anthrogeek

I feel like I need to reiterate that there is no correlation between being heavy and being unhealthy. You can be plushy and have a perfectly working heart, normal blood pressure, etc. There have been scores of studies published on the matter, here are just a few that I picked out from a quick Google Scholar search:

http://www.hindawi.c...be/2012/951582/

http://www.mayoclini...2/abstract?cc=y
http://link.springer...2350-010-9214-6

http://eurheartj.oxf...tj.ehp339.short

The following videos are from a TED conference detailing the psychology and the neuroscience behind concepts like dieting and "healthy living". The first talk is by a neuroscientist, the second by a clinical psychologist, the third by your regular Joe Schmo. To summarize an extraordinarily dense topic, the fact of the matter is is that dieting, for the vast majority of people that undertake this chore, does not work. We need a sweeping cultural revolution in the way that we perceive fatness: if a person is heavy, it does not mean that they are unhealthy or lazy or that they don't want to change. It just means that they're heavy. And to cast aspersions upon populations of people without knowing their own stories or backgrounds, and, indeed, the very science behind obesity, is, to put it mildly, incredibly discriminatory. 

All the best.

I think this is great news, especially as a community college graduate myself. It's a great first step toward addressing the rising costs of education in this country. To think that there are schools out there that charge students close to $70,000 (USD) a year is absolutely ludicrous, especially when there are countries with systems out there (I'm thinking mainly about Germany) where tuition is free or worth the equivalent of pocket change.

We spend nearly $600 billion annually to fund the military: we can definitely afford to spend (and even divert) some money to address this issue.

Nice.  A colleague of mine once told me that if you wanted to piss a cello player off, play the Bach Cello Suites on a viola.  I couldn't agree with him more.

I honestly believe that the cello suites sound better on the viola (cellists get so indignant whenever I say this out loud )!

Ah, a fellow string player, eh?

 

I'm a viola player myself.  Welcome back to Codex!

I play viola, too--I actually just started playing a few weeks ago. Started just to get my hands on those Bach cello suites!

Thanks.

Now the hard part will be to find a couple other string musicians and a person who is fluent in music mixing to throw together your sounds to create the unofficial Codex string quartet.

 

PS: @ortin ... When I was deciding which instrument to play when I was a lad, I wanted to play the Cello because I thought it sounded awesome. Then my mother shot that down and insisted I play the clarinet she had lying around in the closet.

 

I could never master the upper register, but I have the airflow to rock the lower register loud and proud

I've been meaning to start up a string quartet!--what a coincidence, haha. 

Food was scarce for a large part of mankind's history, so chubbiness has often been seen as a sign of wealth (oh shit they can afford to eat!).

 

We have throughout history seen the wealthy as the attractive ones, so when the menial jobs were outside and the wealthy could afford to stay inside, being tan was a sign of poverty and being pale was the epitome of beauty. During the Industrial Revolution when most of the menial labor moved indoors, paleness became a sign of working class poverty, and the people that had the free time to go outside and see the sun became the new vision of attractiveness.

 

It would make sense for a desert culture to value the weight (and in case of famine, longevity of life) of their womenfolk...

 

 

EDITED PS: Now that cheap food makes us fat, it is a sign of wealth to be able to

1. Be able to afford healthy foods

2. Have the free time to work out

Not necessarily. If that were the case, then wouldn't all desert peoples, and in fact any culture where great amounts of food was only accessible to the wealthy, prescribe to these fat beauty ideals? That may have been the case in the United States, but fatness in Western cultures has a history unique to its own upbringing and reality. Poponoe's ethnography, in fact, makes the argument that fatness in the Saharan peoples' cultures is largely embedded within notions of masculinity and femininity, gender politics, larger institutions like marriage and religion, and so forth. In other words, fatness means different things to different cultures. Your explanation may make sense for our society, but, unfortunately, not so much for other cultures.

With that being said, I would encourage even more analysis on all of our parts to better understand why we view fatness the way we do: why do we associate fatness with unhealthiness and laziness? And why are so we prone to treat fat individuals with such open contempt? You said it yourself: fat people in the United States were viewed as "attractive" in the past. Is this socio-economic paradigm shift reason enough to justify this sort of stigmatization against fat people?

Cheers.