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HEALTH
Skeletally Skinny, Obese, or In Between
Women live longer, but will we ever be at peace with the bodies in which we live?
by Cynthia Moore
Are you pear-shaped, apple-shaped, obese
or skinny? Slight-, medium-, or large
framed? Flabby or fit? Anorexic, bulimic,
fat-phobic, a compulsive eater, an incessant
dieter, an exercise addict? Do you sometimes
think you are all of these? At the same time?
And do your moods depend on how you feel
about your body? It's no wonder. Since the
obsession with slimness hit the industrialized
world like a ton of cream-bathed linguine,
women's perceptions of their bodies have
been thrown far askew.
Operating on shaky standards of health
with relation to body weight, some American
women are aerobicizing themselves to death.
They blindly forge toward perfection, uncer
tain if their efforts are making them healthy
or shortening their lives.
For many women that perfection has little
to do with maintaining a body weight con
ducive to maximal health. Instead, some are
striving very hard—or feeling guilty when
they are not—for some arbitrary thinness set
high in the media sky.
Perhaps the flat-chested flappers of the
1910's and 20's, or maybe Twiggy, at a whop
ping 97 pounds, set this media ball rolling.
Nevertheless, the idea of attaining some sort
of physical perfection is swallowing, and
coughing back up, droves of American
women. Witness the fact that some statistics
reveal as many as 25% of all college women
to be bulimic. A 1987 Boston College study
revealed that 69.7% of its female students
suffer from one or more eating disorders.
The proliferation of life insurance com
panies early in the 20th century and the broad
acceptance of the U.S. Metropolitan Life
Insurance Company's table of ideal weights
are felt by some to deserve blame for the thin
fad. Whatever the fad's genesis, the paradox
ical noodles were set twirling. Armed with a
new standard of beauty to sell, the media
pounced. Thinness became ingrained in our
culture as something for which to strive. So
ingrained, some researchers argue, that as the
years have passed, even science has been
ignoring the facts.
One million Americans participate in
group weight reduction programs each week.
Five year follow-up reveals a 98% to 99%
diet failure rate. There is solid evidence that
the repeated weight loss and gain associated
with dieting, not fatness itself, is the seven-
cheese cream sauce in disguise. Many who
are overweight may be dieting themselves to
death.
The damage is not just physical. The
psychological ramifications of repeated diet
failure are infinite.
Though women are less obese than men
until the middle age mark, research repeated
ly reveals far more young women on diets
than young men. In a 1987 study of high
school students, 16% of young men contrast
ed sharply with the 63% of young women on
diets on the day they were surveyed. In the
same study, 18% of those females catego
rized as underweight were on weight loss
diets!
Media is symbi-
otically linked with
a medical community
which operates on
potentially erroneous
conclusions about the
extent to which fat is
fatal. Meanwhile,
many women are
hard at work
responding to the
stimuli. They com
pulsively overeat or
binge, fast, vomit;
they take diet pills,
diuretics, and large
quantities of laxa
tives; they exercise
maniacally; and they
pay big bucks to have
their fat tucked and
sucked. Often these
are not even fat
women!
The super-obese take horrific and danger
ous measures, such as intestinal bypass and
stomach stapling surgeries, in attempt to
attain "normal" weight. Basically, many
women feel driven to drastic lengths to
become thin. A woman in our culture
receives overwhelming information telling
her if she becomes thin, she will, by defini
tion, become healthy and beautiful—mostly
beautiful.
The Metropolitan Life table, that perva
sive standard for assessing weight, was based
on those who applied for life insurance in
1959—mostly white, high-income males.
The figures were then, of course, extrapolat
ed for women. Troublesome for the spouses
of the men on which they were based, these
numbers were barely pertinent for working
class women and women of color.
In 1979 the Met Life table, viewed as the
Bible of long life, was revised. The new chub
chart reflected an optimal weight of 10 to 15
pounds heavier. Who's to figure? And what
had all those little girls begun to binge and
purge about, anyway?
Another flaw in the magic table of long
life: it assumes no weight gain after the age
of 25. Men gain the most weight with age
during their 20's and 30's. Because women
tend to be less overweight than men at that
age—reaching their maximum weights as
much as two decades later—the table dis
criminates against
women more than
men. Even into old
age, the female slim
ness of youth is held
tenaciously as a stan
dard by both medical
profession and
media.
The cycle is com
plicated. Many stand
to profit by perpetu
ating it. Meanwhile,
the research commu
nity, as usual, is
pumping money into
probing men from all
angles while leaving
women to blindly
interpret the facts
and, often erroneous
ly, apply these to
themselves.
This is the way research has been working
for quite some time now. Remember when
the media was flooded with new information
about cholesterol and heart disease? Notice
Aunt Poly in those unsaturated fat commer
cials. She is thrilled with herself. As she
delightedly prepares the toast for Uncle
Clog's breakfast, she beams about slipping in
a fake-food butterish goop to replace butter
because she is worried about his heart.
She can't address the fact that as many
women die of heart attacks as men and that
those women more often die from their first
attack, because she doesn’t know this. And if
she did, there have been no major studies
telling her how her own cardiovascular health
is affected by exercise, aspirin therapy, relax
ation techniques, alcohol, and hypertension.
But you better believe she will implement
some new routines for Uncle Clog because he
and she and the rest of the Western world are
bombarded with information about his risks
of heart attack. Aunt Poly—who does not
know that cardiovascular disease is the lead
ing cause of death in women—may even
independently decide that she should adopt
her husband's new healthy lifestyle.
She may do herself more harm than good.
Apparently cholesterol is tricky in post
menopausal women, who just happen to be
the ones having the heart attacks. Their doc
tors dole out replacement hormones, but
research has yet to determine whether or not
this is wise. And hormone levels affect
cholesterol levels.
A recent U.S. News and World Report arti
cle says, "It is conceivable that cholesterol is
a less important factor in heart disease in
women than in men, but no one knows." The
slight oversight of excluding more than half
the population from the plethora of cardio
vascular research makes you wonder. Are
these older women— who live an average of ’
eight years longer than men—viewed collec
tively as bags of arthritic, osteoporostic bones
who have all been widowed by their hus
bands who choked on globs of polyunsaturat
ed spread and died in their sixties of their
fifth heart attacks?
Gaping holes exist in the information
that doctors are able to provide about serious
women's health issues such as hormone
replacement therapy, the prevention of osteo
porosis, heart disease, and breast and other
cancers. Apparently women are too difficult
to study with all those monthly hormonal
swings, not to mention their mood swings.
And after menopause hits and those hormone
levels plummet, they tend to get really bitchy.
Amidst this vast vacuum of research on
women's health, someone is doubtless pour
ing tons of research dollars into trying to dis
cover how best to get those fat women thin,
once and for all. Plenty of attention is given
to attracting our thinness and fitness dollars
and odds are good that women will remain
obsessed enough to keep the thin businesses
healthy.
If only those powerful forces would stop
killing women to perfection! If more
research funds were allocated to help us live
our long lives healthier, perhaps we could
reroute our perfect quests and learn to be at
peace with our bodies.
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Southern Voice/October 11, 1990
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