But was it the fat that killed them, or living in an industry where appearance is more important than health?
Sometimes I wonder a) how many celebrities dying due to “drugs” is really only about the drugs or more related to the diet culture in Hollywood and the pressure to conform and b) if those drug habits had anything to do with the diet culture in Hollywood and the pressure to conform.
OTOH, look how many male actors you could name. Plenty more still alive and working. Now try doing the same for women. At least overweight men have representation in media and not strictly as a joke or gross.
Sexist doesn’t mean “never happens to men”. It means it happens disproportionately to a particular sex.
I knew a couple who were both diagnosed with diabetes. One of them was determined to see the grand kids grow up and changed their lifestyle, the other did not. Two years later one was thinner the other was dead. It was painful to watch; painful to see that someone I cared about, when given the choice of eating differently or dying, decided dying was the way to go. Anyone who thinks they died “because they were fat” is nuts.
Our attitudes towards eating and fat people’s bodies are definitely sexist. The changes in attitudes towards men’s bodies, though, make me think of professor salaries. What happened when women gradually started taking over more of the university teaching jobs from men? Tenure disappeared, university teaching became very low paying work. Sometimes we “fight inequality” by treating everyone as badly as we treated the oppressed group. Eating disorders used to be thought of as a women’s issue. Young men and boys seem to be on track to make it gender neutral in a generation. That’s completely fucked.
They might laugh, but that anger comes out somewhere down the line and one of the quickest defenses for dealing with your own sublimated body shame is shaming others. I honestly think this is why it is so important to some men to be able to shame women and more than that, to make sure there are real consequences for women whose bodies are deemed “ugly.”
Are examples of the way men’s and women’s bodies are seen by each other, particularly in straight people.
While I agree that boys and men are catching up in terms of body dissatisfaction and self-judgement, there’s not a lot of evidence that this is having any effect on how men as a group (as evidenced by the study) view women.
I knew at least two young women in my life who literally approached weight with the “valley of the dolls” method. You don’t eat while you’re passed out after all! And I’ve known countless thin alcoholics who joke about their “liquid diet” over happy hour. I’m pretty sure disordered eating is a legitimate gateway to addiction even if food doesn’t become the primary obsession enough to qualify for an eating disorder diagnosis.
Even though you’ve hit a plateau, congratulations on dropping the weight you already have! Losing nearly a human being worth of weight isnt fucking easy.
And my recommendation? Simple body weight resistance exercise during the week. My wife stalled after her first forty pounds, and that got her back over the hump to losing again.
Obviously this is just me talking out of my ass, but my feeling is that when you treat people badly they tend to behave worse rather than better, so I wouldn’t be surprised if increasing body consciousness among men actually increases misogyny. Some men may become more sympathetic to women because of their experience with body shaming, others will use it as an excuse to rail against feminists and blame women for all their problems.
That’s an interesting idea, because I wrote the above comment with the assumption that experience leads to empathy.
Also interesting that the reverse doesn’t seem to be true- women have not adopted unrealistic standards for men’s bodies spite of their experience with body shame as a group.
Oh, must I be the one to bring this up? “One man’s meat is another man’s poison”.
Some people, due to the incredible luck of their particular little inlet of the gene pool, can eat until they’re the size of elephants with no appreciable health consequences. Some others of us, can’t get fat or we’ll die. Not ‘eventually’, or ‘only under extreme conditions’ - we die right now.
Everybody in my family looks GREAT in the casket! Athletic, unwrinkled, and not even fully gray, we all drop dead from massive coronaries before age-related diseases can even touch us. And even though diet and exercise can’t make us outlive our ancestors, letting ourselves go to seed will shave off at least a full ten years and make our middle age one long misery of physical frailty.
‘Live slow and die young.’
I don’t post this to bum everyone out, but…our mileages definitely do vary.
Can you elaborate on this? I’m assuming your “less” means fewer calories. I thought it was more or less a law of thermodynamics/accounting kinda thing. Why wouldn’t consuming fewer calories than are used result in the body’s consumption of stored energy and thus reduced body mass? Not to say this results in health benefits or they lose fat and not muscle or anything, just that such a deficit would result in reduced body mass.
ETA:
I found this. It answers much of the concept in variability not only of bodies absorbing calories but the variability of food itself. It doesn’t give measure to the difference, though. I mean is it a 10% swing in calorie availability/absorption across 90% of the population or what?
Looks like the overall principle still holds, it’s just that we’d have to figure calories absorbed (which would be super hard to measure) vs. expended rather than eaten vs. expended. Unless we convert toilets to bomb calorimeters it’s kinda tough to weigh out what you didn’t absorb.
One thing, when you starve your body, the body responds by holding onto more of what you put into it, because you’re making it panic. It “thinks” the world’s food has run out so it responds with hoarding what’s there.
Suddenly eating half what you usually do, can lead to weight gain.
I can get with that, but what is the variability? I would think the variation would have to be how many calories are absorbed by the body rather than consumed. Is there so much variation? I’ve often wondered how consistent that was. Are some people super absorbers and the data panel on the food packaging doesn’t apply to them?
So does that make the person less active? Don’t they have to be powered by something? I’ve heard this as well but not seen much official/authorative on it.
" Building on the 1977 Senate report, the 1980 Dietary Guidelines for Americans was one of the earliest such national guidelines.24 Many of the available data were derived from less robust types of evidence, such as from crude cross-country (ecological) comparisons and short term experiments using surrogate outcomes, mostly in healthy middle aged men."
So…are you a healthy middle aged man? If not, your mileage may vary.
