Why is our society so messed up in terms of fat/skinny...

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Okay, so I lied. I walk for 2 hours 6 days a week, and I stay away from junk food, 98% of the time. I also have 1 muffin and a small coffee for breakfast at McDonalds, instead of 2 Sausage McMuffins at McDonald's and I have for 2 weeks. I don't drink.

Hollywood. They put pressure on them to be thin. You have to be a certain weight for them to hire you. If you don't wear a size zero, you are fat.

So all these celebs eat and go right to working out until all those calories are burned and they work out three hours a day, some don't even eat and they just do excessive work out. I remember watching a show about it on VH1 and I thought it was so sad. Plus when they have babies, they go right to working out to lose the baby weight than bonding with their newborn.

Another issue they have is when they play a role for the movie and the character is heavier, that's when they eat and they put on the weight but after they are done filming, they go back to starving themselves. I heard it can confuse your body and mess it up because it won't know what weight it is supposed to be at if you keep doing that.

Plus have you seen the bashing on IMDB sometimes on celebs, people say on there they are fat. I remember people saying Hilary Duff is fat. She was a little chunky and had a belly and then she got an eating disorder and lost lot of weight. Then she was skin and bones. At first I didn't believe it because it was in one of those magazines that tell untrue stories until I heard about it in the people magazine I think it was. I had seen how skinny she was. So when you are famous, you get all this bashing on you from strangers online and you are reading these comments about you being fat just because you aren't anorexic thin and because you don't wear a size zero, so you feel fat and it leads you to an eating disorder so you be that thin.

I will never be a size zero because my body isn't built that way.

I will never be a size 14 because my body isn't built that way. That doesn't mean that I sit watching TV eating junk food all day. That's not what I do. That also doesn't mean that I can't strive to be a size 20 or even a size 18. Once I reach my financial goal of keeping $1000 in the bank every month, I'll be splurging on a membership at Fitness Unlimited, not too far from where I live, because I like the machines there. It all boils down to money. Buying healthy food costs money and my budgeting really isn't that great. I've already decided a few seconds ago that the gym is more important to me, than the casino.

In my humble opinion, Hollywood can screw itself.

The US Supreme court should slap Hollywood with a really expensive fine that would put them near bankrupcy for doing so much harm to the society.

Hyper - Your stats reflect binge drinking and heavy alcohol consumption. I just read them. Of course if you're an addict who downs a bottle of vodka a day will have health problems.. I'm talking about one glass of wine. In the ancient times, that's pretty much all that Romans drank where beer and wine. That could explain how small amounts (one beer/glass of wine) a day is actually healthy, most of the pathogens that threaten humans are inhibited or killed off by the acids and alcohols in wine. Because of this, wine was considered to be a safer drink than much of the available water up until the 18th century.

Lower Your Cholesterol

Alcohol also can have a very powerful effect and increase HDL "good" cholesterol by 20 percent if used moderately and in the context of a healthy diet along with regular physical activity, says Rimm. Higher HDL levels are linked to lower risks of heart disease. Mayo Clinic.


*History of Alcohol
*health.com article
*CBS articleMSNBC article
*Mayoclinic article

yes, it does reflect only binge drinking - so the actual costs of alcohol in society are actually higher - lesser drinking costs are not included in the stats. for example, accidents caused by alcohol, etc. are not reflected.

my point is that it costs more than obesity, yet alcohol is not demonized. that shows that we are concerned more with the morality of obesity than the actual health conditions or costs, because otherwise alcohol would be under the same microscope... and it is not.

moderation of everything consumable is usually fine - that is not my point. most people consume small amounts of alcohol, and also eat the occasional cupcake. but if we are going to start judging fat people, we should start judging drinkers too. maybe the government should step in with more programs to discourage drinking, just like eating junk food is discouraged.

EDIT: please note that i don't care if people drink. i also don't care if they are fat. it's the double-standard that offends me.

Last edited by hyperlexian on 31 Oct 2010, 3:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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This is as bizarre as anything Robert Young has claimed that I doubt there's any truth to it.



This isn't hard science. What most likely happens is: People who can afford to drink a moderate amount of alcohol every day have the money to afford eating "healthy" food and to regularly go to the gym. If they've been drinking a moderate amount of alcohol because of the good things they've heard about alcohol, they're probably pretty health-conscious to begin with, too.

As of two years ago (which I'm almost sure is still true today), the only sure way to increase HDL cholesterol is by doing cardio exercise--alcohol or no alcohol. Saying that alcohol has a "very powerful effect" on HDL cholesterol suggests that drinking a moderate amount of alcohol every day is as effective as doing cardio exercise, which isn't only wrong but which is also irresponsible.

Hmm maybe doing research I suppose you can understand more. It's like mouth wash, or when you cut yourself applying rubbing alcohol to the womb kills the bacteria and infection. Do you understand these concepts ? If you ever had a glass of wine before with dinner, and wake up in the morning how do you feel? It cleanses the blood stream.

Y'all do realize that some skinny people can be in worse shape than some fat people, right? Back in middle school, one of the health teachers dropped dead from heart disease. He was in his 30s and very skinny.

OK, well...

The 'evidence' that being fat is always bad for your health is actually a pretty long way from being clear-cut. (Have a browse of this site: http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/ - for some fascinating debunking of a few of the 'facts' on fat, weight, nutrition and health.) What most of us take to be the truth is what the media reports, and what the media reports will always be biased.

I believe this to be for several reasons. First, making fatness as socially undesirable a state as possible is in the media interests because the media runs on advertising, and the diet industry is huge in terms of advertising revenue. Secondly, and this is not my idea but I think it rings very true...we live in a society that, as a society, consumes too much of everything - fuel, materials, space, all the world's resources. We know this, but we hate to admit it. We have to point a finger of blame at someone, and we choose to point it at those who, by popular opinion, appear to have been 'consuming too much'. (In food terms, that is; although food is actually a fairly small part of the average Western person's carbon footprint - and the number of calories you consume, which doesn't have any predictable correlation to your body size anyway, isn't nearly as crucial as what you eat and where it's sourced, and in particular, how much meat you eat).

The truth is, many people have been brainwashed into believing that there's only one 'correct' body size, and that being substantially bigger than that is some kind of moral offense. As has been said, many people will never be thin, or even come within the 'normal' range on the scale. Not without putting themselves through a punishing regime of strenuous exercise and semi-starvation that most 'normal' sized people would not be able to stick to in a million years. That would be tough enough for people even if weight loss were a proven way of improving health, but 99% of it isn't even that - people are forced to try to lose weight just so they can be treated with normal human decency.

There is another aspect to this: Most of the fat people in our society who supposedly have such poor health have two other factors affecting their health that thinner people don't. One is the effect of constant dieting, often from a very young age (I've encountered people who were, as 'chubby' breastfed babies, put on, get this, diet formula....they still ended up fat). The other is the effect of being treated like crap. The latter has been proven (in the cases of people of color, gay people and other stigmatized minorities) to have a real, measurable effect on risk levels for heart disease, stroke and what have you - diseases which in fat people, a hated group with no legal protection, are assumed to be down to their size. Until we stop hating on fat people, we're not going to have a clear picture of whether or how body size affects health...

i'm not sure if you are talking to me, but menintights pretty much refuted what you have said about alcohol. personally, i feel absolutely no positive effects from having a glass of wine with dinner. if i want to get a buzz on, i do, but it doesn't make me feel healthier the next morning; drinking alcohol doesn't make me feel any different.

it sounds as though you have some subjective bias at work; you believe a glass of wine has positive effects, and therefore you feel those positive effects. whatever works for you, i guess.

sugar and fat are also good for you - they are essential, in fact (which cannot be said for alcohol). both food and alcohol in excess have the potential to be detrimental, but in a crowd it is easy to pick out the people who might overeat vs. the people who might drink too much. easy targets.

"cleanses the blood stream."



...yeah, you're definitely a holistic.



That's exactly my issue with all these people arguing that fat people should lose weight "for their own health." As has been said earlier, all these concerns often have less to do with actual health than with appearance. If all these self-righteous pricks were more upfront about their dislike toward fat people, I might have let them go.

Not to mention that people have different ideas of what "fat" is. I've noticed the terms "overweight" and "obese" are often used interchangeably, but someone who's simply overweight probably hasn't been leading the same lifestyle as an obese person. Besides, that are other factors that affect one's health other than weight--and only people who have access to one's medical records can really tell whether or not one should start losing weight. In my own family, my mother and many of my aunts are freakishly healthy despite being clinically obese. It really pisses me off when they feel that they have to lose weight for reasons unrelated to health because people are constantly telling them they're endangering their own lives if they stay at the same weight.