with friends like these...

[arguchik]

scratch that previous post (little lolcat pun there). it's neither diet nor regular soda that causes obesity. it's your friends and family.

:::yawn:::

if they ever settle this question, wake me up, ok?

i don't mean to sound all disdainful, but...like...duh. eating is a social activity. if you eat with your family and friends, you will probably be following similar eating patterns in terms of what, how much, and how often you eat. for example, my mother found it impossible to lose weight when she had teenagers living at home. why? because teenagers eat garbage, and they eat a lot of it. our house was always full of soda, chips, cookies, sugary cereal, ice cream, etc.--even if my mom didn't buy it, the shit was always around because we would buy it, and we were constantly snacking on it. once i was in college (i'm the youngest) and started eating with my friends more, and also started eating more healty stuff, my mom found it easier to lose weight.

added later:
but what i really find annoying about all of this is the normative, fear-mongering rhetoric. the NYT article i linked to above actually compares obesity to a virus. it's a contagion, so...like...if you know any fat people, you'd better quarantine yourself so you don't catch it!

gah! our culture already valorizes thin bodies and marginalizes (understatement!) heavier bodies. do we really need to heap more freight onto that dichotomy?

Comments

WTF

[superannuated1l.livejournal.com]

My family members are fat because we share the same fucking genes. My friends are disproportionately likely to be fat for three reasons:

1) A lot of thin people are abusive and shitty toward fat people, and that's really not what I'm looking for in a friendship, thanks.

2) The eating-disordered subset of thin people tend to be almost visibly distressed by fat people, and therefore they don't want to be friends with me.

3) As a fellow fat person, I'm less likely to judge other fat people, and more likely to reach out to them socially. We have something in common.

But yeah, social contagion, lock up the fat people. Boo!

Re: WTF

[arguchik.livejournal.com]

yeah...all of that. "research" like this makes me crazy. they basically manipulated data from another study to come up with this result--i.e. they reconfigured existing data from a study that was designed to measure something else, ran their statistical analysis, and came up with this conclusion. and of course the press gets hold of it and says, "if you're fat, blame your friends and family." the implication, of course, is that someone deserves to be blamed for something.

nevermind all of the research that shows how difficult it is to modify one's body type, beyond a certain range--regardless of how many calories one consumes. what that "set point" is, and how much it will flex, varies tremendously from person to person.