A Healthy Ambition: The Media

We all know that the media has never been particularly kind to those struggling with weight issues.  Whether it's been the uber waif-like models on the covers of magazines, the beautiful (yet skinny) actresses on TV, or the hundreds and thousands of weight loss products on the shelves promising to turn you into thinnest "you" possible, there really has been almost a war waged against the self-esteem of the overweight.

And yes, it's very true that America has a serious, life-threatening problem called obesity -- our relationship to food and exercise is appalling.  But rather than nurturing a less-obese population by way of healthier habits, we seem to knock ourselves down, call ourselves names, and generally make ourselves feel bad about being the way we are instead.

Nothing pointed this out to me more this passed week than the controversy currently going on in the Twitter-verse.  From what I can gather, Kenneth Tong of Big Brother fame has started a...campaign?...which utilizes what he calls "managed anorexia" in order to shame people into being skinny.  It's disgusting, really it is.

Some of his recent tweets have included:

• Kenneth Tong: making fat girls more irrelevant than they already are, haven't you ever heard of managed anorexia?
• Kenneth Tong: making it acceptable for skinny people globally to call fat people what they are, disgusting.
• Don't listen to them. They're all trying to make fatter. You're a mess as is. Throw the food away. You'll be so much happier then.
• Managed anorexia is not life threatening, it gives living another chance after you messed it up eating too much. 
• The beginning is always today. Managed anorexia is a lifestyle, not a diet.
• Thankful for this global opportunity to help girls all over the world know that to be skinny is to be perfect & to be fat is unacceptable.

In response to this, people have started hashtagging #NoSizeZero, and celebrities have come out quite vocally against Tong.  He's being interviewed by tons of newspapers, radio shows and blogs.  And while we can all say things like, we should just ignore him because all he wants is attention, I feel that that's somewhat irresponsible in this case.  Because not everyone will ignore him.  Those most vulnerable to his kind of poison won't ignore him and they'll think he's right.  So I think it's important to be outspoken against this sort of thing, it's important to show others that not everyone agrees and that being healthy is being beautiful.

Last week was also the first time I caught MTV's new docu-drama, "I Used To Be Fat".  When I first saw it and didn't know what was going on, my knee-jerk reaction was that this was going to be a Biggest Loser for teenagers, that these kids were going to work out for 8 hours a day, burn a billion calories, and that's how they'd lose weight.  I was pleasantly surprised that it turned out to be a little different.

Yes, these kids work out, and they work out every day.  But they work out for a couple of hours and alter other things in their lives simultaneously -- like drastically changing their diets.  Now yes, this is still scarily drastic...and I'm not saying that it's necessarily a good thing to lose 90lbs in 111 days, or that that kind of weight loss is particularly sustainable, but I appreciate that MTV is showing how real and hard weight loss can be.  Once the extreme time frame is taken out of the equation here, the message is fairly simple: There's no magic pill to weight loss.  There's just hard work and healthy lifestyle changes.