My rage does not burn with the fire of a thousand suns. Nor does my hateful glare mutate into gamma radiation strong enough to give The Thing a boner. No, my annoyance simmers with the heat of a strong cup of coffee. But be warned! This coffee is too warm to drink, you will have to wait AT LEAST TEN MINUTES before drinking it! Nonetheless, from hell’s appendix I poke at thee, and wish upon thee an uncomfortable rash to be cleared up within not more than two days time.
Ah, your self esteem posters for women. A silhouette of a “curvy” girl standing next to a “thin” girl, with helpful bullet points, for MAXIMUM CLARITY. “The average American woman wears a size 14!” you proudly inform our potentially bulimic friends. It continues like this for several more bullet points.
Well, University health squad, consider this! The average American is also medically overweight and approaching obese, fast. Being average isn’t anything to be proud of, since average is heart disease and diabetes. In all likelihood, if you’re an average American woman, you’ll soon grow a front butt to compete with even the heartiest of English teachers.
So be warned, self-esteem week! Your good intentions have earned you a reprieve from my firey hot anger, but you will rue the day you tried to put a positive spin on a serious health problem.
In my opinion, taking the shame out of female obesity and treating it like a health problem rather than a personal failing is probably only going to make things easier in terms of losing weight. Many women eat for emotional reasons.
Well, I don’t know about that. Seems to me if you feel like you’re a fat, hopeless blob, you may feel too demoralized to take care of yourself. OTOH, when you start feeling good about yourself, you may be motivated to do more to feel better.
Wow, I can’t whip out my credit card fast enough. If Pat’s weight loss plan is as based on scientific evidence as the rest of his yammerings, then I’ll lose weight faster than God can drown all of the Jesus horses.
It’s not really about that. It’s “self esteem week”. It’s a continuation of the “don’t allow any student to suspect that they possibly might not be perfect” trend in American education. I think it’s harmful because the trend seems to encourage self-deception and inhibit honest self-assessment.
You can see this when you hear “shaped like a real woman” to describe the overweight. Somebody with the ideal weight for their height is not less “real” than someone carrying a few extra pounds. The apologists need to listen to their doctor, stop using “the fashion industry” as their personal bogeyman, quit rationalizing away their faults, and for God sakes quit deep frying twinkies on the altar of “self esteem”.
I can remember being in the car with a very slim attractive friend and we drove past a large girl jogging. My friend was quite disparaging and made an awful comment. No wonder people who aren’t asthetically pleasing to the rest of the world may not want to exercise in public - which often due to budget is the cheapest way to exercise.
Getting the confidence up to get outside and put yourself in a position that maybe potentially awkward and embarrassing for you because of what the rest of the world sees as a social disability is a huge thing. Feeling normal is a huge thing. I used to work in nutrition (having said that - IANAD) with people who had lost a lot of weight and I can remember one lady who had lost 80 kg crying when she was talking about her journey because she was still humiliated at the memory of having to ask for a seatbelt extender on an aircraft; another lady would risk exercising late at night in a dangerous neighbourhood rather than be seen out walking during the day; a man spoke highly of how wonderful it was when people could actually fit onto the bus next to him.
I’m sorry for the rant, but I would think feeling accepted and the oft used word “normal” or “not alone” is the start to help yourself build up the confidence to take those first steps, get motivated, help someone realise that they are worth the time and effort to be healthy.
I don’t generally hear this phrase applied to people who are terribly overweight. It’s usually applied to normal-sized women, to differentiate them from the anorexic fashion models. Hint: “real women”, i.e., normal women, have hips and boobs and a certain amount of bodyfat, unlike super-models.
Being underweight, especially to the extremes required in the fashion industry, is bad for you. Models are generally not at a healthy weight, yet those are the women that are held up as “ideal”. That does cause some problems - especially since most normal women couldn’t achieve those figures if they starved to death. Mind you, I haven’t seen the pic mentioned in the OP, so I can’t say if that particular “curvy” girl is healthy or overweight.
Being fit is a different thing entirely, and we could certainly use more attention to that. But I know some damn skinny people that can’t hardly walk up a flight of stairs, so don’t try to tell me that skinny = in good shape and healthy.
It seems that you don’t quite understand the true nature of self-esteem. That’s OK, many people don’t. I ranted about that on this board until my fingers were blue in the face.
Positve self-assessment is usually the first step towards change, not a hindrance to it.
Yeah, I suspect a lot of the “anti-self-esteem” movement (which they’d never dare call themselves) is either operating on misguided assumptions, or else nurturing some pretty ugly feelings about people.
Oh, fuck off. I understand self esteem better than the idiots that tout it. Quit drinking the Kool-Aid.
“Positive self assessment”? That is what hinders change. We don’t need positive self assessment - we need honest self assessment. The self-esteem movement does not encourage progress because it refuses to acknowledge flaws. Why would anybody try to change themselves if they thought that they were just fine the way the are? Why would anybody change themselves if the people around them constantly tell them that their flaws are perfectly normal and don’t even need to change?
Self-esteem is a good thing. But for Christ’s sake, there are limits. Our kids need to learn the skill of identifying and correcting personal shortcomings in order to grow. This movement in education is the same one that has killed youth athletic programs in some communities because it decrees that all the kids should be given certificates of participation instead of the winners receiving trophies. It would hurt the loser’s “self esteem”, you see. And we all know that no one ever gets their feelings hurt in real life. I put the phrase in quotes because the morons in this educational movement don’t use the term correctly, anyway. As I suspect neither does tdn.
For the weight issue, we need more people like Kirstie Alley. Hear me out here. As we all know, Kirstie gained alot of weight. When asked about it in interviews, she would say something along the lines of “I didn’t just gain weight, Jay. I got fat! Damn, I love me some donuts!” Kirstie Alley has true self esteem - not the shit that some educators tout. She got fat, knew it, and never made excuses. Her sense of self worth (self esteem) allowed her to tackle her weight gain without disguising it with positive bullshit like “real women have curves”.
She didn’t wallow in positive self assessment, she assessed herself honestly. That, tdn, is why she has been able change.
On preview, Doug, Miller. You can fuck off too. If you have something to say about my post, just say it. Don’t insinuate.
I could probably find more, but if some of y’all would, I dunno, do some actual research on the movement you might stop towing the party line and realize the programs don’t work, have never been accepted outside the US to the extent that they are here, and are being rapidly discredited even within the U.S.
