Category: Media
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O-Word For The “Win”
Ever notice how a news story will use “obesity” even when that’s not really the point? Example: A study looking for correlations between cognitive decline and metabolic syndrome, explicitly calling out fat. Headline? “Obesity ‘Bad for Brain’ by Hastening Cognitive Decline“. At least one earlier study tied metabolic syndrome with cognitive decline, but didn’t explicitly called out “obesity”. Marketing fail?
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Thankful Thursday
Things that I am thankful for: 1 The man of the house packed a yummy lunch for me today. He also cooked each night I was home this week. 2 AC. Most houses in Seattle don’t have AC. I don’t regret installing ours, even if we barely used it last year. 3 A job where showing up in shorts one day and a dress the next is…
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God Should Look At Magazines to Know What People Should Look Like
Yes, it’s funny. It also shows the disconnect between what we expect people to look like. We expect people to look like what we’re used to seeing — and if we mostly see other people in magazines or on TV or in movies, that’s what we expect people to look like. And when the movie’s over, we are surprised that reality hasn’t conformed to our fantasies.…
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QOTD: Health
The debate about what exactly health means goes back to ancient Greece. Does health just mean living a long time? Does it mean feeling strong? Are athletes the epitomy of health? In fact, athletes suffer more injuries and illnesses than the rest of the population because they push themselves so hard. So who represents health? What about spiritual health? Ethical health? It’s amazing how much we project onto body type these…
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Things to read
From Jezebel’s Work-Life Balance Isn’t Just for Moms: The basic point of all of this is that whether you have kids, have a partner but no kids, or are living alone, working too much sucks. It’s no way to live, and we’re not dummies. So at some point, most of us realize that we’d rather do something that allows us to actually have a life, rather than commit…
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OBESITY NIGHTMARE….
…or rather, a site is starting to show fat people’s reaction to America’s (drumroll…fanfare…lights…) Obesity Nightmare It started with a Tumblr post, and has continued with photos from Brian (at Red No 3) and Turn It Over. Why? Because we do not exist to be the government’s or the healthcare industry’s nightmare. We are people. We are living our lives. You want to know what we think of…
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Big Fat Sleep
No, it’s not news that lack of sleep is tied to fat. What sleep researcher Dr. Orfeu Buxton found is more information on how this occurs. The resting metabolic rate of the volunteers by the end of the five weeks was 8% lower than where they had started. […] That could explain why night shift workers tend to gain more weight and have a higher likelihood of obesity than day workers;…
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Not News
The website Fark makes fun of news stories that are not, actually, news. Example: Students Discover Desks Have More Germs Than Toilets Why isn’t it news? Well, it’s a common story that pops up once a year or two, and relies on people not thinking about which is more likely to get janitorial attention. Today my Google Health section looked a bit like Fark. First: Paula Deen…
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Vitamin B12 in the news
I’ve written about my vitamin B12 absorption problem before. The NY Times recently posted a good primer on B12 deficiencies, including those at risk: Natural plant sources are meager at best in B12, and the vitamin is poorly absorbed from them. […C]hronic users of acid-suppressing drugs like Prilosec, Prevacid and Nexium, as well as ulcer medications like Pepcid and Tagamet, are at risk of developing a B12…
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Rebecca Puhl on Chris Christie & Weight Bias
Rebecca Puhl is the director of research at the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale. The Rudd Center is pro-weight loss, which can be disconcerting to run across on their website. Nonetheless, they do useful research on weight discrimination and health, not to mention writing articles for CNN on how weight discrimination affects the news coverage of NJ Gov Chris Christie. How common is [weight discrimination]? It may…
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Not Doing Everything
Unvirtuous Abbey (“Digital monks praying for people with first world problems”) tweeted this week: For those who have to carry the burden of what they see but are limited in what they can do, we pray. That … says a lot, actually. For many of us worldwide media means that we see much more than we can act upon. So many causes. So much suffering. So much. Toss in…
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Thankful Thursday
[an occasional exercise in gratitude] My father has been in his new Adult Family Home for over a week and is doing well. The political-bloggers-with-zombies novel Feed that I’ve been compulsively re-reading for the last year did not win the “Best Novel” Hugo but it came in second. Feed and its sequel Deadline are by Mira Grant aka Seanan McGuire. While I did not get to Worldcon this year, I do get to enjoy this ustream of…
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Friday Fun
Here’s something to make you smile Friday, courtesy of Beth Ditto: What are looking forward to this weekend? If it’s not your weekend, what are you looking forward to when you get there?
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Very Fat Characters and Writing Difference
As Roxane Gay notes in her discussion of The Help, Writing across race (or gender, sexuality, and disability) is complicated. Sometimes, it is downright messy. There is ample evidence that it is quite difficult to get difference right, to avoid cultural appropriation, reinscribing stereotypes, revising or minimizing history, or demeaning and trivializing difference or otherness. As writers we are always asking ourselves, “How do I get it…
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Medical Insurance Helps People Feel Better!?
On the one hand, it’s good to have actual research backing this up. On the other hand, it’s insane that this didn’t exist before. From the NY Times: When poor people are given medical insurance, they not only find regular doctors and see doctors more often but they also feel better, are less depressed and are better able to maintain financial stability, according to a new, large-scale…
Living ~400lbs 