I just finished watching the online episode of Dying to be Thin from PBS. You can view it here:
The show is packed with interesting quotes:
“Everyone wants to know the secret to being thin because that… that’s success… that’s love, that’s glory, that’s power – that’s a crock.”
“Sometimes they make it look so glamorous to have an eating disorder.”
“In some ways we all have distorted views of what is beautiful. And the repeated exposure to a particular image teaches you to like that particular image. And we have become so used to seeing extremely thin women that we have learned to think that this is what is beautiful.”
“The whole society is involved in the perfection game; that we can all fix our bodies, make our bodies over. “
“I see the common theme in all of this is that women are using the appetite as a voice and they’re using the appetite to express different things depending on their situation.”
“When I was heavy, I was ignored instead of nurtured. And when I was really thin all of a sudden I was nurtured and taken care of and the teachers loved me and they cared about me. Gaining weight was the worst thing. I was just so ashamed of my body. I felt like I was the biggest failure.”
“The scale becomes your altar. It becomes the site where you pray every morning. You pray that it will be down another pound or another ounce or anything to show that the work that you’re doing – and the work is starving – is working, because other things in your life aren’t working.”
“I believe that very few women escape a battle with their bodies.”
“During a binge people will typically report something changes. At least they feel numb – they’re not thinking about whatever it is that they were worrying about. So there is a reward there. They don’t feel good, but they feel different and they feel some relief.”
“Plus size is no different than being skinny. It’s just another way of being beautiful.”
It was a little glurgy at the end with the “cured” girl writing a letter to the hospital that treated her. but it had a lot of good things to say also.
The most interesting portion of the show for me was the section about bulimia. I don’t have purging problems, but I have dealt with bingeing ever since childhood. I was surprised to learn that it takes about three months of staying away from bingeing before the body recovers and starts acting like a normal digestive system. The signal of fullness isn’t as strong with someone who has regularly binged as with a normal person, and it takes three months of not bingeing to start getting back to normal.
I’ve never gone three months without bingeing my entire life.
That’s probably why weight loss is still a struggle for me, so my new goal is to refrain from bingeing for over three months. That is what I’m striving for to get my body back to normalcy. This was a very helpful documentary for me, even though it focused on anorexia nervosa instead of binge eating.
Via: Online Documentary Illustrates Devastation of Anorexia
Buy Walking Videos
A new weblog is posting items from a Sears Roebuck Catalog from 1902. Even back then, they were ripping people off with obesity cures.
Adding yet another “magic” food to the list, Korean pine nuts are being touted as a weight loss food.
This photo of Christina Milian was an entry in the Photoshop contest, Worth 1000. The picture is done so well, however, that I wouldn’t be surprised if it showed up in a woman’s magazine. Of course, the author of the article would be “concerned” for Christina’s health and have an entire sidebar about corseting.