OriginalCyn
Well-Known Member
What follows is a portion of a letter written in response to the "Bad/Selfish Older Men Who Dump Older Women Who Cannot Make Babies For Them and Then Take Up With Fertile Young Chickies" article at Salon.Com. (Incidentally, that article generated, so far, almost 40 pages of letters...but the last several pages predictably veered off-topic and degenerated into a lot of insult-trading. The original article is here: http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2007/08/01/men/index.html )
A very charming [sarcasm] fellow who calls himself "Ben Dover" (ooh! "bend over"--get it? how clever! [more sarcasm]) has spent a lot of time on that response thread putting down, first, women-in-general, then feminists in particular...and finally women who have "let themselves go" by getting fat! He writes:
"...I saw an interview with John Edwards wife and she was saying how she lost 5 or more dress sizes by eating right and being more active within the past 6-9 months. Why didn't she so this before she had a recurrence of cancer? Not that difficult."
Now, everyone knows that John Edwards' wife's cancer is TERMINAL, right? Ever seen anyone with terminal cancer? No matter how fat they've been, for how long...they go through a period where they lose a lot of weight and look "acceptably slender" for a while...and THEN they get increasingly thin, weak, and finally skeletal-looking. This happened to a former co-worker of mine who had pancreatic cancer. And, yeah, she was doomed to die, but she looked more "tight and toned" than she had ever looked in her life, for just a little while.
So using Elizabeth Edwards' case to "prove" his point is a totally bogus example. (Also, do I detect a smug inference that if she'd only been motivated to lose the weight sooner that she wouldn't have had the recurrence of cancer in the first place? If that's what he's implying, then he's even more "beyond despicable" than I'd originally thought.)
ALSO: JUST ABOUT ANYONE CAN LOSE WEIGHT ON A DIET. The problem is 1-keeping it off long-term, and 2-not winding up fatter than you started out.
It took me TWENTY FRICKIN' YEARS (!) to figure this out. Only about 5% of all dieters are able to take it off and keep it off. Everyone else re-gains everything that they've lost and then gains even more. Making normal-sized women feel fat for being larger than a size 2 causes everyone to go on a diet and then eventually--and ironically--become obese in the long run. If every one of us started out accepting ourselves for what we look like and NEVER went on a diet in the first place, we'd probably all be of a normal weight, with, maybe 5-10% of people, at the most, being overweight and obese. Instead, we've got a situation where the ranks of overweight and obese Americans increases every year. Eventually, we will constitute the majority of Americans, if these trends do not stop and reverse themselves. And the only way to stop it is to undo all of the brainwashing and just STOP DIETING!
What does it REALISTICALLY take to stay healthy and happy? Stop the habit of mindlessly eating and drinking "junk," get up off of our rear ends and move around once in a while, learn what kinds of foods are healthy and which are not, and eat accordingly...but stop, stop, STOP temporarily starving ourselves!
But if you were to go to page 38 of the "letters" section of the Salon.Com article, you'd seethe to read all of the hateful and ignorant "helpful suggestions" regarding motivating us fatties to lose weight! (I especially "liked" the one about denying us health care until we'd been sufficiently punished for our weaknesses.)
And Ben Dover? You can just bend over and shove your smugly self-satisfied misogyny right up your ass!
A very charming [sarcasm] fellow who calls himself "Ben Dover" (ooh! "bend over"--get it? how clever! [more sarcasm]) has spent a lot of time on that response thread putting down, first, women-in-general, then feminists in particular...and finally women who have "let themselves go" by getting fat! He writes:
"...I saw an interview with John Edwards wife and she was saying how she lost 5 or more dress sizes by eating right and being more active within the past 6-9 months. Why didn't she so this before she had a recurrence of cancer? Not that difficult."
Now, everyone knows that John Edwards' wife's cancer is TERMINAL, right? Ever seen anyone with terminal cancer? No matter how fat they've been, for how long...they go through a period where they lose a lot of weight and look "acceptably slender" for a while...and THEN they get increasingly thin, weak, and finally skeletal-looking. This happened to a former co-worker of mine who had pancreatic cancer. And, yeah, she was doomed to die, but she looked more "tight and toned" than she had ever looked in her life, for just a little while.
So using Elizabeth Edwards' case to "prove" his point is a totally bogus example. (Also, do I detect a smug inference that if she'd only been motivated to lose the weight sooner that she wouldn't have had the recurrence of cancer in the first place? If that's what he's implying, then he's even more "beyond despicable" than I'd originally thought.)
ALSO: JUST ABOUT ANYONE CAN LOSE WEIGHT ON A DIET. The problem is 1-keeping it off long-term, and 2-not winding up fatter than you started out.
It took me TWENTY FRICKIN' YEARS (!) to figure this out. Only about 5% of all dieters are able to take it off and keep it off. Everyone else re-gains everything that they've lost and then gains even more. Making normal-sized women feel fat for being larger than a size 2 causes everyone to go on a diet and then eventually--and ironically--become obese in the long run. If every one of us started out accepting ourselves for what we look like and NEVER went on a diet in the first place, we'd probably all be of a normal weight, with, maybe 5-10% of people, at the most, being overweight and obese. Instead, we've got a situation where the ranks of overweight and obese Americans increases every year. Eventually, we will constitute the majority of Americans, if these trends do not stop and reverse themselves. And the only way to stop it is to undo all of the brainwashing and just STOP DIETING!
What does it REALISTICALLY take to stay healthy and happy? Stop the habit of mindlessly eating and drinking "junk," get up off of our rear ends and move around once in a while, learn what kinds of foods are healthy and which are not, and eat accordingly...but stop, stop, STOP temporarily starving ourselves!
But if you were to go to page 38 of the "letters" section of the Salon.Com article, you'd seethe to read all of the hateful and ignorant "helpful suggestions" regarding motivating us fatties to lose weight! (I especially "liked" the one about denying us health care until we'd been sufficiently punished for our weaknesses.)
And Ben Dover? You can just bend over and shove your smugly self-satisfied misogyny right up your ass!
