The Zoo over Ambuscade Street

I find a shocking amount of good sense in this article, even if I don't necessarily agree with the whole thing. Of particular interest are the famous-person stats regarding BMI. I think any reasonable person would agree that the people mentioned are so far from being "overweight" that even considering it is absurd.

A little cardio goes a lot farther to increasing your overall health than eating nothing but a few crackers. And yes, I've met people like that. When I sold diet pills in the mall, they were the kind that needed to be taken before "a meal." One woman asked if it was OK if she substituted "a cracker" for a meal. When I said no, she asked if two crackers would be OK. That's a woman who's never, ever going to be healthy.

I thought these two paragraphs were particularly enlightening, or perhaps I mean amusing:

The single most noxious line of argument in the literature about obesity is that black and Hispanic girls and women need to be "sensitised" to the "fact" that they have inappropriately positive feelings about their bodies. Readers may suspectthis is a bad joke: I wish it were. One University of Arizona study found that, while only 10% of the white teenage girls surveyed were happy with their bodies, 70% of the black teenage girls were happy with theirs (the black girls weighed more, on average, than the white girls).

When asked to define "beauty", the white girls described their feminine ideal as a woman 5ft 7in tall, weighing between seven and seven and a half stone (ie, someone thinner than the average model). By contrast, the black girls described a woman whose body included such features as visible hips and functional thighs.

(Originally posted as a comment in Rachan's journal; I figured it might do some good with wider dissemination)

Jumping-to-conclusions Fu is not an art that you should be proud to be skilled in (where "you" = general you), especially if you're lacking all the information.

A very wise man once said to me that it's far easier to get yourself in trouble with email than it is with any other form of communication, because it's so easy to just hit "send" without really thinking through what you've written. I would expand that to any online communication - IMs, LJ posts and comments, etc. It's far too easy to write something out in haste and anger and hit "submit."

If you do write something in anger, get up and walk away from the computer for a few minutes before you send it. Come back and read the entire thing you wrote again. Then, delete it. Start again with writing whatever it is you want to write, with the moment not quite as fresh. Or, don't write anything at all. You'll save yourself a lot of pain and heartache by pausing before you hit that "send" button.