Sandy KumskovA Fat Conscious Game??
January 19th 2008 05:04
Category: No Category
I like those little collect-and-make games that you download from places like Spintop.com. They give a 60 minute trial and if you like the game you buy it for your unlimited game-playing pleasure. They're fabulous when you're on hold to Optus or Telstra..........
Anyhoo, I got a new one which is a nifty combination of a tetris type game (with pizzas!!) and a coolect-and-make game. And it's really quite disturbing!! At the beginning of each round there's a new type of customer, and fully two of the female characters are described as watching their weight, or being conscious of their figures.
That really gave me food for thought, so to speak. That game designers, probably young adult males, have the view that it's so normal for women to be 'watching their weight' and concerned about eating fat, that they'd build it into the game.
I know our culture is fat phobic, and even fat-discriminatory - but it makes me wonder, has it all gone too far?
As part of the research for my upcoming book, I'm reading Glen Gaesser's Big Fat Lies (amongst others), he quotes some thought provoking statistics that are not new to anyone who's interested in our cultural fat phobia. This one's particularly relevant to the game though, which is that over 80% of teenage girls are dieting at any one time.
That's scary, because your teen years are when your body changes more than at any time since babyhood, and good nutirition is essential to make sure the bones and muscles are robust for the rest of your long adulthood.
Adult women are not in any better shape though - at any one time nearly 60% of women are dieting.
If you haven't got the message by now that diets don't work long term, then good on you for avoiding all the media hype.
However, the message that the human body is hugely successful at storing fat for surviving through famine, is getting out to more people, but still has a long way to go. One truth of human history is that famine has always been the greatest threat to human survival, and our genes know it, so they work bloody hard to make sure we'll survive. This is a whole interesting story in itself and I'll do a later post on it.
Weight cycling (yo-yo dieting) goes like this:
you decide you want to lose weight
you carefully research the most effective plan
you restrict your calories following the plan
let's say that you actually manage to resist your body's urges to eat more, and get to your target weight (again, the stubject of a future post)
statistics say that within 3 years you'll be back at the weight you started at, and likely about 10% heavier.
So restrict your calorie intake at your peril.
Far better to accept that your genes will determine your healthy size, and love yourself exactly as you are. Taking the pressure off yourself, eating clean nutirionally-dense food, and exercising for a good half hour most days of the week, will allow your body to find its own healthy weight and size.
Size acceptance, whether it's a size 6 or a size 18 or a size 24, is the real key to good physical and mental health.
I know a bunch of people reading this will be really sure that fat=unhealthy and only thin=healthy. But I've not been able to find one single study that supports this view. I'd be interested to discuss it, please post below....
Anyhoo, I got a new one which is a nifty combination of a tetris type game (with pizzas!!) and a coolect-and-make game. And it's really quite disturbing!! At the beginning of each round there's a new type of customer, and fully two of the female characters are described as watching their weight, or being conscious of their figures.
That really gave me food for thought, so to speak. That game designers, probably young adult males, have the view that it's so normal for women to be 'watching their weight' and concerned about eating fat, that they'd build it into the game.
I know our culture is fat phobic, and even fat-discriminatory - but it makes me wonder, has it all gone too far?
As part of the research for my upcoming book, I'm reading Glen Gaesser's Big Fat Lies (amongst others), he quotes some thought provoking statistics that are not new to anyone who's interested in our cultural fat phobia. This one's particularly relevant to the game though, which is that over 80% of teenage girls are dieting at any one time.
That's scary, because your teen years are when your body changes more than at any time since babyhood, and good nutirition is essential to make sure the bones and muscles are robust for the rest of your long adulthood.
Adult women are not in any better shape though - at any one time nearly 60% of women are dieting.
If you haven't got the message by now that diets don't work long term, then good on you for avoiding all the media hype.
However, the message that the human body is hugely successful at storing fat for surviving through famine, is getting out to more people, but still has a long way to go. One truth of human history is that famine has always been the greatest threat to human survival, and our genes know it, so they work bloody hard to make sure we'll survive. This is a whole interesting story in itself and I'll do a later post on it.
Weight cycling (yo-yo dieting) goes like this:
you decide you want to lose weight
you carefully research the most effective plan
you restrict your calories following the plan
let's say that you actually manage to resist your body's urges to eat more, and get to your target weight (again, the stubject of a future post)
statistics say that within 3 years you'll be back at the weight you started at, and likely about 10% heavier.
So restrict your calorie intake at your peril.
Far better to accept that your genes will determine your healthy size, and love yourself exactly as you are. Taking the pressure off yourself, eating clean nutirionally-dense food, and exercising for a good half hour most days of the week, will allow your body to find its own healthy weight and size.
Size acceptance, whether it's a size 6 or a size 18 or a size 24, is the real key to good physical and mental health.
I know a bunch of people reading this will be really sure that fat=unhealthy and only thin=healthy. But I've not been able to find one single study that supports this view. I'd be interested to discuss it, please post below....
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