hooooooooly shit
this just popped into my email
um, considering that many EDs and DEHs are partially caused by control issues, is it really prudent to frame temporarily* getting over an ED/DEHs as “how I ganed control over my disordered eating habits”???
*I use temporarily here because ED/DEHs are a life-long struggle. just because you get over them once doesn’t mean they won’t pop back up again in the future. and I am saying this as someone who struggles with ED/DEHs, fyi.
Ethical consumers should be aware poor Bolivians can no longer afford their staple grain, due to western demand raising prices
Good job, wealthy white people. Your exploitation of poor People of Color continues.
Being a little overweight may tip the odds in favor of living a long life, according to a new study. Researchers say there may be some benefit to having a little extra body fat.
This isn’t the first time researchers have raised questions about the link between body weight and how long someone will live. While there’s no debate that being severely obese will raise the risk of all kinds of illnesses and even cut some lives short, it’s less clear what happens to people who are less overweight.
Research: A Little Extra Fat May Help You Live Longer
I wonder if they controlled for overweight because of life-long too-good nutrition v. overweight because of life-long nutrient-poor but calorie-dense diet? But unfortunately, that leads to a whole can of confounding variables…
(via npr)
More men are getting diagnosed with eating disorders, but are struggling to receive help:
As recently as a decade ago, clinicians believed that only 5 percent of anorexics were male. Current estimates suggest it’s closer to 20 percent and rising fast: More men are getting ill, and more are being diagnosed. (One well-regarded Canadian study puts the number at 30 percent.) It’s unclear why, but certainly twenty years of lean, muscular male physiques in advertising, movies, sports, and of course, magazines like GQ—from Marky Mark to Brad Pitt to David Beckham—have changed the way both men and women regard the male body. And thanks to the web, those images are easy to seek out and collect. For American men, the chiseled six-pack has become the fetishized equivalent of bigger breasts. Like all fetish objects, it stands for something deeply desired: social acceptance, the love of a parent or partner, happiness.
But many afflicted men feel too stigmatized to go to a doctor—and many doctors don’t recognize the early, ambiguous symptoms. ‘It is not what a primary-care physician will consider at first glance,’ says Mark Warren, founder of the Cleveland Center for Eating Disorders. ‘Often it won’t be what they consider at fourth or fifth glance.’
Diagnosis is hard. Finding treatment is even harder. Many residential centers don’t admit men, out of a belief that treatment should be sex-specific.
(via longreads)
Older men are more likely than young ones to father a child who develops autism or schizophrenia, because of random mutations that become more numerous with advancing paternal age, scientists reported on Wednesday, in the first study to quantify the effect as it builds each year. The age of mothers had no bearing on the risk for these disorders, the study found.
…
But the study, published online in the journal Nature, provides support for the argument that the surging rate of autism diagnoses over recent decades is attributable in part to the increasing average age of fathers, which could account for as many as 20 to 30 percent of cases.
I wonder how long they were trying to tie it to the mothers’ age, before someone was like “Hey, so I’ve got this crazy idea…” Because, you know, men don’t have biological clocks and their sperm always was, always is, and always will be perfect, unlike those rotten eggs which easily spoil that women have.
“The idea that eating less salt can worsen health outcomes may sound bizarre, but it also has biological plausibility and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, too. A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.”
Sodium-sensitive people benefit from cutting salt, but that’s not even a third of the population! This reminds me of the whole “eating egg yolks is bad for your cholesterol levels.” That myth was borne out of a study on lab rats where they fed the rats an excess of egg yolks. If you did a body weight conversion, the average person would have to eat over 300 egg yolks a day to see ill effects on cholesterol levels. Ah, science-y.
First, there was thinspiration, and now it’s been rebranded as fitspiration. Fitspiration would imply inspiration from fitness, but a quick search on Tumblr quickly knocks that idea down: “fitness” blogs don’t post stats of the cholesterol level/mile time/resting heart rate sort or images of amazing physical feats, but rather, they post stats of the weight lost/calories eaten sort and images of thinness.
I get it. I know how hard it can be the resist what the magazines tell us. “If you eat right and exercise, you can be thin because you’ll be fit!” their covers scream every month. Once upon a time, I believed them, and I borderlined on an eating disorder as I strove to look “fit” and thin. Being thin is touted as the solution to everything: to your low self-esteem, to why guys don’t find you attractive, to all your problems. Being thin will make you happy. The message is simple and powerful, yet it couldn’t be further from the truth. Being thin has nothing to do with how happy you are. I kept telling myself that once I hit my goal weight, I would magically be happy and all the guys would find me attractive and my problems would be better because the implication was that my worth was derived from my looks. But the truth was that I had never been more miserable as I ate less and less and exercised more and more.
Unfortunately, so few people realize this. Both men and women are been seduced by this crock of bullshit.
For women, not only do we tear our own bodies apart, but we tear down the bodies of other women. “Oh, she’s not fit because she doesn’t have visible muscle tone! She’s not fit because she’s not thin! She doesn’t have a good body because (insert some bullshit reason)!” And of course, there is the well-meaning “Real women have curves” retort. No, real women have bodies. Real women have bodies that reflect their experiences, their struggles, their lives. Real women have unique bodies that reflect their unique stories. Let’s respect that.
For men, the unrealistic expectation of what women’s bodies are like has emerged from all of the media representation of women’s bodies. Of all the men who have seen me naked, only two have not said some variation of “You’d be hotter if you lost some weight” to me. Both men who did not say such bullshit to me were surprised when I was more than willing to have sex with the lights on and on top of the covers; when I asked why they were shocked, they gave me the same response: All of my past girlfriends hid their bodies. All of my past girlfriends insisted that the lights be off and that we be under the covers so I wouldn’t see their bodies. All of my past girlfriends were ashamed of the way they looked.
Fit is not thin. Thin is not happiness. Happiness can only come from a place of self-realization. Although fitness (but not thinness) helps with that, it is not the answer. And above all, a woman’s worth is not derived from her looks.
It is the normalization of pathology: if you’re not constantly beating yourself up about your weight, if you’re not constantly thinking about or trying to diet, then you are somehow not a woman in today’s society. If you do not have an eating disorder or disordered eating, you are not a typical woman. Hating your body (and others’ bodies) and not recognizing its amazing qualities is part of the experience of growing up. Focusing all of your energies on how you look and not on your emotional and intellectual development is what “real” women do and those who don’t aren’t “real” women.
We see our bodies and the bodies of other women as objects, and for that matter, public objects. It is our “right” to express our opinions, no matter how hurtful, on women’s bodies. That is fucked up.
“I never even heard people talk about body types. Even now, it’s never been a focus in my life. I’ve always been fit, I’ve always been active, and I’ve always been healthy, but I’ve just tried to live my life the way I live it. It’s nice that I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about my body lately.”
Such a positive, healthy outlook on the human body, fitness and health. (And what a nice excuse to post a picture of Christina Hendricks.)
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