Mom Chronicles 7-Year-Old Daughter’s “Obesity” Battle in Vogue

Photo of Dara Lynn Weiss and Daughter Bea
Let’s talk about fat, shall we?  In fact, let’s just throw caution to the wind and talk about the potential damage parents can do to their children in the name of curtailing the national trend toward childhood obesity.

Or we could just talk about what a crazy bitch Dara-Lynn Weiss, who recently wrote a piece for Vogue focused on the alleged need for her 7-year-old daughter’s need to lose weight, is.

Incidentally, her daughter Bea was 4’4” and weighed 93 pounds.  She is now sixteen pounds lighter.

And, in case I haven’t already mentioned it, seven.

According to Weiss, Bea’s diet was recommended by her pediatrician, who felt that “she was clinically obese and could be at risk for high blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes.”

Just for shits and giggles, I put Bea’s stats into the BMI calculator at the National Heart Lung Institute.  It came out as normal. While, to be completely fair, the CDC has a pediatric BMI calculator that does classify Bea as “overweight” considering her age, I think there’s more than meets the eye here.

To wit, here’s what Weiss had to say about Bea’s dietary habits … and her own actions undertaken as…

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Did Your Home State Make the “Deadliest Eating Habits” List?

Photo of Overweight Woman Eating Fast Food
On a daily basis, weight conversations seem to crop up everywhere.  Try this pill.  Shoot for hypnosis.  Snap a rubber band around your wrist when the urge for Cheetos hits.  Weight Watchers.  Jenny Craig, Nutri-System.  And what about the frustrated naturally thin people that are epically sick of hearing about how dietary news should revolve around a bunch of overindulgent potato chip addicts?

What I find interesting, though, are the many and varied approaches the media goes with in order to make what’s really a very old story at least kind of fresh and exciting.

After regurgitating the fact that America leads the world in excessive BMI (and that “U.S. eating habits and diets have been exported,” leading to a 5% increase from 1980 to 2008 in the population percentage that fit the “obese” definition), Yahoo Finance explores causes for America’s excessive need to feed.

From Yahoo Finance:

Like so many other issues where data are collected in the public sector and the information is used to solve problems nationwide, the problems are local. 24/7 Wall St. looked at a number of factors which cause unhealthy diets and resulting obesity. These include income, access to healthy food sources, the ability to pay for healthy food, the concentration of fast food outlets, and the consumption of fruits, vegetables, sugar, fat and soft drinks. The levels of healthy eating defined with these parameters varies wildly …

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Wilson Phillips’ Carnie Wilson Okay With Being Fat

Album Picture for Wilson Phillips' Debut

I think I was a sophomore in high school the first time I saw Wilson Phillips on MTV and, like pretty much everyone else, I couldn’t help but notice “the fat one.”  A couple of things happened pretty quickly, however, to change my impression.  Well, not of Carnie Wilson’s obese status, obviously.

First, I became really good friends with a girl who was pretty much obsessed with the band.  Like, we’d sit in her room and listen to Wilson Phillips (which we affectionately referred to as “Philson Willips” … how veddy sophomoric) all the time.  The other thing was that I was taking private voice lessons, and I developed a great appreciation for the role of harmony in vocal music.

It didn’t take me long to realize that Carnie …

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Study Proves That an Ideal Female Body Exists … But Does it Matter?

Photos of Different Body Types in Women
I have met very few females that are 100% comfortable with their bodies. Everyone from movie stars to supermodels to Jane the Plumber has some sort of flaw—real or imagined—that they are sensitive about.

A recent study conducted by Australian and Hong Kong scientists (and published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology) does not exactly give a warm fuzzy feeling to those of us with the stomach flab that never quite bounced back after having a baby, facial hair, knobby knees, short stature, no butt, or any other perceived imperfection you can imagine.

Nope, the ideal woman is young, tall, and long-armed.

I’m freaking screwed.

From Science Daily:

“Physical attractiveness is an important determining factor for evolutionary, social, and economic success,” said lead author Robert Brooks from the University of New South Wales. “The dimensions of someone’s body can tell observers if that person is suitable as a potential mate, a long term partner, or perhaps the threat they pose as a sexual competitor.”

It’s interesting how evolution has been dragged into this along with the notion that Darwin’s idea of natural selection extends to the purely physical. And perhaps not entirely surprisingly, that mindset has led to a look at torso, waist, bust, and hip measurements—it’s all about childbearing, don’t you know?

The women used as “models” were Chinese women between 20-49, quite an age gap when you think …

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