Quote of the Day

"Obese women may have the double whammy of being female and having higher body mass index."—University of Alabama at Birmingham researcher Rosalyn Weller, Ph.D., principal investigator of a study which found that "obese women display significantly weaker impulse control than normal-weight women." I guess our impulse control is crushed under the weight of the "double whammy" of being both fat and female.

The aforementioned study, by the way, was reported at Science Daily accompanied by a totally scientific and totally appropriate photo:


And people wonder why I do things like post pictures of my fat gut. It is because, as so excruciatingly evidenced by this photo, it remains a radical act to be fat and happy in America, especially if you're a woman (for whom "jolly" fatness isn't an option). If you're fat, you're not only meant to be unhappy, but deeply ashamed of yourself, projecting at all times an apologetic nature, indicative of your everlasting remorse for having wrought your monstrous self upon the world. You are certainly not meant to be bold, or assertive, or confident—and should you manage to overcome the constant drumbeat of messages that you are ugly and unsexy and have earned equally society's disdain and your own self-hatred, should you forget your place and walk into the world one day with your head held high, you are to be reminded by the cow-calls and contemptuous looks of perfect strangers that you are not supposed to have self-esteem; you don't deserve it. Being publicly fat and happy is hard; being publicly, shamelessly, unshakably fat and happy is an act of both will and bravery.

Rare indeed is the fat chick who manages to find contentment in her own skin, because everything around her is designed so that she will not. Thusly, the idea of a culture that maintains a rational attitude about a spectrum of natural (and acceptable) shapes and sizes is almost impossible to imagine—and yet important enough to imagine and set as goal nevertheless, because the girl who is healthy but fat is not being served by our scorn, and the girl who is unhealthy but thin is not being served by our approbation. And that is to say nothing of the boy who suffers under this grand delusion as well, of whom I know less, since he has never been in my mirror.

[H/T to Shaker Stayss.]