Body Size issues

[Six Gun Jim]

      oh yes she is FINE as hell.   

[Emeline]

Oh man, I detest the body Nazis! 

And as lou so wisely pointed out, you do realise a LOT of those fashion designers are gay and designing clothes for boy's figures, not women's figures, as they purport to be?  Seriously, check it out.  They're making clothes for boy's bodies.  As for those "ideal women" we are presented with - holy cow - most of them look SICK, positively sick.  They're so starved that many of them don't even menstruate.  We're supposed to admire "heroin chic".  Oh yeah, I really admire a starved looking junkie who looks like she will fall off the runway any moment. 

Who the hell decided all women should be the same size and shape and ascribed to them "value" on how well they conformed to this "ideal"?  The sad thing is how many people have bought into it and now pour scorn on anyone who does not conform, anyone who is diverse in size.  When I was a kid growing up there were women of all shapes and sizes around me - some very large ladies.  No one ever gave them a hard time.  No one ever made them feel bad about themselves for having an ample bosom or a large derriere.  People were much more tolerant and accepting of size differentials, even just 2 or 3 decades ago. 

But now...they start brainwashing them young.  It's a hot topic for me too because my cousin had the most beautiful daughter called Donna.  When I say beautiful, she was a pretty girl but she was such a sweet, sweet soul.  Her parents divorced when she was a teenager and she became very depressed.  To cope with that depression she became a binge eater.  By the time she was 21 she was quite large and hated herself for being so overweight.  Worse still she ended up circulating in a group of people who were thoroughly nasty to her about her weight, always making snide remarks and putting her down.  Her family didn't know this was going on or how much worse it was making things for Donna.  In the last week of her life she rang her grandmother (my aunt) and tried to make everything seem normal but at the end of the conversation she told her grandmother how cruel all those around her were being about her weight and one of the last things she said was "everyone hates fat people".  Once her father found out he was trying to make arrangements to get Donna out of the town she had moved to and away from these "friends" but only a few days after the conversation Donna took her own life.  She left a note saying she didn't want to live "because she was fat".

There are a lot of snide and cruel comments on LATOC sometimes about overweight and obese people.  It's now acceptable, even fashionable, to bash them.  So many people have been indoctrinated by the fashion/beauty/publishing/movie etc industry now to feel it is okay to persecute or be cruel to, in fact treat as lesser humans, those who do not conform to these so-called "ideals". 

Body, food and obesity issues can be very complex and multi-factored.  For example I have read studies which showed over 40% of women who binge eat were sexually abused and it's certainly been my experience in the past when I helped out at a sexual abuse survivor's group that a great number of the victims had serious food, body and weight issues. 

Incidentally, as a matter of purely personal preference, I don't find thin women or men attractive (which is not to say I don't think they have any less value as human beings of course).  I think curvy and rubenesque women are just georgous.  In fact I think that voluptuousness is incredibly feminine.  On the other hand most times if I happen to see a "top model" of some kind on the runway, I am struck by how androgonous, often boyish, that they look.

[max_power]

Within a coupla years we will all look anorexic. Eat up! My sexy wife is a size 22. She would be so jealous of a 14 because what she hates worst is things never fitting right. It will be interesting seeing the changes in each other as we starve.

[honeydee]

Oh good Grower....I was scared to answer this question. 

My wife is a size 14 and she's sexy as all get out to me.

That is awesome.  I love that you said that.

I'm a 12-14 and I can't keep my husband's hands off me if I tried.  That is probably all the reassurance I need as far as sexiness goes.

[ReddDogg]

Real men find real women sexy.  Be a real woman, and know guys like me will be finding you sexy.  Women are supposed to have curves.  Women are supposed to be cuddly.  Size 14 sound like a nice healthy, sexy size to me.

My wife is a size 16, and while she wants to lose some weight, I thing she will get less sexy if she loses all that much, because her curves are great, and she is at a size where she can be active and work hard and all that, but when we are cuddling I don't get poked by any bones, and that is the way it should be.  To me, she is perfect, and I tell her so over and over, but like you she see's the TV people, and remembers her childhood, and it is a struggle to get her to believe me sometimes.

And i agree, those of us with some meat on our bones are going to be glad we do when food shortages hit our neighborhood.  I myself have a layer of fluffy over a layer of muscle, but my blood pressure and cholesterol checks out great, and I eat healthy, and I am comfortable in my skin even if every MTV watching chicklet and metro-sexual dude might disagree.

[Max und Moritz]

Fashion mag? Somebody said FASHION MAG?? Oh noes, how can we compete with Frankenmodel!

 

It´s all in the eye of the beholder: no matter how much you twist and bend your cornea to look at yourself, you´ll only get a lousy, partial and distorted view

Please, do post a full-size (pun intended) pic of yourself here, stat.

Then wait for the LATOC folks to comment objectively. You might be very surprised.

[mtlouie]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hibyAJOSW8U (External Embedding Disabled)


What are we telling our daughters? 

[max_power]

Fashion mag? Somebody said FASHION MAG?? Oh noes, how can we compete with Frankenmodel!

 

It´s all in the eye of the beholder: no matter how much you twist and bend your cornea to look at yourself, you´ll only get a lousy, partial and distorted view

Please, do post a full-size (pun intended) pic of yourself here, stat.

Then wait for the LATOC folks to comment objectively. You might be very surprised.

[Hope@ZeroKelvin]

HawtFrog:  Just go look at most of the classical art.  NONE of those women are size 4.  They are shapely beautiful women who embody the femine ideal better than those Frankenmodels. 

That Sex in the City show is just total BS.  TURN IT OFF, why are you watching such drivel?  You can't look like that without hours in the gym and tons of plastic surgery.  Those kind of people spend their entire lives in pursuit of this totally bizarre idea of beauty.   And you know what?  The minute it is gone, which it will be, they are devastated as they have devoted their ENTIRE, PRECIOUS lives to vanity.  And it will be worth SQUAT in the end. 

In my experience, the men who are attracted to these freaks of nature are shallow, self absorbed and completely brain dead.

Dreams of looking like a young Dolly Parton aside, I am a size 12-14 and my husband can't keep his hands off me.  Don't have a shortage of other offers neither.  If the important people in your life love you as you are, why are you judging yourself by some stranger's idea of beauty?   

Good grief!  What people LOOK like is as important as to whom they ARE as the wrapping on a xmas present is to what is inside.

 

[golddust]

I'm a size 14 too and by normal human standards I'm average. By Hollywood standards, yes I belong at Seaworld.

But why should I give a fuck about Hollywood standards?  I'm not an actress. I have nothing to do with Hollywood life or culture. I don't even live within 1500 miles of the place. Sarah Jessica Parker looks terrible. She's not ugly really, but she needs to gain about 20lbs. I can see the bones in her face for crying out loud! She looks like a scarecrow that visited the Estee Lauder counter at Macy's.

These women eat 800 calories a day and work out for 3 hours a day. And get paid millions for it in the end. I'm sure if you wanted to live your life that way, you could be a size 0 also. Me, I love food. And I have better things to do than workout for several hours a day. Especially when I don't get any compensation for it! I love to have muscle too. You think these twigs could lift heavy objects, wrangle small livestock, etc? I don't have a ton of upper body strength, but I have some amazing lower body strength and know how to use it. I kick like a mule. 

And I grew up fat. When I was 2.5 years old I was overweight by about 10lbs which is alot for a kid that age. It just kept going. I mentioned in a previous thread that I was 5'4 and 135lbs at 9 years old. But I was very active! I could do most all things in gym class, and I could outrun everyone in class. For all the typical "fat kid" problems, I didn't have the problem of being picked last in gym. By 11 I was 175lbs, which is almost the weight I am now. My weight kept going up and up. It was some cosmic fail between sugar addiction and bad genes and depression/anxiety from an early age.

I have been truly what fat is. I was a size 32 (A women's clothing size 32, not a 32 waist! That's when shopping REALLY sucks!). A size 14 isn't fat in any way. There's so many things I could not do at that size. So many ways I was limited and my lifestyle in general was impacted daily because of it in ways people who've never been there couldn't know.  I could not walk 2 blocks without my feet killing me underneath 360lbs of weight. I could not stand up long enough to wash dishes, it hurt my back too bad. Lemme tell ya, you pay great attention to weight limits at that size and you get wonderful spatial judgment. I could look at a seat or something and know instantly if I was going to fit or not. Usually not. But I think back now to all the time and energy I spent on doing such things. Making sure I could fit places and finding end-of-the-row seats in theaters so I could technically occupy only one seat.

I live my life absolutely normal now, shop in normal clothing stores and have virtually no limitations. As soon as I got under 200lbs again, I went horseback riding! I grew up around horses and missed them dearly. Most places have a 200lb limit.

If this is fat, then I'm pretty damn happy with this level of "fat." Optimally I'd like to lose 20lbs of fat and gain 20lbs of muscle. If it doesn't happen, you won't catch me crying about it. I've worked too hard and come too far to not be grateful.

You may be different and not prone at all to gaining weight like that. But I know if I'm not fat, most anyone else who is a size 14 (and not bordering on midget height!) isn't either. Fuck what society tells you. They have everything else wrong, why in the world would they know a damn thing about what a woman should look like and why in hell would I trust their judgment when they say someone is fat or not? And in the true spirit of our excess consumption way of life, beauty too is all manufactured. It's a product to sell and if they can drag women down in the mud long enough, they're going to get up and start asking for ways to get that mud off. Lo and behold, they certainly have the perfect solution, don't they? Models are coat hangers. Try to remember that. A designer makes a sample of their clothing and in the smallest size they can make and that's what is worn on the runway. And often, the styles are such that they won't work on anyone bigger than a size 6 without progressively more involved alterations to that style. In other words, these high fashion designers can't actually design clothing worth a shit or they'd be able to make clothes for human women to wear, not a kewpie doll.

There's a book called The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf I highly recommend. It'll really make you feel much better knowing what a fucking lie women have been sold about beauty and size.

[Xenopus]

I'm watching 'Sex and the City' and all these super skinny woman running around and I, as a size 14, am feeling like a fat ass whale on the couch. When I was little, I was told I couldn't be friends with certain people unless I was skinny like them, so, I stopped eating and when my mom found out, she made me start eating again. Unfortunately, all that pressure has remained with me. I love/hate shopping. When I get to the store, what I buy looks wonderful! It's perfect for my size, and curves, but then I come home and I feel so out of my skin wearing it that I don't wear it.

Can anybody suggest anything that will help with this problem?

I've been a size 14 for 50 years. It used to bother me. When I look at photos of myself at 20 or 30, though, I can't think what I was worrying about. My worst feature was my dyed blonde hair, not my body. Yuck!

At some point I got too busy to worry what I looked like and still found I had no trouble attracting me. That was a good thing to discover. It is one of the advantages of old age that you cease to worry about looks and start to think of who people are, not what they look like.

The advice here is good. Turn off the damn TV, or at least don't watch those dreadful soaps. And stay away from fashion magazines and such garbage. You'll like the look of the people in the farming magazines and "Backyard Poultry" much more. And the ads are much more interesting.

When the grocery store trucks stop running, those of us who can live on our humps for a week or two will be at an advantage. 

[Emeline]

Say, are any of you guys and gals old enough to remember (like me, at 49) when women were actually valued for things like their skills and talents, character and virtue, intelligence, femininity and grace (which comes in ANY size and age, trust me) and that kinda stuff, not just how "little" they weighed or what size their boobs were?

[JoMama]

You guys would have it easy in a collapse when food is scarce.  I'm 6'1" and 130 lbs, and I've never been able to go above 135 regardless of food intake.  And I'm a guy.

The endocrinologist told me there's nothing I can do, I don't have an illness but it's just genetically determined fast metabolism, and until they produce drugs that can trigger more putting on weight safely, I'm out of luck.  I'm not holding out hope, given that most related research goes into slimming, not gaining...

[madison]

I suspect in a crash of any type, we'll be thankful for a few extra pounds

Try shopping at a Lane Bryant.  God, they have some gorgeous clothes!  It's sometimes hard to find clothes that fit and look good at skinny girl stores.  Having at least one outfit you know you rock can be a nice mood lifter!

Me, I like a woman with a bit of padding, myself!

[Emeline]

You guys would have it easy in a collapse when food is scarce.  I'm 6'1" and 130 lbs, and I've never been able to go above 135 regardless of food intake.  And I'm a guy.

The endocrinologist told me there's nothing I can do, I don't have an illness but it's just genetically determined fast metabolism, and until they produce drugs that can trigger more putting on weight safely, I'm out of luck.  I'm not holding out hope, given that most related research goes into slimming, not gaining...

JoMama, one of my best friends whom I grew up with is exactly the same.  He actually eats like a pig - always has - and LOTS of fast food and junk food, yet he is forever THIN and I do mean thin.  Every time he goes to the doctor he is told he is underweight and must put weight on, but he never can, no matter how much he eats.

This simplistic formula they have which goes energy in x energy expended dictates the amount of energy used/stored seems to be so laughable.  If it was a CAR people would go, but how big is the car, how many horsepower is it, what terrain is it going over etc etc because the VARIABLES in between will vastly influence the outcomes, yet we living, organic, diverse human beings are somehow expected to conform to some rigid dictates.  Any knowledgeble  farmer or animal breeder knows that is not true of animals, that for instance something like a Shetland pony really HAS to have a very restricted diet because it will easily get overweight and founder if it doesn't, while as they say "you can't fatten a thoroughbred" (some thoroughbreds eat a ton and always remain lean animals regardless).  

That's one of the reasons I enjoyed Jon Gabriel's book so much.  He thinks outside the square and comes up with some real answers.