Reworked (with the artist’s permission) from a poster featured on Orac’s blog.

As Tim Minchin said in his beat-poem Storm:

Do you know what they call Alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine.

Bring on the homeopathic lagers.

According to the founder of gut busters being thin nowdays is simply proof that you can afford someone to help you to be thin in a ‘obesogenic’ age. Which, quite frankly is crap.

Then Dapin meets Michelle Bridges. As two of his friends have recently lost a significant amount of weight using her new diet she obviously knows what she is on about. I disagree. I could write a restrictive diet and sell it and people would lose weight. I have absolutely no qualifications but with a smattering of googling you bet I could come up with something that helped people lose weight – short term just like Bridges does. It doesn’t mean that I have any idea what I am talking about. It doesn’t mean that the people who have lost the weight are in any way better off either.

Bridges: “As I said to one of my contestants, You’re standing on the corner of Man-Up Road and Pussy Street. Which way are you going?’”

I’m going down ‘F you and your sexist crap’ Way.

Out of all of this I think this is what I found most disturbing:

Bridges: “And a lot of exercises that used to be contraindicated are now the latest fad,” she says, “like burpees. Once upon a time in the fitness world, people were like, ‘Don’t give anyone burpees: they’re so bad for you.’ Now, I prescribe them in the newspaper.”

Now I prescribe them in the newspaper. For people I have never seen, for whom I am not there for to ensure they are doing it properly and not doing themselves an injury. I wonder if they are able to sue if they do get injured?

Luke Istomin: …even rolling the ab wheel is back. “That was ruled out a couple of years ago because people thought it was too bad for your lower back,” he says, “but if your core strength is fine, you can do that.”

I’m assuming that this guy works at a gym where they check that people’s core strength is fine. I certainly hope so. Where is this blase attitude about people’s bodies coming from? Is it be thin at all costs including your bodily integrity?

Shannon Ponton from TBL, scarily, comes closest to making sense.

He says people always ask him, “What’s the easiest way to lose weight?”

“There is no easy way,” says Ponton, “and the more fads and gadgets people come up with – the Abdomenizer 1000, 2000, 3000 or 4000, where you can get abs in three minutes a day – it makes business better for us.

“Because people know that once they’ve come home at three o’clock in the morning, drunk, and bought an Ab Sculptor off infomercials and it doesn’t work, that they’ve really got to come in and do some hard work.

“It takes commitment, it takes consistency and it takes discipline, which, at the moment, rules out about 85 per cent of our population because they’re just soft.”

Unfortunately he is also caught up in the thin is beautiful. What is wrong with being fit? Just being fit, as fit as you are able to be in your personal circumstances? Why are people soft if they don’t enjoy punishing workouts? How about trainers take up the challenge of making exercise fun before telling everyone they must do it? How about making it possible for everyone who wants to, to exercise? Or would that mean too much hard work? Who is soft now?

This comment also really pissed me off:

“In Australia we have an obesity crisis. We don’t really have a flexibility crisis.”

We don’t have an obesity crisis. We have a fat hate crisis. If everyone got over this ‘fat is bad m-kay’ reflex and concentrated on letting people live their own lives then we wouldn’t have a crisis. Personally I’d much rather be flexible than thin. I don’t care that pilates won’t make me thin because it makes me feel stronger and more flexible and more comfortable in my body. My fat body.

But how are we ever going to get any sort of acceptance of people’s bodies if we have this crap circulating constantly in the media? As a good friend of mine said “If you are looking for your business you won’t find it on my plate” to which I’d add “or on my body” unless of course I choose to share with you and that is strictly invitation only.

Lets just back up there a minute. Lower self esteem may be an issue for some men, but if ‘they don’t seem to care’ about their beer bellies as noted in the article, who is to say they have low self esteem or less sex because of their belly?

you only need to look around
to realise how many men are overweight and have a beer belly.
They don’t seem to care either.

Maybe because it isn’t having much of an impact on their lives?

People have been working around bellies of all sorts to perform PIV sex for a long time and if they can’t well guess what – people, being the wonderful creative species that we are – have worked out other ways to get our rocks off! I know, blow me down with a feather too, fat people have worked out how to have sex even with each other. You know, if you google it you can find images on the internet to show you just how to do it too. Some of them are even moderately safe for work.

Okay so we have dealt with the bullshit logical fallacy that fat men are so self hating they can’t bring themselves to have sex with anyone. Now, erectile dysfunction is a serious problem. Fortunately, whoever wrote this article has a modicum of common sense and does point out that this problem is not confined to men with a beer belly. I would go further and say that there are probably men with a beer belly who don’t suffer from erectile dysfunction and may never suffer from it. But an important health message is being lost amid the fat hate.

However, overweight men should view the prospect of impotence as a compelling motivation to lead a different lifestyle; one that involves regular exercise and a healthy diet. It is for their own sakes and that of their partners.

Erectile dysfunction does not just affect overweight men. [my emphasis] The world’s largest study to examine links between erectile dysfunction and heart disease found even minor erection difficulties in healthy fit men, can be an indicator of future heart risks.The authors of the study, undertaken in Australia and published last month in the on-line journal PLOS Medicine, examined data of 95,038 men aged 45 years and older.

The researchers concluded that erectile dysfunction does not cause heart disease but may be an early indicator of the problems that lead to it, such as a build-up of plaque in the arteries.

So it is something that can happen to skinny blokes too. Which kind of suggests that it isn’t a problem with fat. I haven’t studied medicine or health, but some Hoydens have and I have heard that many of the health textbooks still take the male body as the default option. So I don’t believe that we could get to 2013 and still be unaware that being fat = positive correlation with erectile dysfunction. If it happened to every guy who was overweight we would know about it. It would be a big thing (pun unintended).

So why the focus on fat?

From a previous post of mine with reference to the Komen storm earlier this year:

from Think Before You Pink: Critical Questions to Ask Before You Buy Pink – I’ll just list the questions here with my own brief summary of why it matters, go there for a fuller background on the questions.
1. How much money from your purchase actually goes toward breast cancer? Is the amount clearly stated on the package?
(Is it what you consider a reasonable amount, or is it insultingly small?)
2. What is the maximum amount that will be donated?
(Has the corporation capped the donation, has that cap already been reached, thus will your purchase actually contribute to the cause?)
3. How are the funds being raised?
(Does the corporation send money on from your purchase directly? Or do you have to mail in proof of purchase? Is the donation more than the cost of the stamps?)
4. To what breast cancer organization does the money go, and what types of programs does it support?
(Research? Screening? Treatment? Established and already well funded? New and innovative? Where exactly?)
5. What is the company doing to assure that its products are not actually contributing to the breast cancer epidemic?
(Many companies whose products have been linked to higher cancer rates invest heavily in the pink ribbon promotions. Should their cynicism be rewarded?)

s.e. smith writes on the challenges pinkification exemplarises for social activism generally:

The path of the pink ribbon and breast cancer awareness in general reflects a larger problem experienced by social movements. It seems that every time they develop a tool of solidarity and something to use as they work in a coalition to address a specific social issue, that tool is handily repurposed for profits, and before anyone can move to take it back, it’s too late. Social movements in general can be excruciatingly slow to adapt to changing circumstances, just as the breast cancer awareness movement was.

A movement that started with powerful intentions became commercial, gender essentialist, and repugnant in many of its mainstream incarnations, even as smaller campaigns and voices actively agitated against its framing. Those who oppose the use of sexism and gender essentialism in breast cancer campaigns are cast as opponents of action on breast cancer; in a strange twist, the people demanding that major breast cancer awareness campaigners be accountable first and foremost to patients are told they don’t care about breast cancer patients.

Ou’s whole post is well worth reading – the above quote is only a very short excerpt.

This short quote from the opening of a Feb 2012 article from Mother Jones on the Komen foundation as a very useful definition of pinkwashing:

“pinkwashing,” i.e. corporations donating a miniscule fraction of money earned from peddling stuff adorned with Komen’s pink ribbon to cancer research, or holding a run (after which less than half of the proceeds go to “the cause,” pre-overhead) rather than, say, providing decent health care to workers or keeping toxins out of water supply.

Image credit: Index thumbnail of pink cut-out dolls stuck into a lawn (author unknown) found on this fascinating 2010 post from Heart Sisters blog: What women with heart disease can learn from “pinkwashing” this month

”It may sound draconian, but why are we rewarding children for good behaviour at all?”

Okay so I cherry picked this from this article scaremongering on childhood obesity. *puts on ranty pants, places tongue in cheek (somewhat)*

So why do we reward children for good behaviour? I mean it’s not like we reward anyone else for good behaviour is it? Convicted criminals never get time off their sentence for good behaviour. We never train our pets with praise for showing behaviours we approve of ‘Good kitty using the scratching post’ ‘Sit! Good dog!’. We never get rewards as adults for good behaviour like turning up to work and doing our job and getting paid. Or getting a bonus, or a payrise or perhaps even a promotion. Nope never happens. We never get praised, appreciated, spoilt, pampered, awarded, or reap the benefits of our good behaviour. So why should children? Why should we encourage the behaviour that we want to see rather than just expect it without a word of suggestion? Why aren’t we the shouty mean angry parents that deep down we know we should be? Why aren’t our children constantly cowering seen but not heard, and seen seldom like they should be. Why do our children expect to be treated like human beings? Why the fuck shouldn’t we reward good behaviour?

Sure, the researchers main point is that we shouldn’t reward good behaviour with ‘sweets’. But this assumes that all good behaviour is rewarded with sweet food. I don’t know any parent that responds to a child playing quietly with ‘oh you are so good this afternoon here have a chocolate’ or use of an inside voice with ‘here is a lolly snake’. Praise and reward come in all sorts of forms and there is no reason not to occassionally reward kids with a bag of lollies or a sweet treat. Claiming that this is the reason for the “childhood obesity epidemic” is pure spin as is in fact this whole ‘epidemic’ rubbish.

FED on a steady diet of fast food, soft drinks and television, 20 per cent of children are overweight or obese by the time they start kindergarten.

Sure my kids like TV but they couldn’t eat a whole one. So is it all children or only 20% who have this diet of fast food and soft drinks? Surely if this were the case then the 20% would have health problems like malnutition rather than just being overweight? I don’t buy into the overweight = unhealthy schtick in case you hadn’t noticed.

So what is my solution? Simple fund public schools better so they can teach kids about healthy eating and exercise and give them opportunities to engage in fun play. Don’t shame them because of their body shape or size. Don’t encourage eating disorders by harping on about epidemics, and provide more funding for people who do suffer from eating disorders. Better train doctors to treat the person not Drs prejudices about fat people. Realise that fat people can be healthy people too and that fat may not be the cause of all illnesses but rather a symptom. Or someone might just be fat because they are. That fat people might be okay with that and that it is not harming you if someone else is fat.

\”Legitimate Rape\” by the Renegade Raging Grannies

With a bonus from the fabulously talented Taylor Ferrera:

\”Legitimate Rape\” by Taylor Ferrera

Please share any bits and pieces you have come across recently that have surprised, delighted, intrigued or otherwise positively engaged you. Or perhaps this week you could share any excellent rebuttals you have come across for antediluvian thinking aloud from people who should not be getting the public platform they have. Peter Jensen springs to mind.

I know you. We have a lot in common. You have been doing some reading and now you are pretty sure everything in the grocery store and your kitchen cupboards is going to kill you.

h/t Kate Harding

So here we are: the conservative states are demanding increased taxation to pay for increased services, and progressive groups are demanding the implementation of a market-based, individualistic funding model that will turn people with a disability into “potentially empowered consumers“. The cognitive dissonance, it burns!

But why does any of this matter? Surely any funding is better than none? What could possible be wrong with supporting a disability funding model that is “an entitlement-based funding mechanism, which will provide flexible, person-centred supports so that people can participate in ordinary, daily life.”

For starters, how about this study of a Queensland program of individualised funding that found:

“… few consumers felt that individualised funding arrangements had personally delivered the benefits which the quasi-market model and associated policy paradigm had indicated that they should receive.”

We are citizens, not consumers.

Lets just step back and look at that objectively shall we. Australians are more healthy (yay Australians, go us) but Obesity (ZOMG!!!!) looms large. So more of us are obese? But we are more healthy. So what is the fucking issue here again? Oh that’s right fat = bad. So we can ignore the Australians are more healthy for the more headline-ingly (yes I just made up a word, I’m fat I’m allowed to) exciting “Obesity crisis!” Although exactly how it is a crisis if we are more healthy is yet to be explained.

So onto the rest of this article. Chlamydia rates are increasing. OMG! But hang on, if all fat people are as unattractive as the average comments on an article about obesity will tell you then who is having all the sex. Hmmmmmm. *snippy tone* Might want to think about using some condoms in all that sex you are enjoying then *supercilious look* (no I did not make up that word).

Lung disease. Yep this sucks but more likely to be correlated with smoking than obesity or perhaps genetic disposition or work in some industries? Still not seeing the obesity crisis bit.

Diabetes. Okay here we go. What, what do you mean thin people get diabetes too. Really? Are you sure? There are two types? No one generally bothers to differentiate between them you say? Fat and thin people can suffer from either? Or both (no really, how sucky is that?).

One in four adults is obese and one in 12 children. But every Australian has at least one risk factor for poor health (what being alive?) and one in seven have five or more risk factors.

Lets focus on that again. One in four adults are obese. Everyone has at least one risk factor for poor health. One in seven people have five or more risk factors.

So one in four obese, one in seven have five or more risk factors. So some of those obese people out there have less than five risk factors to their health. Making them just the same as a thin person in terms of risk. Who would have thought it.

The most common risk factors are lack of activity and lack of sufficient fruit and vegetable intake. But of course we all know that anyone who isn’t obese is active and eats 5&2 every day. Don’t they?

Plus risk =/= certainty. Otherwise insurance companies wouldn’t exist to make healthy profits. So where is the obesity crisis again?