of plenty in modern groups. It wasn’t just an even keel with plenty of variety, and even in non-marginal environments you have to take what you can get at times. But eating to satiation (even gorging) is seen as a good thing in many groups. No food problems here!

Question for the bloggers (I’m new here, maybe you’ve touched on this already), how do you feel about the “thrifty gene” hypothesis? (States that we are biologically programmed to like foods high in calories and to cling to every scrap of fat as an evolutionary adaptation against starvation.)

Finally, regarding the fat Venus figurines, I get very nervous about anyone who makes definitive statements about these guys. We simply don’t know anything about how they were made or used. Maybe there were fat models available, maybe there weren’t.

Love the blog!

Oh, they are! But since I actually hang out with Colleen and stuff, I figured it would look bad even if I won by accident.

It would? I entered. I mean, under my real name so Colleen wouldn’t be influenced.

I mean, not that Colleen isn’t also my friend on Facebook but… I only put my first name?

Maybe my sense of ethics is skewed. But I just assumed winners were chosen randomly.

“As I understand it, most people love food, but feel the need to act like they hate it. … Everyone is clinging to the idea that there’s a ‘correct’ way to eat, and that if they can just crack the code and avoid the wrong foods, they’ll magically become gorgeous and healthy and gain eternal youth and everyone in the world will finally love and respect them.”

So true!