🚀 go-pugleaf

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"
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Lauren Crawford  //  crawford@ben.dev.upenn.edu