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- From: crawford@ben.dev.upenn.edu (Lauren L. Crawford)
- Newsgroups: alt.support.big-folks
- Subject: Article in Allure magazine
- Message-ID: <98597@netnews.upenn.edu>
- Date: 20 Nov 92 23:06:33 GMT
- Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
- Organization: University of Pennsylvania
- Lines: 53
- Nntp-Posting-Host: ben.dev.upenn.edu
-
- A friend lent me this magazine called "Allure." I have all but given up
- looking at magazines like this, and was about to chuck it, when I read the
- editor's column. Listen to what she says:
-
- "There is a picture of me on the wall in my parents' house. I'm at my
- school's May Day celebration. It is a perfect spring day; I'm wearing a
- white dress with ribbons. I'm smiling, and my face is as round as a wheel
- of Brie. I am fat -- not Roseanne Arnold fat, just 17-year-old,
- girls'school, field-hockey pudge.
-
- "Since May Day 1976, I've become a walking diet encycolpedia. The margins
- of my copy of Ulysses from college are covered with notes: Breakfast,
- bran muffin, 150 calories; lunch, four saltines, two pickles, 58 calories;
- dinner, two baked potatoes, 200 calories; total 408. (I remember more
- about those meals than about Leopold Bloom's journey.) I've lost weight,
- regained it, and lost it again. And then I've tried to wash my mind of
- calorie counts, the taste of Tab, the lessons of Herman Tarnower, and the
- guilt.
-
- "We all know the statistics: that about 90 percent of those who go on
- diets end up gaining most of the weight they've lost, and often some more.
- That being on a diet creates all kinds of nuttiness that can end in
- serious eating disorders. The best solution for all of us is to try to be
- normal: to eat when we're hungry, to stop when we're full, and to replace
- obsession with other, nobler pursuits.
-
- "One organization is aiming to cure women of dieting and the self-hatred
- that goes along with it. At a meeting of Overcoming Overeating, women
- learn to come to grips with the idea that they may never be thin. So they
- practice things like standing naked in front of a mirror and accepting
- their bodies. They throw out their bathroom scales (and at the doctor's
- office, stand with their backs to the numbers). They try to distinguish
- between real hunger and "mouth hunger" in hopes of abolishing compulsive
- eating. These techniques may not sound like much, but as one group leader
- says, they require "a tremendous amount of courage."
-
- "As for me, I've forgotten how many calories are in an Oreo, even though I
- still feel like a minor criminal whenever I eat one. I'm off structured
- diets -- and I've sworn never to print one in Allure. It's a start. As
- the leader of Overcoming Overeating says, 'Maybe it's possible to become
- so accepting of ourselves that we may not think about being thin.' What a
- lovely thought."
-
- Whoa! I had to look at the cover again to make sure I wasn't reading Big
- Beautiful Woman magazine. If the fashion industry and the media start
- wising up, we may actually get somewhere!
-
-
- --
- The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world --
- if only from time to time. -- Annie Dillard, "An American Childhood"
- --------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Lauren Crawford // crawford@ben.dev.upenn.edu
-