Antidote for After-Holiday Weight Loss Onslaught

One morning, Kate and Tyra and Claudia and all the other fashion models in New York suddenly received pink slips from their modeling agencies. “Sorry, babe, but your brand of lanky, long-legged beauty is strictly passé. Ciao!”

Kate and Tyra and Claudia and all the other fashion models in New York galloped to the nearest newsstand – and discovered, to their horror, that it was true! A thousand magazine covers had been launched by a valentine-faced thirteen-year-old who stood just four feet tall and weighed only fifty-five pounds.

She was Scottish and came from the latest cultural mecca, Flinging Edinburgh. Her name was McScrawny.

At first, the fashion world was aghast. But, recognizing a lucrative bandwagon when it oom-pah-pah-ed along, they hopped aboard and began singing McScrawny’s praises morning, noon and night.

And decreeing – for everyone who’s anyone, darling – the teensy tartan ensembles that complemented her miniature charms.

Soon it became impossible to stroll down a street, open a magazine, snap on a TV set, go to a movie, glance in a store window, glimpse a billboard, or scan social media without seeing images of McScrawny. She became everyone’s ideal.

Meanwhile, Kate and Tyra and Claudia and millions upon millions of other women sank into a deep depression. Not only did they look terrible in tam-o’-shanters, they just couldn’t measure up – or rather down – to McScrawny. Yet their every waking moment was bombarded by messages that any woman larger than McScrawny was unforgivably disgusting, grossly unlovable, and utterly worthless.

So they begged their doctors to chop five or six inches from their shins. They clamored for a waist-cinching operation in which the bottom ribs are removed to produce a true wasp waist. They paid electrolysists fortunes to reshape their hairlines to match McScrawny’s deep widow’s peak.

They bought every pill, potion, gadget, and gizmo they could get their hands on. Some forced themselves to throw up nearly every morsel they ate. Some smoked their heads off. Some popped the diet drugs that suddenly began appearing in stores, plus laxatives, diuretics and amphetamines as if they were vitamins. And – it goes without saying – they dieted and exercised frantically.

But nothing worked. The harder the woebegone women tried to shrink themselves to McScrawny’s size, the more stubbornly their bodies resisted.

Just to make it worse, they couldn’t find any decent clothes. They simply weren’t being made anymore in sizes larger than 1. Which left nothing but the dowdy duds at down-market shops that made them feel they’d died and gone to Polyester Purgatory.

No employer would hire them. No doctor or lawyer or butcher or baker or corporate chief would treat them respectfully. No one wanted to date them, let alone walk them down the aisle. The husbands and children who were acquired before McScrawnymania were ashamed to be seen with them.

And their images were nowhere to be found in the mass media. In fact, the only time they were paid any attention, it was to mock them. After all, what could be stupider than weighing more than fifty-five pounds, measuring above four feet, or being beyond your teens?

All the females in the land – except the .0001 percent who were naturally McScrawnyesque – came to hate themselves, despise each other, and meekly accept the rising tide of contempt being orchestrated against them, day by day, pound by pound, dollar by dollar.

Then one day the madness simply stopped.

Poof!

Kate and Tyra and Claudia and all the other women in the land awoke from the evil trance and said to themselves: “This is stupid. It’s wrecking my life. Let McScrawny look like McScrawny. And I’ll look like myself.”

Preposterous? Yes. But only the “poof” part is pure fantasy. Much of this parable has actually occurred since 1967, when North American women, and many others, became obsessed with looking as much as possible like Twiggy, the ultra-thin teenage fashion model from Swinging London.

Excerpted from my recently published ebook No Fat Chicks: How Big Business Profits By Making Women Hate Their Bodies - And How To Fight Back (available at Amazon.com and Kobo.com)

www.terrypoulton.com 

The time has come, The Walrus said...

... to talk of many things. Did you notice the capitals in the title above? 

I used them because I'm referring to The Walrus, Canada's smartest and classiest magazine. And I'm not just saying that because it published a profile of me in its latest issue (Jan/Feb 2013, on newsstands this week).

If you check out the story at http://thewalrus.ca/critical-mass/, or pick up the magazine (and thus get a lot of other fascinating reading, plus the entire 5,000 word article), you'll learn a lot - and not just about me and my rollercoaster life as a Fat Chick, and how that led me to write my No Fat Chicks books, and brand myself as I have.

"Critical Mass" writer Katherine Ashenburg ferreted out a wealth of little known information about weight-related matters, and wove it together masterfully - everything from why Tolstoy would likely have been horrified to see Keira Knightley's gaunt arms in the new movie version of Anna Karenina - to the fact that scientists have recently discovered that excess weight involves as many as 400 genes, and in terms of complication, is assessed at 100 while heart disease ranks as 1 and cancer as only 10.

Katherine also reports that - thanks to what I firmly believe is orchestrated prejudice aimed at marketing billions of dollars of worthless weight-loss products and services - Canadian kids are being robbed of what should be happy childhoods. Tragically, 25% of grade six girls and boys in Canada now believe they're too fat, while the number among girls rises to 40% by grade ten. And don't think for a minute that all these youngsters think what they think because they've succumbed to what marketers want us to believe is an "obesity epidemic," because only a tiny minority of them are overweight, while others are actually underweight.

There's also this: It took two years for a prominent and well-respected doctor to get his eye-opening research about the obesity paradox (described in my earlier posts) published. "People thought there was something wrong with the data," he recently told the New York Times.

All in all, The Walrus article is an important, even ground-breaking, read. My hopes are high that it will help effect some of the same attitudinal changes I am striving for.

www.terrypoulton.com

Wait, There's More

So, I explained in my last post how I earned bragging rights - and my very own brand - as The Fat Chick Who Figured It Out.

To encourage mass consumption, I introduced my message in an easy-to-chew size by focusing solely on the wake-up call that's now prompting many medical professionals to reconsider the theory that carrying extra weight is a guarantee of ill health and early death.

Irrefutable evidence to the contrary has been dubbed the "obesity paradox," and last time I checked, there were more than 200,000 Internet posts on the topic. I encourage you to check some of these out.

But there's more to the story. Way more. When I wrote my No Fat Chicks books a decade and a half ago, I believed our society was approaching the beginning of the end of a cruel and delusional era in which what I called the Eleventh Commandment for women prevailed: Thou must be thin!

As it turned out, I was overly optimistic back then, and suffered the usual fate of those who are ahead of their time. After an initial flurry of publicity that enabled me to repeat my message on TV and radio and in newspaper interviews, I was ignored.

Sadly, despite all the evidence and analysis I accumulated and reported to debunk the Billion Dollar Brainwash, which concocted the Eleventh Commandment and profited mightily, nothing much changed. In fact, many aspects of the mass delusion actually got worse.

But now I believe my timing in republishing my Canadian and American editions of No Fat Chicks as e-books is correct.

Millions of people are shouting, posting, and tweeting a giant NO to the stupidity of expecting all women and girls to be thin. Am I exaggerating? Check for yourself. If you type in the keywords "don't diet movement," you'll find more than 20 MILLION posts.

Read some of them. Rejoice. And I'll get back to you later with more evidence that, at least in the No Fat Chicks context, the world is coming to its senses.

Here’s Why I Did It

Why did I brand myself The Fat Chick Who Figured It Out?

Because something that’s seemingly new has recently come down the pike. Baffled medical authorities are calling it “the obesity paradox.”

What is it? It’s irrefutable proof that fat and fit are not necessarily mutually exclusive conditions – just as I reported a decade and a half ago in my books. Both No Fat Chicks: How Women Are Brainwashed To Hate Their Bodies and Spend Their Money (Canadian edition) and No Fat Chicks: How Big Business Makes Women Hate Their Bodies – And How To Fight Back (U.S. edition).

Both my books are replete with studies – some of them decades-old – proving that some extra weight is actually advantageous for patients with such chronic diseases as diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease and high blood pressure.

Too few people were prepared to believe this back then. They chose to stick with the knee-jerk belief that fat people just naturally die sooner than others. But recently so much corroboration has come from new studies that basically repeated what I reported, that many health and medical professionals are finally reconsidering their former assumptions.

Especially eye-opening was a decade-long study of 11,000 Canadians, which concluded that moderately overweight participants have the lowest chance of dying from any condition.

And that, dear readers, is why I branded myself The Fat Chick Who – well, now you know the rest.

www.terrypoulton.com