body image rant
Not to derail the thread or anything with a body image rant, but I love how people bitch and whine about how thin celebrities are, and how bad this is for people, when 80% of the U.S. population is overweight or obese, while only about 2%-5% (at the very most) are anorexic or bulimic. Apparently all of those ads and TV shows featuring healthy people isn't doing much to stop Americans from imbibing all of those snack foods and refined carbs that are contributing to the obesity epidemic.
Clearly, compulsive eating disorders and binge disorders are the far bigger problem than anorexia and purge disorders in the Western world. But somehow I'm supposed to believe that everyone's at home crying themselves to sleep because Jessica Alba wears a size 2 (which is not medically problematic in the least, btw)? Maybe if Americans actually cared that much about who looks good in People magazine, they'd get off their asses and lose weight, lessen the strain on their hearts, and actually be much better off for it. There are people starving in other countries, who would be glad to have a quarter of what we thoughtlessly consume in a day. But there are privileged rich Western white people who have the nerve to complain because people prefer not to look at overweight people in the media. Typical.
There are mountains of evidence that a calorie restricted diet actually prolongs life, diets lower in saturated and trans fat are heart healthier, people with lower BMIs are less likely to die of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, or other illnesses--how could you possibly believe that it's unhealthy to be thin, or to have people in pictures who are on the lower end of the range of healthy BMI? From where I sit it looks like people don't care enough about their weight.