This might be irrelevant to anything anybody is thinking about, but I was reminded by this thread of something.
First, let me say that I don’t think “one size fits all” in the human race. Some people are thought of as overweight but are healthy. Some are exactly the “right” BMI and aren’t necessarily unhealthy because of it. Also, I believe the “right” diet varies from individual to individual. Fats may be very bad for one person, but not at all for another.
A friend of mind wrote her NP thesis on the subject. She interviewed a number of overweight teens and designed a questionnaire for them, the answers of which fit into a psychological profile of a particular sort. She advertised for the girls, and, because she lives in a rural area, a number of them were farm girls. But not all of them were.
I can’t recite the psychological profile stuff, but some of the findings were interesting. Her thesis was turned into an article for a professional journal and she has been invited to speak at a national medical conference.
Those most troubled by their weight were, as one might guess, city or town girls. One pattern they seemed to fit into (again, I can’t recite the psych thing) was that they felt pressured by society, by media, by schools and by healthcare professionals to lose weight, even when they seemed unable to do so. And, it was depressing to them. Some, however “rebelled” and those “rebels” almost always fit an attitude slot of “nobody’s perfect”. In other words, they would accept themselves as thin or heavy, and had adopted a mindset of not caring what anybody thought about that or much of anything else about themselves. They tended to have pretty good self-esteem and functioned well generally.
The farm girls weren’t “overweight” in quite the same way, generally. They would be regarded as “obese” according to some health scales, but were also extremely active and muscular for girls of their age. As a group, they were the most “rebellious” toward the “conventional wisdoms” of proper body weight, as well as BMI. With them, it was a calm sort of rebellion. The conventional wisdoms they regarded as intrusions on an entirely normal way of life, (rural farm life) and utterly rejected them. They registered highest in self-awareness and self-esteem, and lowest in depressive characteristics.
Another thing she found was that for some of the “in betweeners”, there was also a rejection of medical advice generally. They didn’t accept their condition as “abnormal”, thought of it as a “fashion” or “popular” thing to be thin, and being constantly told that they ought to lose weight also impelled them to reject other medical advice.
In the thesis, the writer cautioned against healthcare providers uncritically accepting “societal notions” about weight and weight loss and passing them on to their patients; something they do all the time, and particularly not based on “norms”, some of which are now regarded as outdated. Some girls, she felt, should simply be left alone. If they are healthy and psychologically okay with their weight, leave them alone about it lest you do harm. If, in the absence of pathologies of other sorts, you go against the grain of their thought processes, you run the risk of encouraging psychological pathology, but also of causing the patient to reject medical advice of other kinds.
With some girls, however, there needed to be very gentle, non-pushy, counseling of a more general sort with “health” as the centerpiece generally; including psychological for those who had psychological difficulties with it, but with weight being a fairly small part of the overall health presentation.
I thought it was interesting, and apparently the publishers of the journal and the asociation did too.
Oh, almost forgot. The “farm girls” had a higher percentage of boyfriends than did any of the others. One imagines they were farm boys who didn’t care a whole lot about girls’ weight, but I don’t think the writer ever got into that. I, at least, suspected those boys’ mothers were on the heavy side, likely muscular as well, and they viewed a big girl as “more normal”.
) it is like you are looking for any reason to say see? It’s because I am fat when in fat you absolutely are not.
That sucks that women were jealous of you, they should have known that you are a nice woman who doesn’t do stuff like that. I love your positive attitude. How many cats do you have?
