obesity

How Do You Define Healthy? [Plus: 22 "Men's" Exercises Women Should Do]

September 8, 2011

This is how Gym Buddy Megan defines healthy. And also, this is hands-down my absolute fave picture of her ever. Six scrambled eggs cooked in butter, a half pound of bacon, four potatoes worth of hash browns, six pieces of buttered toast, and a 32 oz. milkshake. And that’s just for breakfast. As the world watches in horror and fascination, Susanne Eman just keeps eating — literally — at her goal to become the fattest woman in history. Says Eman to The Sun, “The bigger I get, the better I feel. I feel more confident and sexy. Why shouldn’t I push the [...]

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How to Help A Child Lose Weight [Help a reader out!]

May 24, 2011

Courtesy of the State of Georgia’s new childhood obesity campaign Three hours of hysterical sobbing, a whole box of kleenex thrown and self-inflicted eye poking (yes, really) is what my third grader did when I assigned him a second sheet of math problems after he lied to me about having homework so he could go play with a friend after school. I am well aware that kids often do not do what we want them to. But then if parenting was meant to be easy they would’ve given us the user manual in the hospital. Instead we do everything we [...]

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Karl Lagerfield Wants to Sell You Ice Cream [And then mock you for getting fat]

April 25, 2011

Skinny Girl Eating Ice Cream: A study in social morés. Eclipsed only by the Fat Child Eating Ice Cream tableau vivant, nothing brings out more opinions than a thin girl with a cone. Some people are jealous: “Lucky genetic freak gets to eat ice cream and still look like that?!” Others are sad: “I’ll never be thin.” Others moralize: “Ice cream is bad for you, skinnyfat girl!” Some diagnose: “That has eating disorder written all over it – I remember when I used to starve for an entire day just so I could eat ice cream.” And some resolve: “I want [...]

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Selling Weight Loss to Children [Are kids the next casualties in the diet wars?]

April 19, 2011

“Tell me I’m not angry for no reason!!!” was the subject line on an e-mail from Gym Buddy Lindsey. I tried to imagine what would be so upsetting as to require the use of a double negative and extraneous punctuation.  That it continued with “I’m so pissed!!!!!!!!!!” only made me more intrigued. (And more entertained – you have to know Lindsey, she’s a very passionate person! We’re friends for good reason is all this tempest-in-a-teapot is saying.) She writes, “I just saw a commercial of a girl no older than fifteen talking about how she didn’t fit in at school [...]

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Do You Need to Look Healthy to Work in a Health Store? [Experimenting on Humans]

April 11, 2011
historylol

Four years of Psychology has made me a huge fan of social experiments. Yes, my undergrad is in psych and yes, I’ll wait for you to stop giggling. While it didn’t make me a good counselor – as evidenced by my choosing Computer Information Systems for my graduate degree – it did give me a good background in how the human animal acts in herds. These social experiments come with risks. You may recall the summer I was hired as a research intern to see how much free ice cream people would eat if no one was watching them (answer: [...]

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Which is Worse: Being Called "Fat" or "Whore"?

February 10, 2011

Source Interview anyone these days about food and no matter what their gastronomic predilections, chances are they will speak of them with a fervor bordering on religiosity. The vegan preaches her diet – nay, lifestyle in the truest sense of the word: it is not just food but an overarching style of life – with a proselytizing zeal reserved in earlier times for Christian missionaries in Africa. The low-carb Paleo follower punctuates his scientific claims with rhapsodic sermons about miracles although the results skew more towards reappearing abdominal muscles than healing leprosy. Consider the last time you were “preached” to [...]

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Happy Meals Are Bad, Twinkies Are Good: Welcome to the Food Wars

November 13, 2010

Or make them fat. Whatever. How could something so happy – it’s even got happy in the name! – cause so much angst? By now you’ve certainly heard about San Francisco banning the McDonald’s Happy Meal. (Note: they actually just banned the toy from being included in meals that don’t meet certain nutritional criteria but as a mother of four I can tell you that’s pretty much the same thing.) You’ve probably also heard that a judge overturned the ban. The war on Happy Meals has grown pretty heated in the past couple of weeks and naturally, this battle has [...]

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Marie Claire Says TV Show about "Fatties" is Socially Irresponsible

October 27, 2010

This Dr. Phil poster may be a joke but many people are serious about their cruel comments. Marie Claire has done it again! After the article that rocked the food-blogging world (which was nasty, sneaky and unfair… and also made some very valid points that I am still thinking about) last month, the lady mag is back in fine foot-in-mouth form with a new article titled “Should Fatties Get a Room (Even on TV)?” that claims to explore whether programming starring happy fat people is “disturbing” and “implicitly promoting obesity.” Their unsurprising fashion-mag answer: yes and yes. (Which I find [...]

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Are Carbohydrates The #1 Health Menace? [Good Calories Bad Calories]

September 15, 2010

Sparkly vampires that don’t die in sunlight and fall in love with inarticulate teenage girls, zombies eating brains with grapefruit spoons and their pinkies out (or off?) with Elizabeth Bennett, hapless-yet-cunning teens battling to the death in a reality show that makes Jersey Shore look like The Christian Ladies Aid Society – these are the types of books that keep most people up at night. Me? I’ve been up for a week now reading the gripping tales of The Fat-Cholesterol Hypothesis and The Carbohydrate Hypothesis spun by Gary Taubes in his game-changing tome Good Calories Bad Calories. Kinda like the [...]

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The Number One Most Effective Weight Loss Tip [Giveaway!]

May 24, 2010

“50 Ways To Burn More Calories” is the biggest, boldest headline on this month’s Allure magazine (the one with a spacey Megan Fox on the cover where she says that she can’t stand looking at herself and the thing she loves most is to be alone so she often spaces out to block out crowds – good thing she chose Hollywood as her lifelong career then!) The list of 50 tips mostly includes non-stunners like “get more sleep” “walk more” “watch less TV” and “eat whole foods.” Salmon and brown rice, the cure-all for everything! Thankfully they also include some [...]

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