Hello hello! I know I’ve been neglecting this blog and I am, as always, extremely sorry about that. I’m currently waist-deep in the second round of edits for my book, as well as trying to keep up my poor, neglected baking and body-image blogs. I promise I will start blogging about writing again, just as soon as I’m not so busy dealing with the dirty business itself!
In the meantime, you might be interested in this recent post on my body-image blog, a reaction to the BBC2 show ‘The Truth About Fat’. Here’s the beginning to help you decide whether you want to read the whole thing:
A friend of mine emailed me last night, suggesting I watch the latest episode of BBC 2’s ‘Horizon’, because it dealt with the issue of Gastric Bypass. But when I started watching it this evening, I realized that really, it deals mostly with obesity – how and why it exists, and what we should do about it – and Gastric Bypass plays a large part in the last third of the program.
In all honesty, as I started watching, my immediate reaction was rage and righteous indignation. Gabriel Weston, the thin, blond, female surgeon who hosts the show announces at the very beginning that for her entire life (including the ten years in which she’s been practicing medicine) she has operated under the ‘assumption […] that I am the size I am because of my character’. Now, not only is that a particularly smug way of putting it, there is a serious problem with the underlying message: that fat people are fat simply because they are lazy and eat too much. They don’t have the strength of character to change their bodies.
Of course, the program isn’t just about this one extremely irritating person spewing her views about fat slobs – it’s also about finding out why fat people are fat, and investigating the causes of and possible solutions to this ‘epidemic’ that’s sweeping the western world. And on that front, the show (and maybe Wilson, if she wasn’t just there as a figure-bobblehead) does a very good job…
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