Today I am 5’2" and 130 to 135 pounds. My doctor last year told me to lose weight (I weigh the same). When I look in the mirror, I don’t look as good as I think I should.
I really don’t care what anyone else thinks, I care what I think. I think skinny is better looking. When I look good naked to me, I feel better about myself all around. I want to wear size 6’s without them being skin tight. I want to sit down in them and be able to breathe. If I exercised and ate right and became a size 4, I’d be ok with that too, but only if I did that and had muscle, not just by diet.
And I have no concern about your weight. I never care if a someonel I know weighs 100, 200 or 300 pounds. If you weigh way too much, I do worry a little about your heart working hard and stuff, but not my place to say.
When I was under age 21, I was under 100 pounds. When I divorced my first husband at age 28 I was 85 pounds. I just had surgery earlier this month and I’m thankful that I’m generally healthy and that is what’s most important (I don’t smoke or drink or do drugs, not even caffeine).
I’ve seen the “gay fashion designer” theory come up before, and while I can see how it would be tempting to believe, I also think it’s rather silly.
Think about it carefully – what is a fashion model’s job? Is it to look attractive…or is it to make the clothes look attractive? It’s not that designers are oblivious to what sort of female body type the common man prefers, it’s that they don’t care because it’s irrelevant to their work. They want their audience to be excited by the designs, not distracted by the women wearing them.
Runway models all need to be about the same size so that the sample clothes can all be made the same size. This saves a lot of time, money, and effort, and it allows for last-minute replacements if a model calls in sick. The standard size used requires a tall, thin body because the designers feel that this body type is what best shows off their clothes.
Models who do non-runway work aren’t usually as extremely tall and thin as those that do, although they do still tend to be taller and thinner than the average woman.
I really don’t feel this is a resolvable issue, but the top downloaded woman on the Internet is Danni Ashe. Danni’s … well, no one’s ever gonna call her skinny. She’s what men like to look at – nobody MADE guys download more images of her than anyone else.
Top supermodels – Kate Moss, Christie Brinkley, Cindy Crawford. Compare and contrast their bodies with Ashe’s. Note features that Ashe has that the rest do not, such as … hips, ass, etc. Draw appropriate conclusions.
Look, no girl under 8’ tall looks attractive at 200 lbs. Yes, there are men who are attracted to those non-traditional body types. In general though, we men are attracted to women who are a healthy weight and in reasonable shape. Personally, I tend to go for girls who are a little fuller, but not to the point of having a gut or excessive lovehandles or anything.
Christie Brinkley, Cindy Crawford and Elle MacPherson are actually on the heavier side for models, as are most models from the 70s and 80s compared to today. That look is more attractive and healthier than the boney, skeletal look of the Kate Mosses. But hey…some girls are just tall and hot looking.
One of the differences between men and women is that women can achieve an “ideal” look by not eating. We men have to actually work at achieving those ideal body types.
Guy: Wow. Brad Pitt sure is jacked. I wished I had arms like that…
Girl: Why don’t you go to the gym?
Guy: Meh…
Oh and models are coathanger thin because clothes look best on a coathanger.
You can’t go by pounds and say that “nobody under XXX pounds will look good” because someone will always prove you wrong.
A friend of mine always looked a little chunky, but not horribly fat—I would never have thought she needed to lose more than, say, 30-40 pounds. She was tallish, but I don’t think she was 6 feet tall or anything. Yet she enjoyed going to amusement parks and having that guy who guesses your weight (and guesses it right), because he could never guess that she was near 300 pounds. How did she weigh so much? Beats me. I was shocked too. But I don’t think she was lying. I’m guessing that it was a combination of big frame and lots of muscles (she had a job where she was on her feet all the time).
And myself, at 5’4" and about size 12/14 (looking like I could probably lose 25 lbs., I was told), well, I weighed 185 pounds. I did not look horrible. I didn’t look like some hideous, fat toad. Part of that weight was in my boobs, which are pretty big, and my big frame (wider ankle and wrist bones are a giveaway). What am I going to do, cut off my boobs to lose weight?
All the females in my family are the same way. They all look like their weight much less than they really do. They wear clothing sizes that are “normal” (i.e. not super-sized) and people think that they look fine. So what if their scale says that they weigh more than they are “supposed” to? Do they suddenly become fat ugly cows, even though they’re wearing non-large sized clothes and don’t look overweight?
Yeah. Like just “not eating” is a realistic, easy option. I don’t know many women that can do that. Most of us prefer to go to the gym and actually eat sometimes. Plus, I look a heck of a lot better when I have some muscle definition than when I’m the same size but flabby. Hey, I’m never going to have big boobs without surgery, so I pretty much have to go for the athletic look!
I’m 5’4" and weigh 120 lbs. I usually wear a size 6 or so. I get a lot of exercise and am pretty fit. Most of the time, I don’t think I’m “fat.” However, I’d have to say if I could wave a magic wand and be 10 lbs thinner, I’d do it. I’m not sure why. Despite hearing that I’m a healthy weight, this homunculus in my head keeps saying “but you’d look so much better if you were thinner.”
I think part of it is a competition with other women thing. Plus, despite what men say, that damn homunculus keeps saying “they don’t mean it; they’d think you looked much better thinner.”
I’m not sure that voice is all that wrong. About 5-6 years ago I had my year of hell. Within 6 months of each other, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and my boyfriend was killed in a car accident. I was so stressed and upset that I couldn’t eat. The only way to deal with my anxiety and pain was to run, run, run till I just couldn’t think anymore. Often, the only way to get to sleep was to exercise to the point of just collapsing. I lost a lot of weight. I got down to somewhere under 110 lbs (I stopped weighing myself after a while) and it was all muscle. I was skinny, but my hair was falling out in clumps, my skin was wretched (acne combined with some odd flakiness and a general grey pallor), and I had dark circles under my eyes that looked like I’d been punched. Yet many people (mostly women but a few men) told me how good I looked. I didn’t look good. I looked like crap. But I was skinny. I have no idea why people would say that when nothing about me looked healthy. I was just really thin.
Oh well, Mr Homunculus is getting ignored. No magic wand exists, I like food too much, and I don’t have the desire for the needed exercise to get down to that weight again.
If the media doesn’t affect people’s worldview then all advertisers should quit their trade. Of course the media affects people’s opinions, that’s why everyone’s always complaining about it. And this debate is about why thin is in NOW when it hasn’t been before. If there were some objective standard of beauty, then it would be consistent across all times and cultures. Of course, that’s not the case. Obviously, there’s something that’s teaching the public to suddendly be attracted to some phyical quirk simultaneously.
Am I the only person sick of Marilyn Monroe being used as some sort of patron saint of normal-sized women? She was not “average sized,” she was naturally petite (though her weight changed a lot throughout her life because of dieting, pills- yeah, healthy example), with a tiny waist and huge knockers. She had plastic surgery, wore gobs of makeup and wasn’t exactly known for her smarts. Yet she’s always being touted as some sort of ideal, as if the 1950s were a golden time for average sized women. They weren’t. Neither were the '20s. Or any time in the past few hundred years, if ads for corsets and arsenic diet pills are any proof.
I think the greatest difference between then and now is how EVERYONE is striving for the ideal beauty type these days- not just aspiring actresses or people in the public eye. Women politicians, authors, radio announcers- they’re all supposed to fit into the mold. And the saddest part is, I think, the sheer amount of time, money and effort spent on maintaining (or acquiring) this image- reading diet books and magazines, cooking special foods, overexercising at the gym, stressing over every single piece of food- that could be spent doing something productive and possibly world-changing. I truly believe that it is easier to maintain a healthy weight (getting down to it is tougher) by eating fresh food and getting a hobby rather than counting every calorie and going to the gym.
Obsessing over food will not lead to weight loss (see: the French). And ultra thin models and obesity ARE related. Yo yo dieting, depression and diet foods pave the way to bingeing/weight gain.
(I actually have an extraordinarily healthy body image- but I’ve seen enough damn friends with eating disorders and spend a lot of time in the fashion/acting world, so this tpoic really gets to me- also, whoever said that Sarah michelle Gellar is at a healthy weight may not have seen her since season one of Buffy)
First, BMI has its known limitations, it is not a perfect system nor the sole one. Second, I always took BMI to be a pretty good indicator and predictor on the higher side (overweight and obesity), not necessarily the lower side (underweight). It boils down to a question of body type (see Wikipedia stub entry and a body-building perspective) as well as lifestyle. You mention repeatedly that you do not feel you are healthy simply because you are by normal convention underweight. If you:
feel aware and energetic
don’t get sick at an abnormal rate
are physically fit and strong
eat healthy quantities at least three times a day, or smaller quantities several times a day according to good nutritional bases
exercise regularly
have good cardiovascular health
don’t find yourself constantly obsessing about your weight
have a stable weight without significant and frequent fluctuation
and so forth, then you don’t have a problem. If you meet these conditions of general health and fitness, you are simply naturally built on the “thin” side, and may consider yourself the current object of envy of the majority of women (or so they always say).
And, if you are naturally thin (it is of course impossible to determine over the Internet), you technically enjoy better health than your heavier peers, from basic things like joint health (the knees and ankles of overweight people take a serious beating) to not having your internal organs slowly constricted by visceral fat, to a healthy, not over-stressed cardiovascular system that is probably likely to keep ticking along nicely and for a longer term, etc.
If on the other hand you are low on energy, physically feeble, get ill frequently, have little stamina, etc., then there is obviously a problem. But I didn’t get this impression from your prose.
Again, BMI is not the end-all be-all. Athletes, and in particular body-builders, tend to score in the overweight or obese range of BMI. Heck, even people with naturally large frames (broad shoulders, big ribcages, sturdy bones, etc.) naturally have higher BMIs without necessarily being overweight. And, of course, ectomorphs and mesomorphs and endomorphs of the same height cannot be expected to weigh the same. So (WAG here) you and your sister might be naturally very petite, and she may have a substantially higher percentage of body fat than you, perhaps accumulated somewhere (such as her belly) where it is particularly conspicuous, and so forth, prompting some of the comments you report (of course, the comments might also be coming from people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about).
True. But generally speaking a thin person is substantially healthier than a fat person, if both engage in moderate exercise and eat a healthy diet. Of course, the fat persons have the distinct advantage that their stores of energy will allow them to stave off starvation a while longer when your airplane crashes on a remote mountainside – if the thin people don’t devour them!
Cat Fight, you are definitely not the only person sick of the Marilyn phenomenon! I for one think there are other significantly hotter women from around that era to pick from, women with healthier habits and better natural looks. Without knowing her dress size, weight, or BMI, I would unhesitatingly nominate the luscious Sophia Loren, who was a total hottie far longer and more consistently than Marilyn.
I’m sorry, but where on Earth do you guys and gals get the idea that people don’t find the thin attractive? Forget models and movie and tv celebs for now. Who among female singers are considered attractive, huh? Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Avril Lavigne, Jennifer Lopez, Jessica Simpson, Jewel, Mandy Moore. The list goes on. Who on that list isn’t extremely thin? What female singer today is considered by the public to be attractive? The chubby, sorry “curvy”, girls or the thin ones? Wait! Most of those girls ARE curvy! They just don’t have CREASES. They have the classic hourglass figure so I return to chubby. I don’t know of a single chubby singer that is considered sexy by the public. Care to share some examples?
Well, if you focus on the set of female pop singers, which is actually an emerging phenomenon, I believe they are patterning themselves after modern porn actresses. I’m being completely serious. Not just their looks and fashion in general, but their promotional material and especially their videos are quite pornographic. I say that as an enthusiast of good pornography, not in any manner implied to detract or criticize. As an example, Jessica Simpson is the classic porn star type, in fact with some make-up and a good bra she could probably play the quintessential porn starlet Jenna Jameson in a biopic.
I think this shift is happening because porn is hot and porn sells.
An obvious solution to correct fashion and TV’s ultra-thin messages is to bring porn more and more into the mainstream. The women of porn body image is, to me, rather healthier and more attractive than the ideals being forced by fashion and television (compare: feminine traits such as large breasts and round asses or stick figures?).
I think this is worth stressing – Marilyn Monroe struggled to keep her weight down. She didn’t fall so easily into the acceptable weight range for Hollywood starlets that she didn’t have to worry about it. So it’s not just that she seems a bit heavy by today’s standards, she seemed that way by the standards of her own time.
It’s true that she wasn’t known as a great brain, but in fairness to Marilyn I think she’d have liked to have been. At the very least she admired intelligence in others, and famously favored intellectual men.
Women who do not want to look like women and starve themselves to be and stay a sort of fleshed skeleton.
Little Girls on a diet of salad.
Mothers preventing little (and older) girls to eat what they like.
Designers making cloths for skeletons, using skeleton looking models, and gain with this detachment of reality international approval and succes.
Women who do not protest against this, but strive and struggle and diet (and even take drugs) to fit in that Skeleton Clothing instead of wanting to be provided with clothing that is made to fit them.
Women who voluntarely undergo the most painful operations to look like Barbie (or oversized Barbie when it comes to the Artificial Breast section).
And last but not least:
Men who find walking skeletons more attractive then women with the natural, sexy shapes of a woman.
What?
In my view such men have even a greater problem then women who believe that looking like a dressed skeleton makes them attractive and sexy.
Imagining The Horror of The Naked Woman Skeleton… Shiver…
Salaam. A
What? Indeed. Please take a second look at the pictures of the women society says is sexy. Can you see their bones? Nuff said. They aren’t skeletons. I’m getting sick and tired of you guys touting that belief. No one likes the waif look. We like women who have muscle tone and definition. But if it (stomach, legs, arms, chin?) jiggles (except for one area) it’s not attractive. If there’s a crease it’s not attractive. Smooth muscle definition. THAT’S hot. Not muscle bulk (generally speaking). But definition. That’s a healthy woman. And pop singers are generally healthy, and considered sexy too.
I have avoided this thread before now. I just cannot resist any longer.
Ah, the poor man who has not experienced the sublime joy of the (non breast) jiggle. What extasy he must be missing. What hights of rapture must be hidden from him. It is sad. I weep for him.
Sexiness has far more to do with apptitude than it does with abdonminals.
