If it's hurting you to watch TV, turn it off. Really. Or else, just watch the Discovery Channel. No one on that show (don't actually have cable, so can't remember the exact name) featuring West Coast Choppers is going to make you feel huge.
Honestly...I see these stick thin little celebrities, and I shudder. I sort of feel bad for them too, but then they start talking out of both sides of their mouths. Like Halle Berry...She was just preaching about how sad it is that women feel they need plastic surgery & whatnot, but at the same time the movie she has out right now is all about how good she looks in a vinyl catsuit. Jamie Lee Curtis made a big splash a year or two ago by being photographed for Redbook "raw" I guess you could say, no makeup, no support garments, nothing. She said she wanted women to know that these "perfect" actresses they see were in reality anything but, and it was OK to look that way. This year? This year she says her next movie will probably be her last because she doesn't want to watch herself grow old onscreen. Do you see the inconsistency here?
It's all over the place, it really is. Look at the women's magazines the next time you're at Wal-Mart. We've been talking about this in the Buyer Beware forum. You have these weeklies,
Woman's World &
First for Women. Every single week, it's one of two things: either a huge picture of a woman talking about how much weight she lost and a smaller picture touting the latest calorie-laden recipes that you just
MUST make for your family, or a giant picture of a dessert of some sort and a smaller headline about this week's miracle diet.
Glamour magazine does it too. I have the copy with Queen Latifah on the cover. They're talking about how gorgeous she is as a "larger woman." If she's such a gorgeous larger woman, then why the **** wasn't she on the cover before she lost those twenty-five pounds they're talking about in the magazine? Remember
Mode magazine from a few years ago, or its clone
Grace? "Style beyond size"...Even when they were preaching about loving the body you're in, they had size 12 "plus" models.
I'll let you in on another thing. This celebrity thinness? It feeds on itself. These women are never good enough. I think it was Vivica A Fox who starred in "Kill Bill"? She was a size six going into the movie, but that was too big! A size six! They put her with a personal trainer for something like three hours a day to get her down to a size two. My other favorite example is Janet Jackson. Before she was known for nipple jewelry she was known for washboard abs. Her personal trainer said in a magazine that she was a size 4 when he started her in on a regimin of something like 200 situps a session, but he "worked with her" and got her down to a size 0. As if a size 4 was too large! And lest we forget, Renee Zellweger was lambasted as fat (and apparently lost a boyfriend because of the weight gain) when she put on weight to play Bridget Jones...She weighed 124 pounds when the "fat" talk started. Ladies, Renee Zellweger is 5'5". One twenty-four is on the low end of normal for that height. Once she graduated from underweight to normal weight, Hollywood called her fat.
It is
so hard to step outside ourselves. But we need to. At some point, you have to look at the celebrity machine, at what it does even to the women in it, and realize how absolutely farking insane it is. It is totally divorced from reality. We owe it to ourselves to not hang our worth on that star. I mean, if the gal next to you started talking about how her neighbor's dog commanded her to lose 20 pounds, you'd realize it was nuts, right? Getting your self-worth from people whose money is made by making you fee less is no better.