Fat/Size Acceptance

DH slates BMI for the mathematics as it measures people in metres squared and he doesn't know any two dimensional people.

People slate BMI because it is a tool that was designed for use with populations, not individuals.

An individual may be healthy outside of the "correct" BMI range for various reasons. An individual may also be UNhealthy while still being within the acceptable BMI range. But on a larger scale most people should be within this range in order to be healthy, so if a large proportion of the population are in the overweight or obese category (or in the underweight category) then something is wrong.

Alternatively, people slate BMI because it doesn't tell them what they want to hear.

Garlic - your link to Nancy Upton redirected me to an 'O2' site which said the site was for over-18s and that I should enter my credit card details to verify my age before I could view the site.

I didn't, obv, but thought should warn others

Molly - I don't know if you've ever smoked, and given up, but the attitude of fellow smokers when you do is quite similar. They're desperate for you to fall off the wagon and it's nothing to do with you and all about them. Well done you.

The thing that bothers me about this discussion (and similar ones on MN) is that people like Nancy Upton are rolled in with people like the White Castle customer, and at the other side of the equation, people who aren't overweight are lumped in with size 0 models. It's exaggeration for effect, and doesn't help. Surely we can agree that size 0 / white castle people are unhealthy, people of a normal weight are healthy, and Nancy Upton - at a UK size 16 - is probably absolutely fine as well.

Hurrah, Molly :) That reads like the post of someone who's come to terms with herself. Long may you continue!

I have to stop listening when people use moralistic language to talk about food/weight/diet. It makes me want to rant at them! I think I find it upsetting because I understand how it really does have a huge emotional significance for them - and am always a whisker away from being sucked back into that vortex. (Well, I hope it's more than a whisker but I've noticed my eating and sleeping have been very peculiar since I joined this thread, so am treading carefully ... ) As a side issue, I've got something similar going on with housework but that's another thread.

I'm finding that Judge & Cable paper fascinating! Their research seems impeccable, and they've highlighted many other issues relevant to pressures on women to be skinny.

Are you doing any therapy stuff to go with your healthier attitude?

15 months ago I had a BMI of 46. It was definitely impacting on my health. I'd developed unhealthy habits and addictive behaviours (popping over to see a friend to raid her biscuit tin, thinking up excuses to go shopping and then eating 3/4 bars of chocolate before driving home). I was literally stuffing down unhappiness and unwelcome emotions with food. I was overwhelmed with self loathing. I had very little negativity from other people and was perfectly successful in terms of career and income.
I've lost a lot of weight although my BMI is still "overweight". I've thought a lot about weight over the past year. I've actually been attacked more by others since I got thinner tbh. Invariably by other overweight women who don't like me successfully slimming. Which I think is quite sad as I didn't decide to do this to impact on them. I am primarily thinking about my health. I have also noticed how much talk about weight relates to being "bad" or "confession". Ffs being overweight means you've eaten more calories than you've expended. Why is that being equated to committing a crime?

I thought the feminist part must be where he sends his wife to pick up his burgers

Here's something about nutrition, being overweight, and feminism:

Even though we live in a supersized world, bigger is not always better. One devoted White Castle customer is suing the restaurant chain because he can't fit into the restaurant's booths. Martin Kessman, who weighs 290 pounds, complained to management for more than two years after repeatedly knocking his knee into the tables' metal supports. After the 64-year-old New York stockbroker sent a series of letters of complaint to the chain, he received what he called condescending responses. White Castle sent him free hamburger coupons and promised that it would expand its booth sizes. But the booths were never changed and Kessman is now taking his case to federal court. He is suing for bigger chairs and unspecified damages because he says the eatery is violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. (He compares himself to pregnant women and the handicapped.) The lawsuit, however, has not put an end to Kessman's love of mini burgers. Now, instead of going to White Castle himself, he sends his wife.

Oh, cheers! Yes, I'm finding myself even more interested in this than I expected. Probably because there seems to be more reliable data around than I thought. I'll have a read of it tomorrow, when I should be working just like I haven't today.

GB- Here's the actual paper if you're interested

www.timothy-judge.com/Judge%20and%20Cable%20%28JAP%202010%29.pdf

I agree very much with you, GAD and mumwithdice, especially about attractiveness being a social construct and the patriarchy finding women more attractive the closer they get to being tits on a stick.

Let's hope Ms Upton manages to do at least something about that - I heard American Apparel are going to offer her a contract! Wonder if she'd take it?

I was reading something earlier about girls being underfed. In India, sexual dimorphism has increased as people get taller. This means, in summary, that people are becoming healthier - so children grow taller - but adults are feeding girls an increasingly smaller proportion of what they feed the boys. The author focused on India for a variety of reasons. He mapped a regional correlation between sexual dimorphism and the number of "disappearing" girls. Grim.

Goth, Nancy Upton is awesome. I agree.

If this has been said before, sorry for the repetition.

I was thinking about how women are supposed to take up as little space as possible and yet be sexually available to men at all times. I wonder if this is where breast enhancement comes in. That is, you make sure you are as thin as possible but, in order to indicate your availability, you make sure that your breasts are large. Thus, the first thing men see is not you as a person taking up space, but you as a sex object. Therefore a woman who is bigger may be seen as threatening because she actually does take up space as a person. That is, she can't be easily sexually objectified.

It wouldn't surprise me if women were judged more on weight than men and we can stop doing that when more women penetrate the work force and fewer go off to become housewives.

I dispute that you have to starve yourself to remain a healthy weight however. I never starve myself.

I had a look at a website of a law firm Linklaters and start ed looking at the photos but just about everyone was male bar one woman per page so it was going to take too long to judge weight/looks. Women often set up their own businesses if they do not make it through in the company where they work. I don't think our leading business owners who are female are particularly thin.

However I want us to remain in a place where fat men and women know they are fat and try to eat better rather than lets all pretend like the emperor's new clothes they look so gorgeously beautiful when they don't.

If the women you know who possibly fall into that zone are mostly wealthy SAHP, wouldn't that be part of the same point?

I don't know why you're querying the research. The average UK weight doesn't invalidate the study - it said the women who earn much above average are much thinner than average. If you want to read the original report, which is cited in my link, it will be interesting to hear what you find.

Were they actually weighed or did they have to write down their weight?

Just that I don't know many women who weigh only 50kgs full stop. Of the women I know who possibly fall into that zone, most are wealthy SAHP (again another point, but still).

The average weight of UK women is 70.6kgs.

24,000 workers were studied, Insomnia, half of them over a 25-year period. It's unlikely the data were skewed by anything at all, certainly not towards glamorous industries.

^That means women between seriously underweight and the low end of healthy earn a lot more than women of middle healthy to overweight size.
I find it quite sinister.^

Perhaps they work in industries where appearance is an issue? The highest paid women would perhaps be a small minority of actresses, models and tv presenters- yes it certainly is a problem if they have to be underweight, but I would seriously doubt that being skinny, as opposed to somewhere in the middle of the healthy weight range or even up to being in the overweight range, would be any kind of advantage for non-looks based careers.

Not to say that looks have no influence at all, but in my experience of the women I know who or who I know of who are at the top of their professions, I would say only a minority are as petite as you'd need to be to weigh 50kg. Most are tall and at least 70kg I'd say, not saying that this is a good thing, but it's just my observation.

Yes, sunshine, that's another good point.

As someone mentioned earlier, professional carers tend to be fat because of the stresses of their job, coupled with limited outlets for their emotional strain. Pathological overeating is known to be an attempt at suppressing unmet needs and frustrations. I can certainly imagine that applying to many women in a family setting, where they look after everyone else's needs but sacrifice their own.