rigorousintuition.ca

Nordic wrote:Jack, I was just giving you a hard time. I know what you're getting at, but I take issue with it, in that I don't believe there is such a thing as true objectivity, and I find the notion of it to be actually dangerous. To look at people with maximum objectivity, in my experience, makes one look at people as simply organisms, like any other organism.

As far as how fat people are treated, I am disturbed by the article posted because I, someone who has never been fat, and who when young could eat anything I desired and as much of it as I desired, am now faced with a 7 year old son who seems to be developing a little bit of weight problem. He could stand to lose a few pounds. I'm not saying that as a fat-hater, but as someone who is worried about both his health and his future. At the rate he's going he could have a real weight problem by the time he's 12 or so. I don't know how to deal with this. I never had to deal with it. And when my son says he's hungry, goddamnit I want to feed him. He's a big guy so he has a big appetite.

JackRiddler wrote: What can I say from this remote location that is valid or helpful, given that I'm not the one dealing with it? Perhaps the following is obvious to you already, but it may be useful so here goes: Big kids do tend to carry fat as they grow, I can say from experience. If you have not already done so, I would urge you for a start to banish the thought of "weight problem" from your mind and focus instead on your son's diet. Goddamnit you should feed him! But you can ban or limit things like coke, juices, sugar cereals and other empty junk. Make him eat better and make him eat fruits and vegetables, without speaking about weight at all. He's only seven, you should be in control of this. In my experience, I would cut up a bunch of fruits into chewy pieces and present them right after school, no alternatives until they're consumed. Kids will usually reach for these. Are you in a position to withstand the resistance from him, and persuade him to go along?

"The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law"
May 13, 2010
Just One Look
By EMILY BAZELON

THE BEAUTY BIAS
The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law

By Deborah L. Rhode

252 pp. Oxford University Press. $24.95


In 2002, Jennifer Portnick taught exercise classes and worked out almost every day. But the fitness company Jazzercise turned her down for a franchise because she weighed 240 pounds (height 5-foot-8). Jazzercise told Portnick that its instructors “must have a high muscle-to-fat ratio and look leaner than the public.” Portnick complained to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, under a law the city had passed in 2000 to prevent discrimination on the basis of appearance. She won. And Jazzercise changed its tune nationally, saying it would no longer demand thinness from its instructors.

To the Stanford law professor Deborah L. Rhode, this is a rare and signature triumph against the cruelty and waste that are the effects of appearance-based bias. She points out that Portnick’s size didn’t interfere with her teaching, yet Jazzercise shut her out reflexively. And in almost every other place in the country, that would have been that. Portnick would have had no legal remedy. Rhode’s new book is her brief for changing this. She sees discrimination against people based on what they look like as deep-seated — and she also has deep faith in the power of law to address it.

As Rhode acknowledges, her framework for “The Beauty Bias” owes much to “The Beauty Myth,” by Naomi Wolf, which lit up the feminist stratosphere almost 20 years ago. Wolf argued that because appearance matters so much for their success — in work, love and almost everything else — women were sacrificing the gains of feminist liberation on the altar of breast implants and doomed diets.

It would be lovely to dismiss this analysis as outdated. But of course it isn’t, as Rhode convincingly shows. Cosmetic surgery has quadrupled over the last decade. Women still wear stiletto heels that ruin their feet and backs and buy any wrinkle-smoothing cream for any price. Being fat, Rhode says, continues to carry “as much stigma as AIDS, drug addiction and criminal behavior.” (Meanwhile, men walk around largely unplagued by their imperfections. Unless they’re short, in which case they suffer, too.)

It does no good to urge women to sally forth in sensible flat shoes while their hair grays and their faces prune. Feminists learned long ago that taking this line only makes enemies. Rhode has internalized the lesson. When she points out that there is no visible gray hair on the heads of any of the 16 female United States senators, ages 46 to 74, she chalks it up to “professional necessity.” Rhode herself is a blonde (I’ve met her and once edited her work for Slate). But that hasn’t saved her from “emergency remedial shopping” at the hands of her Stanford colleagues and a stylist who disastrously teased her hair before a fancy event that she was supervising for the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession. (Yes, Rhode sees the irony in forced primping for an event to promote women’s equality.) Instead of berating herself for succumbing to the fuss, she turns her inquiry from individual choices to the legal framework in which they’re made. Are cosmetic surgery and diet products safe and well-regulated enough? Are legislators and courts sticking up enough for people like Jennifer Portnick?

The Constitution bars discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin and ethnicity. By contrast, only the state of Michigan and six locales — the District of Columbia; Santa Cruz, Calif.; Madison, Wis.; Urbana, Ill.; and Howard County, Md., along with San Francisco — have laws that protect against appearance discrimination. Rhode understands that plenty of her readers will think it “asks too much” to add this new category to the list of legally protected groups. “From their perspective, even if such discrimination is unfair, the law is incapable of eliminating it, and efforts to do so will result in unwarranted costs and corrosive backlash,” she writes.

But before the libertarians spit out their coffee, Rhode asks them to consider how “fat and short” laws have fared so far. She gathered the data and found that the six cities and counties average between zero and nine cases a year. Michigan averages about 30, and annually only one of those complaints goes to court.

Rhode sees no backlash against such sparing enforcement. She can plausibly claim that the upshot of extending protection against appearance discrimination to other states and cities would be not a “barrage of loony litigation” but rather a solution in a limited number of rankly unfair cases. She marshals the deserving examples: a nursing school student who was expelled because officials thought her obesity made her a bad role model for patients; a bartender who was fired in Reno for refusing to wear makeup and tease her hair; a cocktail waitress who lost her job at an Atlantic City casino when her dress size increased from size 4 to size 6.

If you fear that civil rights law is already bloated, you’ll probably be unmoved. But Rhode insists that she’s not conjuring up an overlawyered world in which aspiring models sue for losing work. She would allow businesses to select employees based on appearance in the same way they can legally select on the basis of sex: if it’s a “bona fide occupational qualification” for the job.

Rhode is also ready to concede that “on the reform agenda of women’s rights advocates, appearance does not deserve top billing.” She just wants to talk about the perils of high heels and weight requirements along with the wage gap. Ladies, think about it the next time your feet ache.


Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Slate and the Truman Capote law and media fellow at Yale Law School.

Feeling Good Fitness

By Jennifer Portnick, Aerobics and Fitness Association of America (AFAA) Certified Aerobics Instructor and founder of Feeling Good Fitness, a provider of body positive aerobics classes, personal training and fitness consulting.

Why Dieting Isn't The Answer

As a personal trainer and aerobics instructor I often hear, "I know I can be healthy and happy if I just lose a few pounds." It seems we women in particular are always in search of that elusive perfect weight, the one at which we can accept ourselves and our bodies. Of course if we are feeling unhappy in our bodies the solution is to go on a diet, right? After all, any doctor will tell you that thin equals healthy and fat equals unhealthy. We certainly get this same message from going to movies and watching television. The closer we can come to being thin, we believe, the healthier we will become.

Wrong! Based on anecdotal evidence alone we can see that dieting is no solution. How many times have you or someone you know lost weight only to gain it back? How many times have you or someone you know lost weight and gained back more than you lost to begin with? Dr. Glenn Gaesser, author of Big Fat Lies, reports that at any given time nearly half of Americans are dieting to either lose or maintain their weight. According to National Institute of Health, a full 90% plus of dieters fall into the first category, and more than 80% of people fall into the second. Now, is this because we're a nation of gluttonous, weak and lazy people who can't control what we eat, or is there something else going on here that remains unexamined?

Our bodies really have a single goal, and that is to keep us alive. When we begin a diet our bodies immediately register that the nourishment we need to live is in scarce supply, and we prepare for the "famine" biologically by lowering metabolism and storing fat. Little do our bodies know, the "famine" is not due to an actual shortage of food, it is self-imposed.

Despite the body's tendency to adjust to a dieting state, many of us do lose weight. For as long as we are dieting, though, we can expect to go through a recovery period where we feel hungry for no reason and generally out of control around food. This recovery period is our body's way of recovering from the "famine" and making sure we do not ever go without again. It is during this time that we tend to regain weight and eat more than our body needs, not out of weakness or gluttony, but because our body is designed to help us survive. And surviving is a good thing, right?

Dieting leads to feelings of anxiety and powerlessness. After all, we think, what can we control if we cannot control our weight? Dieting also teaches us to distrust ourselves and our internal needs. If I were to eat every time I wanted food, the dieter thinks, I'd be as big as a house. I know this because I used to believe it myself, until I stopped dieting.

So if dieting isn't the answer, then what is? The amazing truth is, our bodies have a built-in system designed to regulate our weight and our appetite which dieters generally try their best to ignore. Once restrictions around food are removed and our bodies are left to regulate themselves, our weights will stabilize and we will find peace with food. Once we are working with our bodies instead of against them, taking care of ourselves completely, we can know a more balanced, healthful existence, where energies are devoted to the truly important things in life, and not to food obsession and body hatred.

Jennifer Portnick
email: Feeling Good Fitness website: Feeling Good Fitness
Body Positive Aerobics Classes, Personal Training and Fitness Consulting
"Don't Change Your Body, Change The Rules"

Jennifer Portnick

I'm 5'8" and 240 lbs
Get enough rest every night of the week
Dance at least one hour six days a week
Do yoga two days a week
Eat my veggies
Get acupuncture and massage treatments monthly for stress management
Tell others "no" when I am overloaded
Love my body

There are now 1.02 billion hungry people in the world (nearly 50 million in the US). At the same time, there are 1 billion people who are overweight, many of whom are obese and suffer from diet-related diseases that can be as deadly as starvation. Hunger and obesity are not the result of low yields, they stem from the overproduction of toxic junk food, the scarcity of healthy organic food, and injustice in the way farmland and food are distributed.

Gouda wrote:Monsanto's GMO Corn Linked To Organ Failure, Study Reveals

Monsanto's GM corn MON863 shows kidney, liver toxicity in animal studies

Exposed: the great GM crops myth - Major new study shows that modified soya produces 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent

nathan28 wrote: They also knew that some foods cause more insulin to release and some people release more insulin. We now know that people may become resistant to insulin and have diabetes-like symptoms because of over-production of insulin, which leads to inefficient use of sugars and fats...

Plus-Size Revelation: Bigger Women Have Cash, Too
June 18, 2010

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Corseted into a size 18 white denim dress, wearing heels that made her about 6-foot-2, Gwen DeVoe, a former model and fashion-show producer, stepped onto a runway in Manhattan this week and made a pitch to retailers for the plus-size woman.

Those stores that don’t carry bigger sizes? “Shame on you, baby, shame on you,” Ms. DeVoe said. “Every curvy girl that has a dollar is willing to spend that dollar.”

So retailers are realizing.

That same day, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 28 percent of the adult population was obese last year, the highest percentage yet. Almost two-thirds of American women are either overweight or obese, according to the most recent CDC figures.

As doctors and public health officials encourage Americans to slim down, the fashion industry is embracing Americans as they are. Both mass-market stores like Forever 21 and Target and expensive designers like Elie Tahari are deciding the fattening of America is a big business opportunity, and are reinvigorating a market that had faltered during the recession.

The standard clothing that most stores have focused on in recent years fits fewer and fewer people. And as retailers search for ways to invigorate sales, plus size is one of the few categories where there is growth. The plus-size market increased 1.4 percent while overall women’s apparel declined 0.8 percent in the 12 months leading up to April 2010 versus the same period a year earlier, the most recent figures available, according to NPD Group, a market research firm.

“It just makes business sense,” said Ms. DeVoe, who founded “Full-Figured Fashion Week” last year to press mainstream retailers to embrace bigger sizes. “I’ve been told several times that no one fantasizes about being a plus-size woman, and that’s probably true, but the fact remains that you have to work with what you have.”

That is not always so easy for retailers venturing into the world of larger shoppers. Some bigger women do not like to try on clothes in the same fitting rooms as smaller women. Plus-size stocks take up valuable storage space, and not everyone is big in the same way, meaning stores cannot count on, say, a size 16 dress fitting most 180-pound women — one might have a larger torso, another big thighs and another wider hips.

“There are variations not only in the frame, but if you’re looking at larger women, you’re also looking at the way fat deposits are arranged around the body,” said Susan Ashdown, a professor at Cornell who studies body shape and clothing fit by creating a three-dimensional scan of a person’s almost-nude body.

Plus-size clothes, which now generally begin at size 14, have been around for at least 90 years, since a Lithuanian immigrant, Lena Bryant (her name was later misspelled as “Lane” on a business form), turned a maternity-wear business into a line for stout women in the 1920s. There have been several efforts to make plus-size clothes more available, but, as the name of the 1980s-era plus-size chain The Forgotten Woman suggested, larger women have usually been relegated to stand-alone boutiques stocked with shapeless purple caftans.

“One of the things that happens with plus-size women is, as a rule, they’re pretty under-served,” said Bill Bass, president of Sonsi, a social networking and retail site for heavier women. “The big companies forget about them or ignore them, or make them go online to buy their clothes since they won’t have them in stores.”

Although Americans have grown steadily heavier in the last decade, women’s plus-size clothing still makes up only 17 percent of the women’s apparel market today, according to NPD. There just is not much supply or variation in plus-size clothes for women to buy, said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at NPD. And the big retailers have mostly stayed away.

Cost is one issue. Plus-size clothes are more difficult, and expensive, to make than more traditional sizes. Material can be the largest portion of a garment’s cost — up to about 60 percent — and larger sizes require not only more of it, but sometimes different production processes.

“Its not just about how much fabric is required,” said Deepa Neary, a retail consultant at A.T. Kearney, a consulting firm. “You’re actually using wider bolts of fabric, and that sometimes requires special machinery to produce the garments. You often don’t get to pass that on to the consumer, so your margins are not as high as the regular-size clothing.”

And with limited floor space, retailers say it’s hard to display, say, blouses from size 0 to 24. So the plus market “unfortunately gets treated like an exile,” said Kathy Bradley-Riley, senior vice president for merchandising at the trend forecasting firm Doneger Group.

Given those difficulties, some companies have pulled back on plus-size offerings. Old Navy and Ann Taylor stopped selling plus sizes in stores in the last few years, and now sell them only online. Liz Claiborne, which still sells some plus-size clothing, shut down its plus-size line Elisabeth, along with Sigrid Olsen, which carried larger sizes. It sold Ellen Tracy, which also had a plus-size offering. But given the strong sales in the sector more recently, and women becoming ever more overweight, some companies are giving the plus-size market a second look.

The chain Forever 21, which is based in California, introduced Faith 21, its larger-size line, last year. Though sales were much stronger than the company expected, that did not mean it had mastered the category. “We have been working through the kinks even now,” said Linda Chang, Forever 21’s director of marketing. “It doesn’t come as easily as maybe the smaller clothing would.”

Last summer, Target began carrying a line called Pure Energy that translated young, trendy clothes to larger sizes, adding to its more mature plus-size offerings.

“We definitely view this category as a growth opportunity,” said a Target spokeswoman, Katie Heinze. After testing Pure Energy in some stores, Target decided to carry it in all 1,740 outlets.

Elie Tahari, the high-end designer, began selling a plus-size line this year, and at Full-Figured Fashion Week, more than 25 other designers showed their plus-size clothes to an audience of retail buyers and plus-size women.

Backstage before a runway show on Wednesday night, it looked like a sorority house before a formal: shoes everywhere, makeup stacked on tables, the smell of hairspray and baby powder, and women lounging about in silk robes.

On stage, Ms. DeVoe emphasized that plus-size women were ready to buy clothes.

As the crowd whooped, Ms. DeVoe shouted, “My pockets are fat!”