Diets, the weight loss industry and all that.

I looked at the BBC article about waist size, and I must be a medical marvel.
I have a 30 inch waist (so am "healthy")
But
I have a BMI of 34 (so am obese and "unhealthy")
Just highlighting some flaws in their "average person" methods of promoting healthy lifestyles.
I enjoy the food I eat, I enjoy exercise, but I am not, and never will be, average.

Yes BOF that passage rang very true with me too.

We have been 'fed' a lot of hooey since the seventies, really, about what constitutes healthy eating. There is a lot of evidence now, for example, that saturated fats are not the demon they have been portrayed as.

I also disagree that if you are fat, you are just wearing clothes that are too small: actually, you can't touch your toes, run easily, you just feel more cumbersome and uncomfortable generally (I certainly do, anyway). It reduces your enjoyment of your physicality, in my experience.

I think Caitlin Moran made a good point when she said that cheap sweet food is the drug of choice for many women:

"then, by choosing food as your drug - sugar highs, or the deep, soporific calm of highs, the Valium of the working classes - you can still make the packed lunches, do the school run, look after the baby, pop in on your mum and then stay up all night with an ill five-year-old - something that is not an option if you?re caning off a gigantic bag of skunk, or regularly climbing into the cupboard under the stairs and knocking back quarts of Scotch. Overeating is the addiction of choice of carers, and that?s why it?s come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions. It?s still a way of fucking yourself up whilst still remaining fully functional, because you have to. Fat people aren?t indulging in the ?luxury? of their addiction making themselves useless, chaotic or a burden. Instead, they are slowly self-destructing in a way that doesn?t inconvenience anyone."

why was my post deleted, I mearly mentioned other meals

I am appalled at that comment

what a vulgar little man

No problem rookiemater - it's good because being challenged actually made me think out why it bothered me so much.

Ok mmarmite thanks for explaining I get it now.

Hands up who is an average women?

Thats the problem with all of these values - BMI, waist measurement, clothes size, number of calories, number of sausages...

I got exposed to enough feminism in my teens to refuse any engagement with diets and slimming, and have always eaten what I liked. And I have experienced a certain amount of snide commentary to the effect that I am not behaving like a proper woman, that I am doing something wierd and wrong, not just by eating a big meal in public, but by refusing to engage in the feminine ritual of abasing myself pver my wicked greed.
FWIW I have been chubby, I have been quite fat, I have been less fat, and though my fattest spell was due predominantly to misery-eating, I didn't lose wieght by dieting. My circumstances changed and I became a lot more physically active and a bit too busy to spend all my time eating. Right now I'm somewhere around the size 12-14 mark, don't know what I weigh as I don't have scales in the house. I eat reasonably well because I want to feed DS reasonably well: plenty of fruit and veg, brown bread rather than white most of the time, but I will not buy into the bullshit of the diet industry, which is just another religion really (woman-hating bullshit the purpose of which is to separate you from your money and stop you thinking rebellious thoughts, first and foremost).

I agree with mmarmite. Should be up to the individual to decide on moderating their sausage consumption.

I agree with crescentmoon's point earlier in the thread, that so much of the cultural/media norms are about thinness for aesthetic reasons, rather than encouraging a strong powerful body for women.

Thanks for the reply rookiemater. (Also I'm not bothered about "less" vs "fewer")

The problem is the catering company enforcing a different number of sausages for men and women. It's fine for your dh to eat more sausages than you, as that is what you have both chosen based on your lifestyles, tastes, genders, heights, ages and activity levels. The waiter should have allowed each individual to choose how many sausages they wanted.

I agree that the average woman needs fewer calories than the average man. But according to the American dietary guidelines, for people of median weight and height, an active young woman would need 400 more calories per day than a sedentary man aged over 51. If the woman was taller than the average woman, and the man shorter than the average man, the difference would be even greater. But despite her needing more calories, the waiter would deny her even an equal number of sausages to him.

I guess you could argue that even so, given all that, it's not unreasonable to have a rule based on averages. If so, then why should the split be made down male-female lines? Why not say under-sixties get 3 sausages, over-sixties get 2 sausages? Or tall people get 3 sausages, short people get 2 sausages? IMO, the catering company chose to make it's rule based on sex at least in part based on stereotyping of genders, and the underlying view in our culture that eating a lot is un-feminine: women should eat small portions and be dainty and slim and feminine whilst men can eat big portions for strength and muscles.

Ok I apologise for being snarky and for the wrong use of words, but I still really can't get why the sausage scenario is so wrong.

I appreciate that different people have different calorific intakes based on height and build, but on average women need approximately 500 calories less per day than men. Therefore based on this I wouldn't have thought it was unreasonable for the catering company to calculate a different number of sausages for men and women. Perhaps they should have worked it on 2 per person as sausages are high calorie and low nutrient items, but in our household DH tends to eat more sausages than me, not for any sexist reasons, but purely because he tends to eat a bit more at each meal than I do.

I believe the recommendations for pregnancy are an extra 500 calories per day ( i.e. the same as the recommended average for a man) but only in the last trimester, putting on too much weight in pregnancy can cause gestational diabetes.

Obesity is ever increasing in this country and it causes major health problems.
Pretending that men and women need to eat the same could make that problem worse.

otherwise, what mmarmite said.

rookiemater: fewer.

The problem is that a waiter shouldn't be controlling what people eat based on their gender. How many sausages a person 'should' eat at lunch depends on hundreds of factors - whether they had any breakfast, how tall they are, whether they prefer to have big lunches and small dinners or vice versa, how much exercise they do, whether they have a physically active job, and so on. Some of the women at that wedding would need a higher calorific intake than some of the men at that wedding. On top of that, it's very patronising for the waiters or the catering company to take on the role of controlling women's calorific intake - women are quite capable of choosing how many sausages they want. It's fair enough to have an upper limit on how many sausages per person, so they don't run out, it's not reasonable to give all women a specifically differently limit from all men.

And yes, the act was made even more patronising by juxtoposing "men" - who need to be big and strong and are encouraged to eat - against "girls" - who should presumably should eat small portions and stay small and child-like.

Vezzie I'm not sure why the funny faces because the women got less sausages - is it because they were called girls?

Women need less calories to maintain their weight - that's not sexist its a fact.If women increased their calorific intake to match mens then they will generally gain weight - in fact this is what happens a lot of the time when couples get married/live together, woman puts on 20 pounds as eating same as the bloke.

Thanks for the link GothAnne. I've seen the idea discussed on fat acceptance sites, but didn't know about the original essay. The author makes a good point that perhaps we should be challenging media outlets about the use of these images.

A friend of mine went to a wedding recently. She was pregnant but nobody know, but actually that's neither here nor there. She was filled with a raging hunger so when she got 2 sausages for the meal, and the people on either side got 3, she politely asked for another one. The waiter said, "It's 3 for men, 2 for girls [sic]".