October 17th, 2008
Thought it couldn’t get any crazier than the baby food diet or the swallow a tapeworm diet? While surfing around gossip blogs today, I ran across a reference to celebrities going on an “IV diet.” As in intravenous. Diet. I found the blurb here:
One of Hollywood’s dirty little secrets is the ‘IV diet’, in which [...]
Filed under: Celebrities, Cold Hard Cash, Eating Disorders, Gossip, Health, International, Science, Tidbit, Weight Loss | 16 Comments »
September 15th, 2008
It’s Fashion Week, which means we get things like this amazing collection by Christian Siriano and another look at the size zero model phenomenon. Apparently, they’re back in style this season. (So much for Whitney’s victory on America’s Next Top Model.)
Spurred on by a spike in reality TV shows promoting extreme dieting, women are once [...]
Filed under: Advertising, Advocacy, Eating Disorders, Fashion, Kids, Project Runway, TV | 19 Comments »
September 11th, 2008
Whenever I’m asked who this blog is for, I inevitably say it’s for my teenage self—and for teenagers who are like her. So it might not be too surprising that my hot button issue is the way the media talks to teenage girls. For example, in magazines like Teen Vogue that may be subtly [...]
Filed under: Advocacy, Books, Celebrities, Eating Disorders, Fashion, Feminism, Kids, Magazines, Media | 16 Comments »
August 21st, 2008
Oh this is a fucking wonderful idea: an MTV reality show called Model Maker that asks women to lose up to eighty pounds in twelve weeks. Doing the math, that’s approximately seven pounds per week. The goal is, of course, to be “thin” and “beautiful” enough to be a model. (One of [...]
Filed under: Eating Disorders, Feminism, Health, Media, Personal, TV, Weight Loss | 15 Comments »
July 15th, 2008
You’ve probably heard of pro-ana groups online. They’re pro-anorexia groups where people, mostly young girls, of course, go to share their sources of “thinspiration” and talk about their strategies for ingesting the bare minimum of calories. Well now there’s We Bite Back, a post-pro-ana group dedicated to helping and supporting people who are recovering [...]
Filed under: Advocacy, Eating Disorders, Feminism, Kids, Media | 2 Comments »
April 1st, 2008
Here’s the e-mail I got today (bolding mine):
I guess I don’t really know how to start this, other than I just read the blog about the 14 year old with a bad self image, and it gave me the courage to say something too. I’m 16 years old, and I am bulimic. It doesn’t matter [...]
Filed under: Advocacy, Eating Disorders, Health, Kids, Meta | 30 Comments »
March 21st, 2008
Like the Movies recently liked to the Body Image Project, describing it as a blog “where people anonymously write in about their perceptions of and struggles with body image.”
Age 17
In middle school I remember being happy. No one talked about their weight or their body. I am now in high school and the girls [...]
Filed under: Advocacy, Eating Disorders, Feel Good Friday, Tidbit | 5 Comments »
March 12th, 2008
A very interesting and sad story about eating disorders within the Orthodox Jewish community, from Jezebel. Evidently, in arranging their marriages, one of the criteria for some Jewish men is that their brides be below a size 8.
And in a move reminiscent of that Ben Stiller movie, sometimes they take the mother’s dress [...]
Filed under: Eating Disorders, Feminism, Health | 27 Comments »
February 10th, 2008
I keep thinking about the Mike and Juliet Show segment about fat acceptance. I keep thinking of the comments I get from people who are starting to accept that they don’t have to hate themselves, and how much that inspires me. And then I think about their segment on binge eating disorder. And [...]
Filed under: Advocacy, Eating Disorders, Health | 9 Comments »
February 8th, 2008
As promised, I wanted to talk about the appearance of Morgan (aka Fatgrrl) on the Mike & Juliet show. Here are the videos (are you guys getting tired of Mike and Juliet yet? To think, two weeks ago I had no idea who they were).
There are also blow-by-blows at Morgan’s site and at Rachel’s site. [...]
Filed under: Eating Disorders, Meta, TV, Video | 13 Comments »
February 4th, 2008
So, you may have heard about the ridiculous bill being proposed in Mississippi that would weigh people at the doors of restaurants and then refuse service to the obese. Because fat people should be prohibited from eating entirely, obviously. GREAT IDEA!
A suggestion has now been made to modify the bill and apply it only [...]
Filed under: Eating Disorders, Fatism, Food, Kids | 27 Comments »
January 17th, 2008
…or anywhere else, actually. What diet, you ask? Why, a little something called the Tapeworm Diet. Where, presumably, YOU SWALLOW A FUCKING TAPEWORM.
Now I have provided this very short and rudimentary background to helminth therapy to create the idea of “good” worms versus “bad” worms… The beef tapeworm, in addition to immunoregulatory properties, [...]
Filed under: Eating Disorders, Food, Health, Science, Weight Loss | 33 Comments »
January 12th, 2008
According to Wired magazine, chewing too much gum can have a laxative effect and cause dramatic weight loss.
Given that most weight-loss drugs have a difficult time producing one-pound per week weight loss, you might think the scientists would trumpet these findings as a prelude to the newest blockbuster pharmaceutical. But sadly, the drop in pounds [...]
Filed under: Eating Disorders, Food, Health, Magazines, Tidbit | 12 Comments »
December 3rd, 2007
Seventeen has launched the Body Peace Project, “aimed at changing the way young girls view their bodies.” Three celebrities have signed on: Fergie, Brittany Snow, and Ashlee Simpson. According to IMDB news:
The trio want teenagers to stop obsessing about the shape of their bodies. Editor in Chief Ann Shoket launches the year-long project [...]
Filed under: Advocacy, Eating Disorders, Hairspray, Magazines, Media, Movies | 15 Comments »
October 25th, 2007
We don’t have a category for “Thinism” or “Weight Gain” and maybe we should. Miss England has been told to gain weight if she wants to win the Miss World title. Supposedly, this is to set a better example for the youth of tomorrow. Which is, of course, binge eating.
Miss England says:
Miss [...]
Filed under: Eating Disorders, Feminism, International | 15 Comments »
October 3rd, 2007
A-list BFD tipster Kari sent in a link to an article that struck me almost as a follow-up to our conversation about the fashion industry (in the post below). We talked about the editors; what about the designers who choose to use ever-younger, ever-thinner women (and sometimes even children) as models? And where does it [...]
Filed under: ANTM, Eating Disorders, Fashion, TV, Weight Loss | 9 Comments »
September 26th, 2007
There’s no way really to put a positive spin or a clever title on this bit of research, which shows a link between childhood rape and obesity in women.
Researchers surveyed about 2,500 men and women aged 21 and found 7.5 % had had intercourse against their will before the age of 16. While the [...]
Filed under: Advocacy, Biggest Loser, Eating Disorders, Feminism, Health, International, Kids, Science, TV | 40 Comments »
September 13th, 2007
Another thing that made the rounds while I was off was this video, but it’s well worth linking to, for those of you who haven’t seen it. It talks about the effects that magazine images and other media have on young women.
If you’re unable to view the video, this article hits many of the [...]
Filed under: Eating Disorders, Feminism, Kids, Magazines, Media, Tidbit | 7 Comments »
June 6th, 2007
A fascinating expose about the pressure to be thin in the world of modeling. An ex model dishes about everything from pervert photographers to having her fingers measured as a test of whether she was “too fat.”
There was a strange camaraderie, however, as all the models at my agency had been told to [...]
Filed under: Eating Disorders, Fashion, International | 6 Comments »
April 18th, 2007
Unfortunately, Jen Wade is on vacation, so we are going to have to think about this science for ourselves. But I enjoy that this research involves feeding rats Oreo cookies.
“Boggiano assigned rats as ‘binge prone’ or ‘binge resistant’ based on the amount of palatable food, (Oreo® cookies), they consistently ate when given [...]
Filed under: Eating Disorders, Science | 3 Comments »
