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0 of 3 Premium Clicks used this month SUBSCRIBE Print + Online Subscriber Activation | Register x Forgot Password | Need an Account? subscribe | newsletter | deals Classifieds Jobs Autos Real Estate FEATURED » NEWS NOW Zipcar rolls onto SOU campus ... DEQ warns Mountain View Paving to cease operations ... Police Reports ... Zipcar rolls onto SOU campus ... DEQ warns Mountain View Paving to cease operations ... Police Reports ... Book Notes: A big body is not a bad body Comment By Rae Padilla Francoeur More Content Now DailyTidings.com By Rae Padilla Francoeur More Content Now Posted Apr. 14, 2015 at 7:38 AM By Rae Padilla Francoeur More Content Now Posted Apr. 14, 2015 at 7:38 AM » Social News “Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight and What We Can Do About It,” by Harriet Brown. Da Capo Press, Boston, 2014. 274 pages. $25.99. Author Harriet Brown’s argument is an incendiary one: Stop the useless yo-yo dieting and accept yourself as you are. Once you do, the torturous self-loathing will diminish and you can begin to make some meaningful course corrections. In other words, stop trying to be among those 3 to 5 percent of dieters who manage, usually through herculean efforts, to keep the weight off for five years. Enjoy life. Enjoy food. Enjoy yourself. Think radically and rightly: overweight is not directly correlated with bad health. But don’t expect society at large to cheer your efforts. People don’t want to hear that dieting is most likely less healthy than bearing a higher BMI. They especially don’t want to hear that fat is just fine. One thing Harriet Brown does in “Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight and What We Can Do about It” is share some of the hate leveled her way. She’s written and spoken on the topic of weight for some time now. The resistance to her informed point of view is harsh and ingrained, and will be for some time to come. Norms, especially those reinforced by popular media, are hard to revise. As a result of her daughter’s struggle with anorexia, Brown researched and wrote “Brave Girl Eating: A Family’s Struggle with Anorexia.” Brown herself had long loathed her body that she could not re-sculpt into the ideal Barbie-like figure. Few bodies are that malleable. She began a long course of education on eating, disordered eating, health and weight loss that included hundreds of interviews and examination of most of the studies and science on weight loss here and abroad. “Body of Truth,” as a result, is heavily supported with data. If you want to know more, consult the 29 pages of footnotes in her book. Brown is also an associate professor of magazine journalism at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. “Being thin,” writes Brown, “has come to represent not just a physical condition but a spiritual and moral one. The divide between thin and fat marks a line between good and bad, virtue and sin, success and failure, beauty and ugliness, health and sickness.” It should come as no surprise, then, that 97 percent of young women surveyed by Glamour magazine in 2011 said they felt hatred toward their bodies at least once a day and often much more. “I’ve interviewed hundreds of women about weight and body image over the last few years, and every one of them says she has struggled with body hatred,” Brown says. Shame and self-loathing are the price of admission for being female. The same is growing more true for men, as well. Children, sadly, are beset, earlier and earlier, by weight-conscious anxiety. Two out of three 13-year-old girls are afraid of gaining weight. Despite the massive amount of scientific evidence pointing to the futility of dieting and associated shame and outright misery, there has been only one study done on media’s influence on body image and eating behavior. Similarly, Brown devotes more of her book to the baffling persistence of doctors and scientists to insist that heavier people are less-healthy people. Evidence strongly suggests the contrary. Moderately overweight people have a lower mortality rate than thin people. Brown sites the role of commerce in all of this. Since weight loss is ultimately futile, it’s an indefatigable cash cow. Weight Watchers may have a maintenance program for those who reach their goal, but most Weight Watchers with lifetime member status wind up counting points before long. Weight loss is a national obsession and a guaranteed source of revenue for doctors. One of the most shocking anecdotes in her book features a bariatric surgeon who brings his nursing staff boxes of doughnuts — always stocking the human pool for new clients. He needn’t bother. Half of stomach alterations fail to produce the desired weight loss. The “What We Can Do about It” part of Brown’s book is lean, excuse the pun. Her personal approach to health and weight includes moderate exercise, eating foods she likes, stopping when she’s full, getting enough sleep, socializing with friends and family and taking whatever medications she needs to contend with anxiety and depression issues that run in her family. The hardest part of her approach, she writes, is letting go of self-loathing. Basically, acceptance, hard as it might be in the face of all those Victoria Secret ads, is the key to peace of mind. Rae Padilla Francoeur’s memoir, “Free Fall: A Late-in-Life Love Affair,” is available online or in some bookstores. Write her at rae.francoeur @gmail.com Read her blog at freefallrae.blogspot.com or follow her on Twitter at @RaeAF. By Rae Padilla Francoeur More Content Now DailyTidings.com By Rae Padilla Francoeur More Content Now Posted Apr. 14, 2015 at 7:38 AM » Comment or view comments Reader Reaction » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. Southern Oregon Directory Featured Businesses Loading... 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