It’s been a while since I posted anything under this entry, so here’s some interesting reading. My piece is long, and the article I’ll link to is also pretty long, but worth it, trust me.

This week, there have been headlines going round (most of them stemming from one woman who, surprise surprise, is trying to sell you her book) stating that crash dieting – you know, eating very little to lose weight quicker – is actually healthy and effective.

There have been a number of responses to this that involved the (unfortunately) old chestnut of ‘Of course eating less makes you lose weight – there were no fat people in concentration camps!’

Leaving aside the utter crassness and stupidity of that remark (and I lost a relative in a Japanese POW camp myself, so I think I’m entitled to express an opinion), those ideas both rest on the notion that you should be prepared to restrict your eating to any extent – no matter how much it, you know, screws up your general health (because there were very few healthy people in those camps either) – if that’s what it takes to make you get to an ‘acceptable’ weight.

Just in case you still think this is true, here’s that article…
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/02/how-weve-came-to-believe-that.html

Calorie restriction. Undertaken by healthy people. Volunteers doing it for the good of their country. Not even nearly as severe as some low-calorie diets. This is what it does to your body, and, something that’s often overlooked, to your mind.

This may not make easy reading for some people. Because, you know, once you’ve eliminated the spurious notion that fat people must diet ‘for the sake of their health’, what have you got left?

Surely not that we live in a society that expects some of its members to do genuine damage to themselves…because the rest of society doesn’t like how they look?

I’ll leave you to think about that one…