The-F-Word.org

I’ve got lots of school stuff to catch up on, so here’s a quick round-up of related topics in the blogosphere and news.

Congratulations to Harriet Brown, who announced this week that HarperCollins has purchased the rights to her next book, Brave Girl Eating. The memoir follows the Brown family’s struggle to cope with daughter Kitty’s anorexia. You can read Kitty’s story here. A brief summation of the book:

When Brown’s daughter developed anorexia at 14, Brown refused to accept the dismal track record of traditional approaches to eating disorders; this is the story of her family’s triumph over the disease, weaving together a parent’s perspective, a journalist’s point of view and issues of neurobiology and genetics. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Brown wrote about her family’s experience in the Times Magazine in 2006.

I’m still accepting blogs to be added to the Eating Disorders Digest feed. If your blog addresses eating disorders at least in part and you want to be added to the list, leave a comment here with your blog RSS feed address. Note: I have had to delete a blog off the list that ends every post with a running count of the blogger’s current weight, calories consumed, and exercise undertaken. While this feed is not intended to be anti-reality, I also want it to be as safe a place as possible for those struggling with eating disorders to go to. Detailing your own struggles with an eating disorder is fine, but I think posting a running count of your stats and weight loss goals aren’t appropriate for this feed, either. Another note: if you’d like to be added to the feed, please embed the feed on your site first. The feed is intended to be a cross-collaborative project, for both bloggers and readers of our blogs. You can view the feed here. Also, if you haven’t already, join the Eating Disorder Studies Yahoo group.

Size-zero models form a convenient coathook upon which the media like to blame many an eating disorder. But for me and others like Naomi Hooke, the development of our eating disorders has very little to do with ultra-thin models. Hooke explores the forces that led to her development of anorexia at age 11 in the British Independent - finding it had nothing to do with size-zero models.

Anorexia has often been perceived as a quest for model-like beauty, as a teenage fad or as a diet gone wrong. It has even been described as a lifestyle choice. Seldom is anorexia acknowledged as the life-threatening medical condition that it is… Sufferers are often presumed to pour over the pages of glossy magazines and starve themselves in their aspiration to become glamorous, thinner-than-thin sex goddesses. From my own experiences and from those of numerous other eating disorder patients I have met, I can say unequivocally that nothing could be further from the truth. Beauty has very little to do with eating disorders, and the desire to be thin is merely one of many symptoms. Rarely can a single “cause” be identified.

Although the fashion industry may be rife with anorexia, the majority of eating disorder patients have not become ill through catwalk influences. And nor are they models.

And finally, go and read 18-year-old Katie Muller’s fantastic essay “F.A.T.” over at the other TheFWord site:

There is no good reason why women should be so appalled by their natural size and inherent store of fat (women naturally have a higher percentage of fat on their bodies than men) but there is a simple reason why they are. We live, no matter how much we like to pretend otherwise, in a man’s world. We are still, in a million small ways and plenty of big ones, submissive, convinced of our inferiority and full of contempt for our own sex. And to fit into the small space left for us in this man’s world, we have no choice but to shrink.

Shrink to fit, we are told, and reap the glorious benefits of success, money and even love. And when that never happens, reap the benefits of dying exhausted and being buried thin.

Muller’s conclusions on why aesthetic beauty standards are more stringent for women than for men fall in line with my own research interests: Women are encouraged to change their bodies so they don’t have the time nor the effort to change the world. As Miller explains:

Self-starvation is encouraged because as long as fat is seen as the enemy and ‘beauty’ the prize at the end of the rainbow, men are safe and women are trapped. Suddenly, from this perspective, eating disorders seem like an obvious solution, a practical reaction to society’s demands. They are so perfectly suited, in fact, to the job of undermining women that it would not be unreasonable to suppose they had been invented for that very purpose.

Muller, who also struggled with anorexia, understands what so many women in similar situations have come to understand: that “thin enough” is simply a journey, never a destination reached; that one can never be “thin enough” or “pretty enough” or “good enough” because the standards constantly shift, become higher and harsher. As she explains it:

We are all bashing our heads against the same brick wall. What are we trying to do? Break down the wall? It is not working is it? Perhaps that’s because we don’t need to break down the wall at all. We just need to stop bashing our heads against it.

Sage advice, indeed.

Comments? Critiques? Leave your thoughts on the stories above in the comments below.

Stand-up comedian, actor and writer Tom Naughton insists all we know about fat to be a load of bologna. In parody of and response to Morgan Spurlock’s mockumentary Supersize Me, Naughton’s Fat Head insists the so-called obesity epidemic has been wildly exaggerated by the CDC.

How does he set to disprove obesity stereotypes? He plays into them by setting out to show how one can lose weight while eating a fast food diet. You can watch the trailer below and other clips on his website.

I’m straddling the fence on this one. On one hand, it’s hilariously funny and represents a departure from the usual fat fear-mongering while also disproving tired stereotypes. But on the other, it’s still promoting weight-loss and a particular means of weight-loss, namely a low-carbohydrate/high-fat diet. In his effort to dispel stereotypes of fatty and fast foods while demonstrating how one can lose weight and improve health by cutting carbs and sugar, Naughton is still reinforcing the good/bad food ideology. Still, I don’t think we ought throw the baby out with the bathwater. Given the dominant socio-political clime of the day, is it better to work with people than against people, while still appropriating channels and spaces for our own means? What do you think?

This originally arose as a comment to the discussion over at Shapely Prose on the recent study which claims you cannot be fat and fit. There’s another dedicated discussion on the subject at Feed Me!. I decided to repost my comments here, too.

The study in question, of course, is this one referenced in this AP story or read the official study here. The study followed some 39,000 women with an average age of 54 over a period of 11 years, tracking their weight, physical activity, and incidence of heart disease. The study concluded that overweight active women had a 54 percent higher risk and obese women an 87 percent higher risk for developing heart disease. By contrast, overweight inactive women had a 88 percent higher risk and obese inactive women a 21/2 times greater risk for developing heart disease.

In other words, according to these researchers, weight trumps physical activity in the development of heart disease.

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“Voluptuous women needed… for student photography project (no worries, no nudity). If you’re in your 20’s, got real booty, boobs or hips, please help me out!”

So read an advertisement posted by communication graduate student Kristin ‘Lou’ Herout last fall throughout buildings on her Northern Illinois University campus.

The 23-year-old graduate student and professional photographer replicated advertisements from Cosmopolitan, Elle and other women’s fashion magazines using not industry standard size-zero models, but rather “curvy” and “realistic” women to accompany a scholarly paper on the subject. “Basically, I just want people to see what it would be like if plus-size models were represented similarly to slim models,” said Herout.

The Dekalb, Ill. native boasts her own photography company startup, K Lou Photography, and teaches courses as a teacher’s assistant at NIU on audio and production. She’s also a photographer for one of Chicago’s premiere wedding photography companies, Essence Photography and Video. I caught up with Herout as she prepares to move to San Francisco this summer to complete her master’s degree in photography at the Academy of Art University to talk about her provocative project.

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In my case for pro-ana/mia sites, I mentioned the pseudo pro-ana boards over at Teen Vogue’s messageboard. The magazine, of course, is owned by media mogul Condé Nast.

The board carries the well-meaning title of “Fitness,” but as I, Jezebel and now Teen Vogue’s editors have realized, it’s devolved into a forum where girls post unhealthy weight-loss techniques and distribute many of the same kinds of advice also seen on self-proclaimed and unabashed pro-ana/mia sites.

According to the site’s notice:

Dear TeenVogue.com Fitness Forum users,

The TeenVogue.com fitness forum was launched to encourage discussion on healthy body image and to create a dialogue about health- and fitness-related issues. After seeing the alarming number of posts regarding eating disorders over the past few months, we have decided to remove the forum completely.

The Fitness Forum will be removed from the site on Monday, April 28. We encourage users to continue to post health- and fitness-related questions and comments in the Beauty Buzz forum.

For those who want to learn more about eating disorders, please visit the following links:

Eating Disorders Anonymous: www.eatingdisordersanonymous.org
National Eating Disorder Information Centre: www.nedic.ca
The Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness: www.eatingdisorderinfo.org
The Body Positive: www.thebodypositive.org
The Renfrew Center Foundation: www.renfrew.org

I applaud Teen Vogue editors for recognizing and acting to protect the health and wellbeing of its members. Hopefully they will monitor all of their forums more closely in the future so as to nip this kind of behavior in the bud and to provide more constructive alternatives. But it isn’t enough simply to remove a forum dominated by eating disorder talk and not to replace it with a space for responsible and monitored discussions of the subject. Nor does the removal address and work to solve the root issues in why such talk emerged in the first place. As you can infer, board members have simply created a new and underground forum to discuss the same kinds of tips and behaviors that are now banned at Teen Vogue and are using the board’s private message feature to spread the link.

Sadly, people who want to learn such behaviors will continue to seek them out and will usually be fruitful in their searches. Banning this particular forum might not make a dent in eating disorders development, but it is important that media publications like Teen Vogue also not provide and sponsor a forum for such self-destructive talk. Send Teen Vogue a note letting them know you appreciate the move here.

The belief that upward social mobility in the United States can be achieved with mere hard work and determination has existed almost as long as the country itself. America’s Protestant worth ethic has been encapsulated by people like Horatio Alger, who wrote a series of stories involving poor young men who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to achieve great success.

Weight-based discrimination is rampant today because of our culturally ingrained stereotypes of fatness and fat people. Fat people, it is assumed, are fat due to “lifestyle choices,” that being a willful overeating of “bad” foods and sedentary lifestyle. So-called obesity-related diseases are viewed to be a drain on our national economy, as they decrease work productivity and increase health care costs. And because of the conflation of fat with overconsumption, those rapacious fat people are also thought to represent a threat to the environment and the security of the nation state itself.

The world collectively sighs as it wonders why fat people won’t just practice dietary restraint, eat healthier foods, exercise and pay scads of money for diet programs, even if such programs have been shown to be largely ineffective. Why, oh why can’t and won’t fat people pull themselves up by their bootstraps to become thin, socially acceptable, and responsible citizens?

Maybe it’s because fatness isn’t always caused by inactivity and a scarfing down of Twinkies. As anyone who has struggled with weight will attest, weight loss and gain aren’t always simple matters of “choice.” Here are some physiological reasons why some people are fat:

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Taken from the British eating disorder organization b-eat’s website:

The British TV production company betty is making a one hour documentary on eating disorders as part of the BBC Learning campaign about body image & mental health issues.

The film will seek to raise awareness that anorexia and bulimia are not conditions that just affect teenage girls. The program will feature women aged 25 plus, who are suffering from an eating disorder that has developed later in life, or are experiencing a reoccurrence of an earlier condition.

We are keen to find people to speak about this subject, people with a direct personal experience as well as carers and practitioners with a professional interest. Is this subject that touches you in some way? Or perhaps a partner, family member or close friend? Whatever your experience it would be good to speak with you. All conversations are strictly confidential and at this stage for research purposes only.

If you would like to contribute, please Nonie Creagh-Brown on 0207 907 0868 or email nonie@betty.co.uk. If you would like to talk to beat first, please contact Press Officer Mary George on 01603 753316; media@b-eat.co.uk

betty is an independent television production company that has been making award-winning documentaries, drama, factual entertainment and formats since 2001 - see www.betty.co.uk

Several bloggers have written about the re-release of the Sweet Valley High series, decrying that the “perfect size 6″ twins of the 1980s have now been whittled into a “perfect size 4.”

Writes the blog Gawker:

It seems kids in the 80s lived by totally fat standards. Also, Sweet Valley High students now have their own anonymous blog, presumably to hatefully bully the fattest of their classmates.

Fillyjonk at Shapely Prose also chimed in:

After all, you’ve got to up the ante sometimes or girls get complacent. We can’t have the size sixes thinking they’ve achieved perfection — you can’t even get a modeling gig at that size, you cow!

And a different perspective from Mo at Big Fat Deal:

My first reaction was, indeed, to feel indignant and infuriated. But now that I think about it, really, it doesn’t make much of a difference. Elizabeth and Jessica were always “perfect” in a way that I found it impossible to relate to, and the fact that their bodies were “perfect” was no small part of that.

The comments are all spot-on and I don’t have much else to add other than the sound of my head repeatedly banging the desk in frustration. But I do have this to add - contact information.

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Kudos to alternative weekly San Diego CityBeat writer Kinsee Morlan on her fair and sensitive pro-fat article. I am quoted in the article, as are Paul Campos, NAAFA spokesperson Peggy Howell and others working to end size-based discrimination. And let me just say how awesome it feels to be quoted in an article alongside the great Paul Campos.

I think Kinsee may have confused me with Kate in one line - I can’t sit still or keep quiet for 15 minutes, let alone silence the chatter in my head long enough to do meditative yoga every day and the only picture of myself on my blog doesn’t really show much of my body at all. But, both are moot points in the light of such a lovely and positive article.

The story centers around a San Diego woman, Kathy Hernandez, and her Big Beautiful Women night at a local club there. I don’t particularly care for the BBW euphemism or the fetish some attach with it (also addressed in the article), but I think it’s fabulous that this group of women have found a way and means in which they feel empowered, beautiful, and fabulous. And even if the guys there are looking for “bigger-than-average racks of lamb,” it sure beats the alternative:

“Would it be acceptable for me to go over to a guy in a wheelchair and start berating him because he’s in a wheelchair?” asks Kathy. “That wouldn’t be socially acceptable. But three guys over there walking by and going, ‘Look at that fat cow.’ Is that socially acceptable? Right now it is. If I had to worry about these three guys coming in and looking at me with disgust and saying, “Eew, would you do her?’ I’ve actually heard that. What am I supposed to say? Should I call them assholes? I’ve done that before, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t do it every time.”

Abigail Saguy, an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA, who’s written extensively on obesity and society, complements the story with some interesting context on the origins of how obesity has come to be epidemic’ized:

Saguy traced the origin of the term “obesity epidemic” to the mid-’90s, after a publication by CDC researchers noticed the increasing number of people who are overweight or obese according to the BMI. Soon after the report was released, Xavier Pi-Sunyer wrote an editorial published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In it, he said, “If this were tuberculosis, we’d call it an epidemic.”

“So it was metaphorical at first,” Saguy explains, “but then the metaphor was dropped and people just use it.”

The piece is largely positive and I thank Kinsee for taking the time to research the issue and to understand what it is we’re saying. I particularly like these two lines:

But evolution for fat people is actually more like adaptation to a world that doesn’t understand or accept them… As things stand, fat people are still metaphorically sitting in the back of the bus.

Luckily, there are people out there like Kinsee who do understand, or at least, try to understand. I’d encourage everyone to write in to the San Diego CityBeat with letters of appreciation and praise, because you know who else will be writing in, too.

This is a follow-up to the call for action on article featured on the Tampax/Procter & Gamble website www.beinggirl.com. Titled “What Does the War Have to Do With Your Weight?,” the article “reassures” young girls that they aren’t alone in their emotional overeating, and provide 9 irresponsible and potentially harmful “tips” on how to curb emotional eating.

I called Tampax’s 800 number (1-800-523-0014) and after a long hold, was told to either use the Contact Us form on the website, or the Ask Iris feature. The rep was really nice and I’m sure she tried to help as much as she could, but was told to tell me that these are basically our only options - apparently, Tampax isn’t too concerned with the dangerous and harmful messages it posts on its sites, even given the potential liability of such postings. Considering the article has been posted since August, we need to begin - and keep - flooding these boxes with requests that the article be taken down.

Even more heartbreaking than the article itself are the comments by the girls beneath the article. Keep in mind, the target age of the site is adolescents, meaning 10- to 11-year old girls. The fact that so many of these girls know their weights - at age 10!! - astounds me. Sure, some girls posted some positive comments about self-esteem and admonitions against eating disorders and dieting, but most of the comments are as follows:

A classic warning sign of an eating disorder - the feeling that a parent is “making” you fat:

Well, My mom ALWAYS tries to feed me! I have like, 6 meals a day! She calls me “skinny.” Well she hasn’t seen me naked so it’s unfair! And she made my brother fat too! It started in the fith grade for him, and now she’s doing it to me! I feel like crying! :

Note that at this weights (and height for one girl) below, the commenters’ BMIs place them at the low end of what the government considers to be an average weight range. And yet both still feel as if they need to lose weight.

alright, I am 15 years old, 5′5″, and I weigh about 118 lbs.

what do you think about this?I always want to lose weight but I have no freaken self control!it’s so hard!

am 13 and weigh somewhere in the range of 108-110..
Is that normal? I don’t really know.
I am scared to step on a scale because i think I will get stressed out over what I weigh.

And nothing like starting dieting before starting high school:

you know that ment alot what you said i always want to go on diet’s cause i just turned 12 today (aug. 15th)

and i weght 119

i have alot of belly fat

Probably encouraged by doctors such as this one:

CAN SOMEBODY HELP ME PLEASE . I WENT TO THE DOCTOR YESTERDAY AND SHE SAD THAT I AM 35 POUNDS OVER WAIT. I WAY 160 NOW, WHAT SHOULD I DO

This comment would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic:

i am 11, 5′4”, and i weigh 92 lbs. actually im 93 but i tell ppl im 92 cuz ppl think im only 85 but im actually 93. i dont have an eating disorder or anything i just have a very high self esteem!!!! ppl with a higher self esteem weigh less cuz they neva stuff themself and they dont eat at parties and they play sports and keep their body movin i swim dance, do gymnastix, ride my bike and swim in the winter in an indoor pool!!! also when it gets colder ill have 2 stop ridin my bike and start runnin

And probably the saddest kinds of comments:

I think that after 9/11 it is true that more people became overweight I was in second grade when it happened I use 2 be a tiny little girl very skinny the boys all ways after me. and became overweight and now no more boys just as friends and that’s about it. nothing more but thankfully nothing less. i rather be anorexic than be overweight i have attempted anorexia and bulimia in the past year but learned its not worth it and i still overweight and i excercise more and i am currently cutting down on the amount of food i eat which i feel so good about and i am looking into getting a bf cause i think he likes me

its worse 2 stuff urself than 2 starve urself

With sites and attitudes like this, who needs terrorism to destroy the promising futures of the next generation?