1) Sunday Magazine’s cover feature in the New York Times entitled (on the cover, at least), “Are Your Friends Making You Fat?”

Francesca cannot sum up this article for you because she does not want to Get Depressed. So she just stares at the screen with her hands over her eyes, peeking through her fingers, trying to build up the courage to read the damn thing. Can someone with more stamina please tell her what it says?

Also tell her whether that article contradicts the study Francesca was recently reading about (and which she now cannot find; help?), in which it was found that skinny people who ate next to an obese person were unlikely to copy the obese person’s eating: If the obese person ate a lot, the thin person would eat less (presumably so as not to get fat like that other guy), and if the obese person ate very little, the thin person would eat more (possibly under the logic that the fat person is on a diet, but if one is already thin it’s OK to indulge). So, in a way, the best way to stay skinny is to have lots of fat friends who eat a ton and inspire you to … not be like them?

Oy. Francesca is so depressed!

2) Many bloggers have been discussing this article, about 34-year-old Samantha Clowe, who died shortly before her wedding, after being on a 500-calorie-a-day crash diet for 11 weeks.

First, Francesca expresses sadness for Samantha and her loved ones.

Second, Francesca notes that, technically, we do not know for sure that the diet is what killed Samantha. Anyone who has seen House M.D. or CSI knows that it can take a while to figure out what happened. The coroner has not made a statement about this. It is possible she had some other, underlying, condition and the diet had little or nothing to do with it.

Third, all that having been said, Francesca also notes the pressure to be a slim bride, and the fact that a physician gave Clowe the go-ahead to eat only 500 calories a day (a starvation diet, given that she was 5’9″), for weeks and weeks. This doctor should be ashamed, and read this blog.

Fourth, Francesca also notes that Clowe went on this diet “to get respect at work.” What was going on at Clowe’s job? It is possible that Clowe was too sensitive and perceived a lack of respect when there was respect; but Francesca suspects that her co-workers, too, should be taking a long, hard look at themselves.

Oy, depressing.

We briefly mentioned Frank Bruni’s memoirs yesterday, but “I Was a Baby Bulemic” which he wrote for the New York Times –adapted from his book– is the most honest, encompassing personal retelling of the beginnings of disordered eating.

I have a fairly healthy relationship with food now –I say that as I’m full from my lunch of mixed greens, pâté, homemade tzatziki (y’all I’m NEVER getting through these two gallons of yogurt) , my famous soda bread and one of those super crunchy foam-caged pear apples– but I recognized myself (and my mother) in almost every paragraph.

Enormous thanks to Lex for pointing this out.

So the rest of you go, read this and come back and let’s have a discussion. It’s a little heavy for a Friday, but who said heavy is bad?

Loving to eat, I mean REALLY loving to eat is slowly coming back into vogue thanks to renewed interest in Julia Child and several foodie blogs and yet there’s always a frisson of the forbidden.  Think about “food porn” and those marginally talented but uniformly busty TV chefs who tongue strawberries in soft focus and moan for the cameras. It’s a dirty little secret that’s not such a secret.

It’s no wonder then, that Dominique Browning called Frank Bruni’s –the outgoing New York Times’ restaurant critic– memoir Born Round brave.

“I hold him in even greater estimation, not only for his discernment and his accomplished prose but for his bravery. “Born Round” is a book about growing up with a love of food, family and friendship. And it is, more important, a book about a lifelong struggle, one that drives an endearing, heartfelt narrative. “Born Round” is about being fat.”

[...]

“His mother worried about his weight, but any diet she imposed was stymied not only by her need to feed everyone, but by Grandma. The problem was simple: food was love. “You love Grandma’s frits? . . . Then you love your Grandma!””

[...]

“Still, he always carried at least an extra 10 pounds. “Once a fat kid, always a fat kid, never moving through the world in . . . carefree fashion.” By the time he attended college, he had become adept at deploying a panoply of weight-loss tricks, from popping amphetamines and laxatives to forcing himself to vomit.”

read the rest of the article here and, if you’re as intrigued as I am –I think Bruni and I might have the same grandma– you can purchase the book by clicking the image below.

So let me ask y’all a question.

I hate publicity stunts. Not that I haven’t pulled a few myself in my day but I’ve always hated myself in the morning.  In general I believe all manner of stunt publishing should be kept safely behind glass with “break only in case of emergency” written on it.

This holds particularly true for the “no such thing as bad publicity” stunts.  The stupid reality shows, the purposefully incendiary articles, I just hate to give them any press at all, which puts me in an odd position. Am I upholding what few shreds of journalistic integrity I’ve developed as a newspaperman or am I depriving my readers of the whole story?

Take for example PETA and their latest campaign that has a cartoon of a fat woman in a bathing suit with the heading “Save the Whales, Go Vegetarian” on it. I mean, that’s just tiresome to me. It’s a stunt, we all know it’s a stunt, and yet they’re getting tons of free publicity –they even just got a bit from this blog which makes me insane– because people see the bait and go after it.

This isn’t news; it’s marketing and by writing about it we’re unintentionally creating the most odious of all pseudo-journalistic droppings: the advertorial.

I mean, it’s not like we’re unaware that fat hate is out there or that any of us are shocked that PETA who has never met an anti-feminist image they haven’t wanted to exploit (see also: Pamela Anderson’s spokesnipples) are preying on women’s self-loathing, so it’s not like these people are offering us any new or useful information, by re-publishing them the only message it really sends is “if you ridicule fat people, you’ll get a lot of response.” and when print, television, radio and new media are ALL competing for your attention, that response –whether positive or negative– is solid gold.

So I’m opening it up to you. Do you want to see these stunt-type fat-bashing articles or links or would you be just as happy focusing on the positive?

 I find this article from Megan McArdle at The Atlantic to be extremely interesting:

This week, Health Affairs published a new study showing that–quelle surprise!–obesity accounts for an ever growing share of our health care costs.  They put the number at about 10%.  So I decided to ask Paul Campos, the author of The Obesity Myth, what he thought.  The book, which everyone should read, argues that the health benefits of losing weight are largely imaginary; that we are using “health” to advance our class bias in favor of thin people, particularly thin women. [...]

Megan: Let’s start with the first. If there’s one thing that everyone in America knows, it’s that being fat is really unhealthy. Why do you call it a fake problem?

Paul: The correlations between higher weight and greater health risk are weak except at statistical extremes. The extent to which those correlations are causal is poorly established. There is literally not a shred of evidence that turning fat people into thin people improves their health. And the reason there’s no evidence is that there’s no way to do it.

So saying “let’s improve health by turning fat people into thin people” is every bit as irrational as saying “let’s improve health by turning men into women or old people into young people“. Actually it’s a lot crazier, because there actually are significant health differences between men and women and the old and the young — much more so than between the fat and the thin.

Megan: So why is the public health community so set on this issue as the major driver of our health care costs?

Paul: Because we’re in the midst of a moral panic over fat, which has transformed the heavier than average into folk devils, to whom all sorts of social ills are ascribed.

Megan: Aside from rising health care costs?

Paul: Well according to the obesity mafia our kids are all going to die sooner than their parents, which sounds like a moral problem as well as one of health care costs. It’s all complete nonsense.

Megan: Do you think being overweight is a proxy for things that DO make a difference, like fitness?

Paul: It’s a weak proxy, but yes it has some marginal significance. It’s good to encourage people of all sizes to be active and avoiding eating disordered behavior (like dieting), but this isn’t because lifestyle changes will make fat people thin people. They won’t. I’d like to talk a little about the statistics if I may. 

read more here

So I woke up this morning and started my day by browsing the Yahoo headlines, as I often do. Most of the time I don’t even find a story worth following, but I look anyway on my way to pick up my mail. Sometimes I even get a good laugh at some hysterical flapdoodle or find my way to a story that actually does matter to me.

And then I find my way to stories like this one.

Yes, according to the New York Times, hot hip young men are carefully crafting tiny potbellies. Not the adorable miniature pigs, mind, but on themselves. The story carefully explains that the ‘Kramden’ as it’s been dubbed in honor of Ralph Kramden of The Honeymooners, as played by the inimitable Jackie Gleason.

The Times claims this trend is a reaction to the demand for flat abs over the past few years, but lays it even more at the feet of President Obama:

Hipsters, by nature contrarian, according to Dan Peres, the editor of Details, may be reacting in opposition to a president who is not only, as the press relentlessly reminds us, So Darn Smart, but also hits the gym every morning, has a conspicuously flat belly and, when not rescuing the economy or sparring with Kim Jong-il, shoots hoops.

Oh, and it’s also the fault of women that men started worrying about their bellies at all, you know:

Until recently, men were under no particular obligation to exhibit bulging deltoids and shredded abdominals; that all changed, said David Zinczenko, the editor of Men’s Health, when women moved into the work force in numbers. “The only ripples Ralph Kramden” and successors like Mike Brady of “The Brady Bunch” had to demonstrate were in their billfolds, said Mr. Zinczenko, himself a dogged crusader in the battle of the muffin top. “But that traditional male role has changed.”

As women have come to outnumber men in the workplace, it becomes more important than ever for guys to armor themselves, Mr. Zinczenko said, with the “complete package of financial and physical,” to billboard their abilities as survivors of the cultural and economic wilds.

Of course the fact that it’s now fashionable (assuming we believe this at all) for men to carry more weight around the middle (and woe betide the man who can’t manage to gain weight, apparently) doesn’t let the ladies off the hook, we are warned.

Besides, ‘That Guy’ with the ripped abs and bulging biceps probably doesn’t exist at all, according to personal fitness trainer Robert Morea:

“When do you ever see that guy, anyway?” Mr. Morea asked, referring to those legendary Men’s Health cover models, with their rippling torsos and famished smiles. “The only time you really see that guy, he’s standing in front of an Abercrombie & Fitch store.” Perhaps, he suggested, there is really only one of them. “It’s the same guy. They just move him around.”

Now if only someone would recognize that ‘That Girl’  doesn’t exist either. If we did, maybe things like the recent lopping of Kelly Clarkson on the cover of Self wouldn’t happen.

Francesca told you a few months ago about one of her favorite You Tube mavens, Lauren Luke, who posts delightful videos with makeup application demonstrations.

Did you catch the New York Times article about Lauren, whose makeup line, By Lauren Luke, is now on sale at Sephora?

A 27-year-old single mother from South Shields near Newcastle in England, Ms. Luke is nothing if not approachable. She is the kind of open-faced, plain-spoken Englishwoman you might expect to encounter at the butcher shop or corner pub. With her plump proportions and pretty if nondescript features, she seems an unlikely candidate to shake up the beauty world. And yet it appears she is doing just that.

Francesca bristles at the statement that being plump makes one an unlikely candidate to shake up the beauty world, but the more Laurens who rise and succeed, the fewer people who will be surprised.

Congratulations, Lauren! xoxo!

Subscribe to Lauren Luke’s You Tube channel.

Purchase By Lauren Luke products.