April 1, 2006
"Some students would subsist on little more than lettuce flavored with calorie-free spray butter flavoring."
Ah, the extreme austerity that is needed in preparation for the hedonism of Spring Break!
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12 comments:
That "calorie free" butter substitute is basically 100% oil, and has around 100 calories per tablespoon.
The reason they get to call it calorie free (like PAM, for another example) is that the designated portion size is so small that the actual calories per portion are less than 0.5. Under federal rules, that allows them to say that a portion has no calories--the beauty of rounding down--when the calories in it are 100% fat calories and the spray is the equivalent of a spritz of the oil of your choice.
And when I viewed the article it was accompanied by an advertisement with a picture of a stick thin model, of course. Also, who allows their 15 year old daughter to go on spring break to the beaches of Florida or Mexico? I would think that anyone that did that would be, by definition, an unfit parent.
wickedpinto:
huh?
I'd tried in the past to find these pro-ana sites, which I keep reading about, but since they are censored, I never could. For the first time, with the help of this article, I was able to find them, because the article gave me the idea of a new word to Google: "thinspiration." Frankly, I think lots of women who won't overdo it still want to read a list of extreme diet tips. One that amused me: spin around until you're so dizzy you get nauseated and can't eat. I think ordinary overweight women could benefit!
About the spray: who wants butter on lettuce anyway? That was working as a diet tip for me because it was so disgusting maybe I didn't want to eat anything!
Wickedpinto: When I Google gay marriage, the whole first page contains sites arguing the issue. No porn whatsoever comes up. I guess there's a preference setting somewhere, but I'm just using the default. (I've never looked at one porn site. I've never gone looking or been duped into clicking to one.)
Hygate: Yeah, I wonder what percent of students really engage in this sort of behavior -- not getting thin, but traveling to beaches for spring break. It's expensive to go to college. Where do people get the money to go on pleasure trips? I think a lot of kids just go back to their hometowns and see their family and friends. And I'll bet lots of them just stay where they are and try to get their papers done. You never read about those kids. You do read about kids that do something altruistic though. A lot of kids went to New Orleans, for example, and did hard labor to try to help people. (You could lose some weight that way.)
Knoxgirl: I think it was implicit that he was responding to Dave and Muglar on the issue of whether the web suckers healthy minds into disease.
WickedPinto, not necessarily disagreeing with you - mostly because I have know idea what you're talking about other than I'm pretty sure I never want to see what's on your harddrive - but this sounded testable:
when you type "gay marriage" or "sodomy" you will likely find 30 or 40 gay sex porn sites, and 5 scat sites.
For "gay marriage," there are no porn sites in the top 100 returns (I stopped looking at 100). As there are 54 million returns for that phrase I'm sure you could find 30-40 porn sites, but they're not near the top.
For scat the first thing I think of is either Ella Fitzgerald or the garbageman from "Chico and the Man." However, at #36, we get what you're looking for. Try this nonpornographic quiz, snack or scat.
In conclusion...beats the hell out of me.
know s/b no. I blame the time change.
Also forgot to google sodomy. Actually found this surprising as porn turns up much less than I expected it would. Even the link for "Alliance of Sodomy Supporters" is about various U.S. and State laws. You'll get to your 30-40 sites quicker than with "Gay marriage" or "scat" but if you had no idea what sodomy was, you can quickly be informed without burning your eyeballs.
I'm confused about anorexia now and the pro-anorexic sites I've seen (haven't seen one if the last few years I don't know what they're like now) have made me think of practitioners in a different way.
Fundamentally, I tend to think of it now as a very extreme and dangerous kind of body modification and not as primarily a mental illness (my previous idea). I'm not so sure when and where the 'lose just a couple more pounds' turns into a dangerous obsession but I think that treating the underlying desire for body modification as a mental illness is maybe not the most productive.
I think the best approach would be to help anorexics find something else (something safer) to be obsessive about that can distract them from starving themselves to death. Yes, that would be just trading one obsessive disorder for another, but it's practical in the short term.
In college, Spring Break is considered a rite of passage. If you can't afford it, it's considered a personal defect. Starving one's self to participate in whatever debauchery The Norm decides is de rigeur is totally unsurprising, unshocking. That's how poor people keep up with their peers in this particular realm of conspicuous consumption.
The "pro-ana" sites basically act as a guide to killing yourself. It's like an electronic suicide pact.
Electronic suicide pact? That sounds like . . . JAPAN!
On a marginally more serious note, they're not 100% about starving themselves. They also discuss exercise. I think as a matter of youth culture it's got its usual mix of good and bad. American youths are widely excoriated for being excessively fat, and dissemination of the "one hundred crunches a night!" aspect of this subculture wouldn't be an entirely bad thing.
Also, who allows their 15 year old daughter to go on spring break to the beaches of Florida or Mexico?
And this sounds like Lydia Bennet. And I think parents probably give in to their daughters for about the same reasons Mr. Bennet does -- peace and quiet, and a failure to appreciate just how wild one's own offspring can be.
Muglar: The question is where the disease begins. Dieting itself is not a disease. Is it a mental disease to be overweight? Why not? I think to some extent average people, ie overweight people, are jealous of people who figure out how to diet successfully. They get very intrusive and insulting and censorious. You can find all kind of articles about how to overeat and indulge yourself to the hilt. But try finding strong diet tips. You'd think dieting was a crime! We're only allowed to see the sensible dieting advice. It's very nannyish. I would like to see some amusing, weird diet ideas. Yeah, I know some girls get carried away, but making it into a big taboo isn't necessarily helping! If you know someone who is getting too thin, do something about it, by all means! I've never known anyone who's done this, but most people I know are too fat. We need a lot of help dieting, and this fretting about anorexia is, I think, part of our own denial about our problem of being fat!
Do we have any evidence that anorexics die earlier? Or is it all speculation?
I thought starvation diets were supposed to double your lifespan.
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