See also Body Image and
Fitness.
Dear Leo,
OK, so I have recently gained loads of weight, and most of it has gone to my belly, which has swollen into a huge fat lump.
I'm thinking of dieting, but my boyfriend doen't want me to, he says he thinks my belly is sexier fat. He plays with my flab
all the time, he squishes it and rubs and massages it and eats sweets out of my belly button. Is this normal, and should I
keep my belly?
Biblitz replies:
Relaxing massage is one thing but I can't say I like all this squishing business. Still, chacun son gout.
As long as you're satisfied it's you your partner finds sexy and not an
objectification of your
good self. The cultural temptation to objectify/fetishize women does not, I fear, have their best interest at heart. Act
according to your own wishes on the matter and see what happens.
Bouncing baby Biblitz, as pleasantly full as a young python, clearly tucking in and getting his. Alright for now but what would he become, his fevered parents must have wondered?
Paperback By P.G. Wodehouse
'I have just returned from Market Blandings, Mr Galahad. I went there for the purpose of making a certain purchase. I don't know
if you have happened to notice it, sir, but recently I have been putting on a little weight, due no doubt to the sendentary
nature of a butler's - '
'Beach!'
Let him work up to it,' said Penny. 'The Vail method. Building for the climax. Go on, Beach. You're doing fine.'
'Thank you, miss. Well, as I say, I have recently become somehwat worried about this increase in my weight, and I chanced
to see in the paper an advertisement of a new preparation called Slimmo, guaranteed to reduce superfluous flesh, which, was
stated to contain no noxious or habit-forming drugs and to be endorsed by leading doctors. So I thought I would look in at
Bulstrode's in the High Street and buy a bottle. It was somewhat embarrassing walking into the shop and asking for it, and I thought
I noticed Mr Bulstrode's young assistant give me a sort of sharp look as much as to say "Oho!" but I nerved myself to the
ordeal, and Bulstrode's young assistant wrapped the bottle up in paper and fastened the loose ends with a little pink sealing
wax.' (-- pgs. 58-59)
Until this moment, like the Spartan boy who allowed the fox to gnaw his vitals without mentioning it to a soul, Sir Gregory had
kept his tragedy a secret from the world. Rightly or wrongly, he thought it made a fellow look such an ass. Chaps, he felt,
chaps being what they were, would, if informed that he was mortifying the flesh at the whim of a woman, be inclined to
laugh their silly heads off at a chap. But now the urge to confide in this sympathetic friend was too strong for him.
'She says I'm too fat, and if I don't reduce a bit the engagement's off. She says she positively refuses to stand at the
altar rails with someone who looks like ... well, she was definitely outspoken about it. You know what girls are, especially
these athletic girls who dash about tennis courts shouting "Forty love" and all that. They're all for the lean, keen, trained-
to-the-last-ounce stuff. Dam' silly, of course, the whole thing. I put it to her straight. I said: "Dash it, old girl, what's
what's all this about? I'm not proposing to enter the six-day bicycle race or something," but nothing would move her. She said
unless I ceased to resemble a captive balloon posed for its flight into the clouds, those wedding bells would not ring out. She
said she was as fond of a laugh as the next girl, but that there were limits. I quote her verbatim.'
'Good gracious!' (-- pgs. 39-40)
'So long, Atkins, Scarsdale and the rest of you! Join your fellow predators in the drink!' When the medical experts provide compelling evidence linking their measure of obesity to ill health, Biblitz will study it. Until then, he advises diet entrepreneurs to stop going about attacking the confidence of healthy young people or prepare to face the prospect of a large American lawsuit as Fatmeister Susie Orbach has suggested. So there!
'Body Mass Index (BMI), forsooth!,' suggests this superior intellect. 'None of that diet nonsense for me. Use it so as fodder for our feathered friends!'
Hardcover
By Paul Campos
More of the book.
Even America's celebrated Institute of Medicine (IOM)
will go no further than the statement, 'the link between obesity and
disability needs further investigation.'
What is 'The Obesity Myth'?
Well, the myth actually has three parts. The first is that weight is a good indicator of health and that you can tell a
lot about whether a person is likely to be healthy and to have good life expectancy by just looking at their weight. The second
is that significant long-term weight loss is medically beneficial. And the third is that we have some method of producing this
result - significant long-term weight loss - that is worth the costs that are incurred in attempting to produce this effect. All
three of these assumptions, or, really, more acts of faith on the part of our culture, are false. This is just not the case.
What kind of evidence have you found in examining these myths? Obesity is a pervasive topic now.
It is pretty interesting. One of the more shocking aspects of this is that when you actually go looking at the data, when
you actually look at the medical literature, you discover the fact that there isn't a very good correlation at all between w
eight and health and that this correlation disappears completely when you start taking other variables into account. So, for
instance, ask the question: 'If you compare thin sedentary people to fat active people, who is healthier'? The answer is that
fat active people are much healthier than the thin sedentary people, and they are just as healthy as thin active people,
indicating that activity levels are very important to health but that weight really isn't. So as an initial matter, you
discover that by looking at the medical literature a lot of the claims and certainly the main, central claim that fuels the
obesity media, are not supported by the medical data.
Furthermore, the next thing you discover, and I think this is perhaps the most shocking single aspect of the whole
obesity hysteria in our culture, is that there really isn't any good evidence for the proposition that significant, long-term
weight loss is medically beneficial. Given the hysteria we have on the subject, and given all the messages that we're getting
from government authorities that people ought to be trying to lose weight, you would assume that it had simply been more or
less conclusively demonstrated that weight loss is medically beneficial. But in fact it hasn't been demonstrated at all and
indeed it hasn't even been tested.
The reason the proposition that significant long-term weight loss is beneficial hasn't been demonstrated as a matter of
medicine and science is that we do not know how to produce significant long-term weight loss, and so, therefore, it's not
even possible to set up the kind of experimental data that would test this hypothesis. We don't know how to make fat people
thin. So when you consider that it appears that things other than weight are vastly more important to health than weight
itself, that we don't know if being thinner would actually be good for them, and that we don't know how produce these
results, even if it was a good thing to produce, it simply is not rational to have a public health policy that's constructed
around the idea of making heavier people thinner. (From a 2003 interview by Dr. Pattie Thomas with the author of The Obesity
Myth, Prof. Paul Campos, at BigFatBlog)
By Robin Marantz Henig
Oct. 5/08
More on the prospect of a lawsuit against Weight
Watchers.
More on a celebrated baby bulimic.
More on Biblitz favorite, Dear Fatty French.
The public-health crusade of the moment is a no-holds-barred war on obesity. ...
But some activists and academics, part of a growing social movement known as fat acceptance, suggest that we rethink this
war - as well as our definition of health itself. Fat-acceptance activists insist you can't assume someone is unhealthy just
because he's fat, any more than you can assume someone is healthy just because he's slim. (They deliberately use the word 'fat'
as a way to reclaim it, much the way some gay rights activists use the word 'queer.') Rather, they say, we should focus on health
measurements that are more meaningful than numbers on a scale. This viewpoint received a boost in August when The Archives of
Internal Medicine reported that fully half of overweight adults and one-third of the obese had normal blood pressure,
cholesterol, triglycerides and blood sugar - indicating a normal risk for heart disease and diabetes, conditions supposedly
caused by being fat. ...
Scientists who study obesity at the cellular level say genetics determines people's natural weight range, right down to
the type and amount of food they crave, how much they move and where they accumulate fat. Asking how someone got to be so fat
is as meaningless as asking how he got to be so tall. "The severely obese have some underlying genetic or metabolic difference
we're not smart enough to identify yet," says Dr. Rudolph Leibel
of Columbia University Medical Center. "It's the same way that
a 7-foot-tall basketball player is genetically different from me, at 5-foot-8."
Fat has been blamed for cardiac trouble, diabetes and some forms of cancer. But fat-acceptance activists argue that the
epidemiological studies that link fatness to disease often fail to adjust for non-weight-related risk factors found more often
in fat populations. Poverty, minority-group status, too much fast food, a sedentary lifestyle, lack of access to health
insurance or to nonjudgmental medical care, the stress of self-loathing and being part of a stigmatized group - all are more
common among fat people, and all are linked to poorer health outcomes at any weight. This makes it harder to say to what extent
an association between obesity and disease is due to the fatness itself or to the risk factors that tend to go along with being
fat.
It remains an open question, one deserving of further scientific scrutiny, whether the health risks seen in fat
populations are caused by the fat itself or by something else. Only then can we really know how to effectively wage the war on
obesity - or if such a war even needs to be waged. (-- p. 24)