What do Julia Roberts, Jamie Oliver, Full Figure Fashion Week, and my grandmother have in common? Dinner.
In a recent post I described the death of the supermodel. It seems that her death was followed almost immediately by the deaths of the middle class and the middle bodied--tied together by the purse strings. Last week confirmed my suspicions.
Late one night Pretty Woman caught my eye, and a moment in the film struck me. When no one on Rodeo Drive will help Roberts' character, the hotel manager sends her to a personal shopper at a department store. As soon as she sees Julia, she comments, "So you are about a size 6." Roberts is amazed at her eye, saying "How'd you know?" and they go on to laugh about the specialized knowledge of certain professions. The exchange seemed so notable because, at this moment in our culture, it's unimaginable that a young, beautiful, popular starlet would identify her body, in character or out, as a size 6. It's practically an elephantine number in Hollywood, for some a dirty little secret.
Recently I'd also been caught up in Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, in which he takes on our school lunches. Factory farming, high fructose corn syrup, chemical preservatives/additives, and diabetes are dire factors that need to be addressed immediately. But I was saddened by the fact that most of the families and schools cited finances or budgets as the primary reason for feeding food to their children that they knew was bad for them. Industry spends billions of dollars inventing new flavors of chips and soft drinks, but in the aisle these empty calories are cheaper than basic produce.
In this economy cable television, gym memberships, and dining out are the first cuts. We all know that eating in saves money. Yet the grocery bill itself comes under intense scrutiny. As someone who remembers the exact taste and texture of commodity foods, especially the cheese, I'm intimately familiar with the pains my mother took to feed our family in the mid-eighties. My parents are avid gardeners and we ate loads of fresh, free produce in the summer. But there were also hot dogs, macaroni and cheese, lots of pb&j sandwiches, and the look on her face as she balanced that checkbook each month. Children record all these moments in HD.
Two young girls I met on location last weekend (shooting at a lake in New Jersey) noted that our snacks were from the expensive grocery store in town, and one stated "No one does a Roll Back like Wal-Mart, you can get an eight-pack of Reese's peanut butter cups for one dollar!" My inner child got excited about that. But my inner child used to be overweight. So when pundits note that one out of three children are severely overweight or obese, my heartstrings go taut.
Moving to NYC and walking everywhere, followed rapidly by yoga, farmers' markets, a modeling contract and a nutritionist all reformed my relationship to my body and my health. When the New York Times covered Full Figured Fashion Week recently, they focused predominately on obesity and the resulting business opportunities in the enlargement of America. Money spent in the grocery store, money spent on larger wardrobes--they seemed to be drawing a direct line.
Clearly there is a relationship between what we eat, how active we are, and our health. But I bristle at the notion that a woman who doesn't fit a size 6 or even 12 means that she is essentially unhealthy. The irony is not lost on me when, at many photo shoots, I am making the same lunch choices and swapping nutritional advice with the size 2 model. Plus modeling has become a safety net for many of the taller, larger-framed models who cannot maintain the razor-edge silhouette required, even with an eating disorder. (We cannot ignore the health risks also suffered by those chronically underweight, as opposed to obese.) After transitioning to "plus" they generally settle at a healthy 10-14, presumably their natural size, but still read "thin" on camera.
One of Michael Pollan's guidelines in Food Rules is to eat food that your grandmother would recognize. My grandmother grew up in the 'twenties on a farm in northern Wisconsin. In many pictures she is on her way to feed the livestock, milk the cows, and work in the garden or the house. This is not a sedentary woman. By all accounts she ate plenty of eggs and potatoes, fruit and vegetables both fresh and preserved, meat more rarely. All organic we can assume. But her frame was not exactly slender. Seeing these pictures revolutionized my idea of myself. They reconciled my ideal of beauty with my gene pool. I finally understood that being healthy is not a result of my jean size, but of my habits and my personal care--whatever the number on my clothes, my cholesterol and blood sugar are in good shape.
Food has become the enemy because we cannot make peace with our bodies, small or large. There is an egregious assumption that if we adhere to a balanced diet of healthy foods and get regular exercise, we will have the perfect movie star body. Most of us won't. This is the propaganda of diet gurus, personal trainers, and a media industry of extreme fads, quick fixes, and unsustainable programs for sale. The problem is that "healthy diet" and "weight-loss diet" are not the same; neither are "active lifestyle" and "athletic conditioning." Healthy moderation may not get the airbrushed cover of a magazine to show up in the mirror, but we'll be far from obese.
Two tummies: the six-pack of cultural media or the flab of the food industry. Choosing becomes a constant struggle. Do we live in a state of rigid deprivation or let ourselves go entirely? Do we count calories or dollars? All because we've made it too expensive to be healthy and at the same time believe that being healthy means being impossibly thin and forever young. This dead-end struggle is what our children absorb.
Our bodies are extraordinary, built to carry us through life on waves of sensory perception and emotion. If we put power into taking care of them instead of altering or ignoring them, we could settle into a healthy range of sizes and shapes. Freed from being terrorized by media fantasies. Divorcing our idea of health from our size, but instead to the quality of life: how much energy we have, how our food was grown, and how we feel after eating it.
We want children to have a positive body image and real, affordable, and nutritious food on their plates. Which means we cannot remain obsessed with attaining the perfect body or ignore the situation in American grocery stores, because doing so is becoming lethal to the most innocent among us.
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Robert Tornambe, M.D.: The 10 Commandments Of Realistic Beauty
Susan Yager: Are Food Labels Really Necessary?
Powerful statement.
I suspect part of this is that food these days is almost booby-trapped. There are things that are clearly not good for you, but your friends are eating them; things that seem good for you, but aren't; things that are good for you, but are expensive, or can be rendered better-tasting but become more fatty. What to do?
Even if clarity ever does get established, I suspect that those of us who have been conditioned in this way will hold onto these neuroses. I'm not sure that starting out (at 26) as smaller than average in the American population would really cure the obsession, either.
I believe that sizes were even smaller before the 50s. If you look at sewing patterns, you'll see that a size 12 pattern has about the same measurements as a 4 or 6 in ready-made clothing. I remember my very petite friends in Chicago used to shop at a store called the "5-7-9 Shop." In those days there was nothing smaller than a 5. If you were smaller than that, you were probably way under 5 feet tall - and in that case, you'll still have problems today.
1/2 cup macaroni
1 cup non-fat milk
1 T butter
1 1/2 T flour
3 oz sharp cheddar cheese
Salt, pepper, spicy brown mustard, Worchestershire sauce to taste
Cook macaroni until tender. Make a lovely sauce of the remaining ingredients. Combine and enjoy. I allow myself this treat. And no, I have not calculated how many calories it ends up being. I eat it along with some nice spinach or broccoli stir-fried in a small amount of good olive oil. Enjoy :)!
Being physically healthy has nothing to do with being a moral person.
I don't understand this buisness of acting like morality is at all part of the conversation.
You can decide to be physically healthy, you can decide to let yourself be unhealthy. Unless you think your choices someone hurt or help others, there's no morality involved.
When people say women should be a healthy size I don't think it means any size you feel like being. I'm almost a size 12 and I'm tall but I should be a comfortable size 10. I need to lose about 15lbs to get to my healthiest weight. The weight number doesn't matter as much as how you look and feel, but that doesn't mean you can fool yourself by saying, "I love the way I look when I weigh 200lbs." That's just a crutch.
And yes, some women are naturally very thin. Not everyone is killing themselves to live up to the Hollywood standard. Btw, anyone who thinks they need to look like celebrities is seriously dumb or they have self esteem issues.
Why does everyone have to make excuses for not living a healthy lifestyle. It's hard but it's worth it. There's no shortcut for eating smaller portions of good, fresh food and getting moderate exercise every day. It's a lifestyle you have to learn to do if you've let yourself go.
I'm interested in how you have determined that "some women are naturally very thin," yet the idea that some women are naturally fat is unimaginable.
Multiple, exhaustive studies have been done on twins adopted by separate families which suggest that weight is anywhere from 50-90% determined by genetics. Just as there are naturally thin people, there are also naturally fat people.
There are fat vegetarians whose diets are what you would consider ideal, yet are still fat (and, as we know, diet determines weight more than exercise habits do). There are also plenty of fat and active people... people who, at first glance, you would easily dismiss as "making excuses" for their weight.
Ask any doctor who specializes in obesity treatment and he/she will tell you in no uncertain terms that you cannot judge the health of a person by the size of his/her body.
Peace,
Shannon
you seem to be taking offense to what people are saying. i am going to be very, very blunt. being too fat is not a good look and is not healthy. being too thin is not a good look and is not healthy. i am not sure what your healthcare background is, but mine is pretty good. the problem is that everyone is not going to fit into the same categories and cannot be expected to be on the same programs to achieve optimum health. if you are truly pleased with your size, then i am happy for you. but you really need to stop being so offended.
My boyfriend is a vegetarian and has been for years now. He weighs about 18 - 19 stone or around 252 - 266 pounds. He is very healthy and works 5 - 6 days a week.
I'm hopefully going to go live with him for 3 months next year. During that time, I'm going to be trying my own hand at vegetarianism. I highly doubt my weight will drop much if at all during that time.
Many people don't believe that vegetarians can be fat, well, there's my own, personal example.
You know, the only thing that REALLY matter is what size dress you wear. Forget your family or your job or your hobbies or your actual, quantifiable health. According to you, fatness equals misery and since I'm not feeling that way about my fatness, I definitely have some work to do in order to bring down my self-worth.
Thanks!
Peace,
Shannon
Atchka.com
FierceFatties.com
In the 10th century, areas that primarily at cereals lived HALF as long as areas which primarily ate meat. Even if a frenchman lived to be twenty years old, chances were that he'd die younger than a child who was born to the Norse society, despite markedly more violence among the Norse. Moreover despite a lack of dental care in either case, and despite the longer life among the Norsemen, the Norse had 1/10th the tooth decay of the French.
Butter-coated dried fish might be healthier than whole grain bread? That's my interpretation.
Let me start by saying that obesity rates leveled off in 2000 for women and children, and around the mid-2000s for men. So your theory that half the country will be obese in three years is going to provide me with days worth of amusement, so thank you.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122536128&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
Second, I love the secret doctor cabal that thrives on unhealthy patients and is discouraging you from losing weight. Whatever doctor you were seeing is AWESOMENESS defined. I need his number, along with the number of the dentist who gives you Bubbleyum and rock candy as a reward for being a good patient.
Peace,
Shannon
Atchka.com
FierceFatties.com
It is equally important to begin the conversation on what we are being told is food. When I found out that companies spend a fortune on manufacturing food that is designed to be appealing and create the craving to have more - I threw my hands in the air and committed to eating minimally processed foods. I am on a budget - a tight budget - and yet it can be done. It takes time and it may mean that we have to rethink our lifestyle.
Get out of your seat, onto your feet and move.
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If you can't afford a stand up desk with a built in treadmill get a portable mini ellipitical and force yourself to use it everytime you are at the computer.
Oh, and I am a size 6.
Nobody cares.
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You're a size 6? Congratulations. Life must be perfect for you. I'm sure you've solved all of your personal issues, which is why you are here providing this patronizing advice to everyone.
Although the basis of your advice is valid (Dr. James Levine's NEAT (or non-exercise activity thermogenesis), your execution is condescending and paternalistic. "If you can't afford a stand up desk"?
Obesity is strongly correlated with poverty. Most people are lucky they have a job, let alone a desk they can convert into a treadmill.
Peace,
Shannon
I'm glad the artificial standard of looking like a concentration-camp inmate with enlarged breasts is going away.
That said, it is either expensive or time-consuming to eat well and not junk. We have to get rid of fifty years of advertising crap as quality.
The "size 12-16" thing is a myth, debunked by the people at Snopes
http://www.snopes.com/movies/actors/mmdress.asp