Skinny Bitch? No, Id rather be Chubby.

“Get off you Lazy ass and get skinny!” says the book Skinny Bitch. Personally, while I found these women’s approach to getting skinny modernly different, at times I felt that they were way too harsh. This book does not just suggest a diet. No, it suggest you throw out your entire lifestyle and embrace the vegan approach. While it is not advertised as a vegan book, Skinny Bitch promotes the cruelty-free, meat-free, dairy-free lifestyle. Basically, no meat, dairy products, sugar, eggs, or joy as it seems. While I don’t doubt that living this way would indeed make you a bit healthier and probably a lot skinnier, I found that the book pushes such a harsh, drastic change. I know that I, for one, am not willing to give up the things that I find such joy in eating, such as chocolate, coffee, sugar, just to lose a couple of pounds. Vegan is fine and dandy but I don’t think that I would just be able to change my eating habits just because a book is screaming at me to do so. That brings me to the diction and phrasing of this book. Overall, I found all of it a bit harsh. While reading the excerpts I could practically see the authors standing over me yelling at me to get off my lazy ass and throw out my cookies. From one page to another, it seemed as if it was insult after insult. The book goes from criticizing my coffee addiction at one moment to calling me a wimp for not being able to give up sugar on cue in the next moment. In fact, instead of feeling the desire to get up and do all of the things the book screamed at me to do, I wanted to chunk out the pack of excerpts and go eat a chicken sandwich and an ice cream sundae. I guess that this book might appeal to certain women, who find it refreshing that these authors are telling the “truth”. But I found myself more agreeing with the author of the second article, who criticized the book for being, in a way, a harsh cruel bully. And the comment about how the anorexic person hears the voice that sounds similar to that of the book really surprised me and made me dislike the book a bit more. It is not that I hate the book. In fact, I found it a bit witty at times and allowed me to relate because of the use of its language but it did not make me want to become a vegan. It was entertaining to read, but instead of convincing me to change my lifestyle, it made me want to cling on more to the bad habits that the book accused me of having.

Want a twinkie? dont lie, everyone does.

This past week’s discussions on obesity and weight problems has really brought to life the idea of “obesity” to me. Before these discussions, I associated the word with, pardon the stupidity of my language, gigantic, humungous, sick, 800 pound people who were trapped in their houses and unable to walk. I never associated the word with BMIs or so. I figured that fat was evidently fat and skinny was obviously skinny. I didn’t think that there was so much science involved with the classification. I guess this is partly due to the media influence on my life. I grew up wondering why I didn’t look like the celebrities on tv and such. While I was stick skinny, I was still very unhappy because it seemed that while I got that down, my proportions were off. I never seemed to be “perfect” or rather, “celebrity-like”. That website we looked at in class really opened my eyes. But personally, I think that it is extremely hard to classify someone’s weight. What exactly is the “correct” weight? If we go by the official nutritional scale, our “obesity” problem is larger, no pun intended, than we ever suspected. And when it comes down to it, I think that obesity is an emotional, physical, and ethical problem.

            When it comes to analyzing the causes of this problem, Chapter 10 really provides insight. It explains how casual arguments are never simple. They are complex and go to many levels. It is not simply what’s on the surface. You can not blame obesity on just the intake of calories. Could peer pressure, lifestyle, and metabolism contribute to it too? I think all of these things play a part in the cause of obesity. What causes us to eat more calories? Why defines obesity? As you can see, nothing about this “casual” argument is casual.

            Another subject that caught my attention was that of the fad diets and workouts. I think the reason this topic caught my eye was because I probably have heard or tried many of these before in hopes of obtaining that unreachable “perfection”. These things offer the easy way out. You get to eat the stuff that tastes so good, while growing closer to that desired look. Using this diet, I can look like this celebrity or by doing this workout plan I can resemble this celebrity. I think that the media contributes a lot to the making of these diets into fads. But personally, I think it comes down to self-evaluation. How you view yourself contributes to how you define obesity and diets, etc. For me, While Im content with my body image, there is no way I have totally come to terms with myself. I have days where the body demons rise through my self-imposed barriers and cause me to criticize myself. So I ask the question: is it ever possible to be completely and totally happy with your body in today’s society?