Christina Hendricks is one of the stars of Mad Men and her curvy beauty makes all the men’s heads turn. What the frak could that fashion critic for the New York Times have been thinking?!! Just look at her give Betty the low down on the office here:

• Mad Men – Joan (Christina Hendricks) gives Peggy the 411

I first saw Christina Hendricks in the excellent science fiction series, Firefly, over eight years ago. She played the evil genius, Saffron, who nearly wiped out the brave crew of Firefly and almost outwitted Captain Malcolm Reynolds.

You can see her in her evil and busty glory here:

The next time a comment from someone makes you feel like your body doesn’t quite measure up, remember the idiotic fashion critic at The New York Times. There are always imbeciles out there whose sole goal in life is to bring other people down. Don’t let them decide how you feel about your body. Walk with the grace and swagger of Christina Hendricks and keep your head high.

You become a vegan.

But what happens when being a vegan isn’t enough? When there are so many people out there who are also vegan, it doesn’t make you feel special enough, so you need to take it one step further.

You become a raw food vegan.

But what happens when being a raw food vegan isn’t enough? When there are so many people out there who are also raw food vegan, it doesn’t make you feel special enough, so you need to take it one step further.

You become a freegan.

At this point, you find yourself rummaging through a dumpster to find your daily meals.

Maybe it’s time to reconsider the idea that your diet is supposed to make you feel unique, special or superior. When they said that you are what you eat, I don’t think they meant that as a judgment of your personality, just as a guideline for food choices.

Using your diet as a statement of your political beliefs is just as disordered eating as anorexia, bulimia or binge eating. If you need to feel good about yourself, your diet isn’t going to make you feel any better than earning a lot of money, wearing the coolest clothes or exercising a lot. There is ALWAYS someone out there doing more than you and you cannot outdo the crazy people of this world.

If you feel some sort of superiority from your diet of choice, it’s time to re-evaluate your emotions and find a way to aid your self esteem that doesn’t involve being better than other people.

Otherwise, you’ll find yourself eating out of a dumpster.

The announcer says:

Hi, I’m Bob. I’m the spokesperson for the Coca-Cola company. I’m here today to ask you to continue buying Coke. I’m sure you’ve been drinking it for years and if you still enjoy it, then I’d like to remind you to buy it again sometime soon.

Basically, it’s just brown sugar water. We haven’t changed the ingredients lately, so there’s nothing new I can tell you about that. Uh, changed the can around a little bit, though. You can see that the colors are different there and we’ve added a polar bear so the kids’ll like us.

Coke’s very high in sugar and like any high calorie soda, it can lead to obesity in children and adults who don’t sustain a very healthy diet. And that’s it, it’s Coke. It’s very famous, everyone knows it. I’m Bob, I work for Coke and I’m asking you to not stop buying Coke.

If any soda was forced to advertise at this level of honesty, I don’t think anyone would drink it.

Video via: What If Advertisers Couldn’t Lie?

• Japan Goes Bananas for a New Diet – TIME

The Morning Banana Diet regime is simple: A banana (or as many as you want) and room temperature water for breakfast; eat anything you like for lunch and dinner (by 8 p.m.). A three o’clock snack is okay, but no desserts after meals, and you have to go to bed before midnight. Sumiko Watanabe, a pharmacist in Osaka designed this stress-free diet to help increase the metabolism of her husband Hitoshi Watanabe, who had been rather overweight. In due course, Mr. Watanabe lost 37 pounds.

Here is a video explaining it:

If you notice, the most important part of the diet is number four:

Eat until you’re full, but not stuffed.

This simple concept is THE reason that people might lose weight on this diet. It’s an idea that Weight Watchers and many other diet programs have promoted for the last decade. Being able to eat until you’re satisfied, but not full is the biggest predictor of whether you’ll be able to lose the weight and keep it off.

This diet has caused runs on bananas in Japan and it looks like Dole is trying to create the same fervor in the United States. They are calling it the Dole Banana Diet. Look at this advertisement I pulled out of People Magazine last month.

According to Dole,

Bananas contain resistant starch which research shows blocks conversion of some carbohydrates into fuel, boosting fat burning by forcing your body to rely on fat stores instead – a sure aid to sustainable weight loss. Dole has created a delicious banana diet to help you stick to your New Year’s resolution.

Will the Morning Banana Diet make you thin?

Maybe… I think we need a lot more research on the “magical” powers of resistant starch. Replacing your usual breakfast with one banana could save you anywhere from 400 to 700 calories, depending on what you usually eat for breakfast. That amount of caloric reduction could result in a loss of a pound a week as long as you don’t over compensate at lunch and dinner.

Is the Morning Banana Diet hazardous?

Probably not. There is a risk of feeling REALLY hungry before lunch, especially if you deal with low blood sugar on a regular basis. I prefer to have protein with every meal because it makes me feel full. More importantly, eating a banana for breakfast every morning is a really good way to get sick of bananas and never want to eat them again. They are a GREAT addition to your diet but do you really want to make yourself sick of them?

Are you going to try it?

Sorry, Dole, I’m not buying it any more than I bought the Three Apple a Day Diet or the Dairy Diet. Sure, I’m going to eat bananas when they sound like a good breakfast, but the Morning Banana Diet just sounds like a way to make Dole very rich.

Watch out. Even the seemingly healthy ideas are backed by people trying to take your money. Choose a diet that is balanced and that you can live with. Adding more fruits and vegetables to your diet is a good option, but any plan that tries to convince you that one certain food is THE answer is just trying to take your money.

It reads:

Now that I’ve lost the weight, fat people disgust me.

This postcard just brings to light the stark reality of fat hatred. I’ve talked about this a couple of times before. The first time, I suggested that people don’t really hate fat people. It’s more complicated than that.

• Starling Fitness » Why Do Skinny People Hate Fat People?

It didn’t take too many comments to realize that I was totally wrong about that idea and that there are people out there who HATE the overweight.

• Starling Fitness » Why Do Skinny People Hate Fat People? REDUX

There is nothing that we can do about other people’s feelings about us. All we can control is our actions and our own feelings. Focus on yourself and let those fat haters stew in their own juices.

PostSecret’s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a 24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.

I can tell you what doesn’t work. When I bring my own healthy treats, I feel totally left out when Mike comes out of the gas station with his selections. In the past, I have brought apples, veggies and even Weight Watchers bars for my own treats, but no matter how good they were, I felt cheated.

I realized that part of the fun of being on the road is stopping at the truck stops. Even if I buy some veggies at the foodmart, they are better than veggies from home somehow. I have to go in the truck stop to use the bathroom and I feel left out if I don’t buy a treat.

This time, I bought veggies in Fillmore and a sparkly lip gloss in St. George. Both of them felt like a treat, especially the lip gloss.

When you’re out on the road, you don’t have to suffer to stay healthy. What you need is a chance to stretch your legs, take a potty break and get yourself a treat. The treat doesn’t have to be food related. It could be a funny bumper sticker or a novelty lighter. As long as you feel like you are getting something fun, it’s good.

• Physical Activity and Nutrition : Chronic Disease Prevention : NYC DOHMH

Here is the commercial they have talking about the dangers of sugary sodas. Warning, it’s kind of gross.

It says:

Drinking one can of soda a day can make you 10 pounds fatter a year.

Don’t drink yourself fat. Cut out soda and other sugary beverages. Go with water, seltzer or low fat milk instead.

It’s true that sugary sodas can pack on the pounds, but quitting them isn’t just as simple as switching to water. Many sodas have caffeine, which is a powerful drug that will kick you in the gut if you go off it cold turkey. Sensitivity to caffeine withdrawal is different for each person, but there are tried and true ways to stop drinking soda and minimize the symptoms. I wrote an article about it here:

• Starling Fitness » How To Quit Soda

If you are ready to stop drinking yourself fat, give yourself a few days to muscle past the caffeine withdrawal. Once you’re past them, you’ll be free to substitute water or seltzer for your soda.

Via: Rudd Sound Bites: Nauseating New Anti-Soda Ad

You can see the trailer for Disfigured here:

Anyone who has ever wished they could get anorexia has thought about it. When Lydia asked Darcy for “anorexia lessons,” I sat there in awe of it. Yes! I had always wanted someone to teach me how to get anorexia. If I had to have an eating disorder, why couldn’t it be the popular one?

Lydia and Darcy’s experiment goes wrong, of course, because it’s a story about loving yourself at any size, but that isn’t what messed me up. What really screwed me up and set my healthy eating back for at least a month was Darcy’s view of the world.

There is a scene when Darcy is giving Lydia anorexia lessons. They are sitting in the park, watching girls walk by and Darcy is ruthlessly commenting on their bodies. Any little flaws, whether they be muffin tops or minor bulges, are pointed out and criticized by Darcy in order to get Lydia into the anorexic frame of mind.

This is how it is. This is blood sport.

It made me think that if I were to get to my goal weight, I might become one of those skinny people who hate fat people. I didn’t want to be that judgmental person that Darcy was and it took me a while to realize that I wouldn’t become that person, but I have to tell you there was a lot of bingeing before I got to that point.

It was a good movie and it had a great message, but it messed me up when I saw it.

Robin Marantz Henig starts the article, telling her side of the story. She was a health and fitness writer while her daughter was growing up. When Jess was nine months old, a stranger made an off-handed comment about Robin’s baby, which turned into Robin’s obsession with making her daughter thin and acceptable in her mind. From the beginning paragraph, when Robin describes her daughter belly-dancing, she just CAN’T stop herself from demeaning her.

She wore a costume of bright blue and a gold hip scarf with jiggling coins. Her midriff – also jiggling – was bare.

She goes on to pay lip service to the dance by calling it graceful, but I can tell that the “jiggling” belly was the first thing on her mind. From the tone of Robin’s side of the story, you might think that it was all a misunderstanding on her daughter’s side, but one paragraph shows that Robin is still trying to spare her daughter the “pain” of being fat.

When she was 16, Jess sat me down one night and told me she’d been bulimic for years.

That was a VERY brave thing for Jess to do. I never did tell my grandmother about my eating disorder spawned by her desperate attempts to spare me the pain of being fat.

My first thought was she couldn’t be [bulimic], or she wouldn’t be so fat.

When I read that I KNEW with a capital “K” that poor Jess had experienced all that I had, but unlike me, she didn’t have a mother to run home to who loved her just the way she was.

When I read Jess’ side of the story, however, I learned that it was MUCH worse.

When I was 6, my mother, a journalist, wrote an article for Woman’s Day called “Kids Get Fat Because They Eat Too Much… and Other Myths About Overweight Children.” Under the main bar was a sidebar about how she’d turned me from a slightly chubby 4-year-old into a slightly less chubby 6-year-old… by feeding me less.

Let’s be honest. It wasn’t by “feeding her less.” It was by STARVING her. Just like when my grandma fed me 600 calories a day, Robin was starving her daughter because some random woman had said, “I love fat babies,” when Jess was nine months old.

This was typical. When Mom wrote about children and health, I appeared in the role of Fat Kid Saved by Diet or Exercise.

Not only was Robin mistreating her child, she wrote about it regularly for women’s magazines. The kind of magazines that my grandma read. Not only did she starve her own daughter, she recommended the similar treatment of children all over the nation. Maybe even including me.

Somehow the two of them have mended their “fractious mother-daughter relationship,” but I have no sympathy or clemency for Robin. No matter how much she thinks she has changed and accepted her daughter for the way she is, there is monster lurking in there who will never be satisfied, even if Jess were to wither away to a wisp of herself.

Believe me, I know this because I was a wisp of myself when I was 17 years old and my grandparents never accepted me. In their minds, I ALWAYS needed to lose weight. Even as an adult, when I got down to a healthy weight for my height, my grandpa never mentioned anything about my weight loss. Instead, he recommended that I go to Weight Watchers like his friend had done.

There is no satisfying beasts like Robin and my grandparents. Sure, they love us, in their way. They think that the constant negative comments about our bodies will somehow spare us pain, never realizing that the only people causing us pain about our bodies are THEM.

If you have a person like this in your life, I doubt you will ever be able to have a civil conversation about weight. Even if you think you’ve made a breakthrough with them, like Jess and Robin, know that it’s just a truce, not a victory. You will have to find someone different for support with your health and fitness because you can never depend on them to be helpful without bringing up all that pain from the past.

Disfigurement from liposuction is a very REAL result, but having scars and misshapen skin isn’t considered a medical risk. Here is some more information from Discovery Health’s website:

• Liposuction Risk : Risks of Liposuction : Discovery Health

Whether reported or not, liposuction problems are real enough — though some, such as wavy or uneven skin after fat removal, are not medically serious.

Considering the risk of dying from plastic surgery (like Kanye West’s mother did), liposuction doesn’t seem worth the risk. When you add the chance of being disfigured, I’m surprised how many people are willing to have the procedure.