Barbie’s not just a doll.

In Galia Slayen’s hands, the iconic blond plaything has morphed into a life-size representation of what an eating disorder looks like.

Four years ago, Slayen, then a student at Lincoln High School in Portland, Ore., built what she believed to be a life-size version of the doll she played with as a child as part of the first National Eating Disorders Awareness Week.

“I was at a friend’s house and her mom’s an artist so there were all these art supplies around,” Slayen told TODAY.com. “She helped with the actual proportions.”

The Barbie stands about 6 feet tall with a 39″ bust, 18″ waist and 33″ hips. She is made of wood, chicken wire and papier mache, and is dressed in a size 00 skirt that was a remnant from Slayen’s one-year bout with anorexia.

“I’m not blaming Barbie [for my illness] — she’s one small factor, an environmental factor,” Slayen said. “I’m blond and blue-eyed and I figured that was what I was supposed to look like. She was my idol. It impacted the way I looked at myself.”

The goal in creating Barbie’s likeness was to start conversation. “Talking about eating disorders is taboo to many people, and this made people talk about it,” Slayen said. “It’s a shocking image. A lot of people have seen it, and it’s started debates,” she said, particularly after she wrote about it for the Huffington Post. “Her proportions are not 100 percent correct, but her look is not invalid.”

“As a pop-cultural icon, Barbie is often used as art to express one’s own personal opinions and views,” a Mattel spokesperson said in an email. “Girls see female body images everywhere today and it’s critical that parents and caregivers provide perspective on what they are seeing. It’s important to remember that Barbie is a doll who stands 11.5 inches tall and weighs 7.25 ounces — she was never modeled on the proportions of a real person.”

Slayen introduced her Barbie to her college, Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., at its first National Eating Disorders Awareness Week this year.

At the school, there were different activities for each day of the week, including covering mirrors with pictures, facts and information on eating disorders, something Slayen had done at her high school. However, “there were just eight mirrors in my high school. There were over 300 in my college,” she said with a sigh.

One day, when my daughter caught me with my tape measure measuring for a dress, she asked me to measure her.I playfully obliged her.

My four year old’s waist is exactly eighteen inches.

Let that marinate for a minute.

(Don’t worry about the toddler. I wrapped the tape around her waist and promptly told her “Yep! Perfect!” She flexed her little toddler muscles and scurried off to go harass our dog.)

The video from Galia’s appearance on The Today Show is included below. Pay special attention to the Black woman at the 1:35 mark who says “This is what the media portrays. This is what counts as beautiful.”

It’s not lost on me that a Black woman stood next to a life-sized interpretation of a blonde haired, blue eyed toy and told a news outlet like Today that “this blonde haired, blue eyed, pale skinned, big breasted, toddler-sized-waist having woman is what you portray as beautiful, desired and appealing to me a woman of color who is the least able to ever look this way.”

I had a long conversation about this one – Black women and our relationship to Barbie. I don’t think it’s a monolithic one – I’m pretty sure it’s not, in fact – and I also think that the spectrum is wide and vast for a lot of us. Me offering up my own relationship to Barbie isn’t an arrogant attempt to say “You’re all like me!” but it is adding another side to it all.

To put it bluntly, I didn’t see Barbie in this way. Outside of simply being a toy that all the neighborhood girls came together to pool our collections and have the ultimate Barbie lifestyle party? Barbie did nothing for me. I think the fact that she was SO different from me and my everyday reality of inner-city Cleveland, that I couldn’t make the connection that Barbie was who I was to grow up emulating. Being a doctor, a pilot, a veterinarian, a wife, a super hero, a fashionista… having a vacation home, a convertible (that drives without her driving it!!!!!), a mobile home, a mansion… awesome friends (complete with a token Black friend that, funny enough, only one of us owned and none of us played with), great male friends and boyfriends? It felt like awesome overload.

While I’m certain that there’s a Kenneth-and-Mamie type correlation to be had here, I question whether or not that extended to body type. It’s obvious that many of us have internalized the “the blonde-haired-blue-eyed-pale-skinned women have what I want, so if I want what they have I should look like them” part of the dating/mating game, but does that extend to body type for us? If so, why? Why not? What does your relationship with Barbie look like, and did it affect your body image?

Black Women, Body Image And Our Relationship To The Life-Sized Barbie is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. My Thoughts On The Vogue Italia “Plus-Sized” Cover, “Real Women,” and Body Snarking
2. O Magazine Answers: How Different Is Barbie From The Average Woman?
3. Update: “Why Black Women Are Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?”

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Post tags: barbie, black women, Body Image, dolls, kenneth clark, mamie clark, the doll test

The description reads, “Clips from the upcoming documentary exploring the deep-seated biases and attitudes about skin color—particularly dark skinned women, outside of and within the Black American culture.”

Welp. Hope you’ve got a tissue. You just might need it.

Before we do this, I’d like to make a few things clear.

Proclaiming “It’s 2011! Skin color doesn’t matter any more!” doesn’t work around here. The reality is that anyone who spends any amount of time on a social network – the places where people are most able to share what’s on their mind without the threat of immediate repercussion in their daily lives – will be able to tell you that at LEAST once a day collectives of people are discussing “a skin-color issue.”

I do acknowledge that skin color issues go both ways. It just so happens that today, the topic is a movie that focuses on, well, Dark Girls. I’d love to see and hear stories of how skin color issues have affected us all, but one person’s story doesn’t invalidate another’s.

Lastly, I’d love to use this as a case study to help us understand how we identify ourselves, and what we pass on to our daughters.

Like, for instance. The girl whose mother said “…and could you just think of if she had any lightness to her skin? She’d be beautiful!” I actually became teary eyed at that moment. As a mother who is now very aware of what messages I pass on to my daughter, and as the sole arbiter of who she becomes as a person right now… I cannot imagine her being “too dark” as a “negative point” against her when I think of all the things that make her who she is.

One of the pleasures of attending an historically Black university is that you get the opportunity to take very culture-specific courses. One of those, for me, was a psychology course that centered around issues that faced Black America and how we can combat them. It was in this course that I learned about Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, who are both well-known for their “Doll Studies” which are what’s mimicked in the first few moments of this video.

You have to wonder where our little girls get these messages from? That they’re worth less – not necessarily worthless – than their peers because their skin is darker. I’ve written about this before – the more we highlight and focus on perceived flaws in our little girls, the more likely they are to do things that we don’t attribute to girls who have high self-esteem… and that could be weight or skin color. The little girl who answered those questions in that video couldn’t have been older than a second grader (I might have a kid, but I’m terrible at guessing their ages.) and had already decided that a child who looks the most like her is the dumber, uglier child. What happened to thinking you are the hottest potato in the pan?

(“Hottest potato in the pan?” Yes. I’m country. I know already.)

What scares me the most about this, as a Mom, is that I don’t know what it is that passes on these images to children – is it something as inconspicuous as seeing only white children in TV shows, or is it actually hearing someone say “nobody wants your dark ass anyway?” – so I don’t know how to fight it. I don’t know how to combat it. And can we ever? Even if your home is safe for the development of a young Black girl’s psyche, who’s to say that your sister is as enlightened as you? Your Mother? Your cousins? The babysitter? The other kids on the yard? If it’s coming from all angles, how many swords do you need?

I mean, how much pain do you have to endure in your childhood before you start to say things like “I don’t want my child to look like me?” How does that change how you approach and view relationships? How many women do we know who specifically seek out men who “look a certain way” so that the possibility of diluting the skin color of the child is greater? How does that mentality feed into the idea that “lighter skin” is a hotter commodity and more wanted than, well, Dark Skin? I mean, I think of a fella I dated once – fair skin, green eyes – who swore up and down that I was only interested in having his baby, since “that’s how all the others were.” Poking holes in condoms, lying about birth control… needless to say, that was too much for me.

And really, for those of us who were teased (or watched someone be teased) as children for being overweight, what do we do? We go into hyperdrive trying to prevent our little girls from being overweight. What messages do we pass on to them about themselves when we do that? When we overcompensate in our parenting, and our little girls turn into that which we didn’t “want,” how do we treat them then? Do we become resentful and start trying to have another child, preferably without the perceived “defect,” or do we just beat it into our little girls’ heads that they “have a flaw they need to work hard to overcome?” Isn’t that just passing down the same body image issues we have?

Who perpetuates this? I mean, if you listen closely enough, it comes from three different angles: one woman says “I’m used to hearing ["I'm so glad she didn't come out dark!"] from other races,” a man says “Dark skinned women look funny beside me, so I’d rather not date a dark skinned woman,” and – obviously – our media, which is run by an often nameless, faceless collective that is, ostensibly, not-black. (At this point, considering how ingrained this is in our society, I don’t know whether or not it’d matter whether or not media was all-Black.)

The point about sexuality is also troubling to me, because when we try to decouple issues that compel women to make questionable decisions when it comes to relationships. You can deny it, but the point will always be there. It is a fact that transcends relationships, but is especially visible there: individuals who believe that they have less to offer than their peers will accept a lesser role and be happy with that, simply because they don’t think they’re worthy of any role at all.

Calling a woman “beautiful, exotic” behind closed doors, basically telling her everything she wants to hear, getting what you want from her, and then leaving? It’s using a woman. It’s exploiting her weaknesses. And if everyone around her values her as little as she does, there’s no one around her capable of building up her self-worth, because they don’t think she’s worth much, either. There’s no one around able to support her in her most vulnerable point – the point where she feels like she has nothing to offer and is worthy of merely meaningless sex (unless, of course, she can tell herself that this is exactly what she wants and is honest with herself about it.)

“It doesn’t look clean, I feel like… like, nasty, almost… When you roll out of bed, and your hair is like, nappy, it’s the most disgusting, unclean thing…”

Oh, word?

My bad.

I don’t care to do the natural-vs-relaxed thing on my blog. However… this makes me sad, especially from a girl so… young. And while I’m almost certain that there’s some grown woman out there like “Well, I agree with her. It just looks unclean,” I’m going to go out on a limb and say “That… makes me sad, too.” And we can both be okay with that.

I’m in the interest of shining a light on the things that prevent us from being who we are, who we want to be… and most of us want to be lovers, dreamers and little green frogs–er, I mean, worthy of… the same things as everyone else. We want the space to be vulnerable. To be emotional without being deemed angry. To be loved without subtext. To be adored and admired. To be exoticized without malicious intent – as in, it’s okay to love my dark skin and my deep eyes, but do you also seek to love the other things that make me who I am? These stigmas keep us from getting to that space. How do we fight them?

Body Image, Self-Worth & Sexuality: Dark Skin, A New Documentary is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Body Image: Feeling Like You’re Never Enough
2. Black Women, Body Image And Our Relationship To The Life-Sized Barbie
3. The Quest For Healthy Body Image

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Post tags: blackness, Body Image, dark skin, light skin, relationships, skin color

…I thought it might be interesting to bring this up, here:

At a plastic surgery clinic in Upper Manhattan that caters to Dominicans, one of the most popular procedures is an operation to lift women’s buttocks, because — as the doctor explains — “they all like the curve.”

In Flushing, Queens, surgeons have their attention trained a few feet higher, on upturned noses that their Chinese patients want flipped down. Russian women in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, are having their breasts enlarged, while Koreans in Chinatown are having jaw lines slimmed.

As the demand for surgical enhancement explodes around the world, New York has developed a host of niche markets that allow the city’s many immigrants to get tucks and tweaks that are carefully tailored to their cultural preferences and ideals of beauty. Just as they can find Lebanese grape leaves or bowls of Vietnamese pho that taste of home, immigrants can locate surgeons able to recreate the cleavage of Thalía, the Mexican singer, or the bright eyes of Lee Hyori, the Korean pop star.

They can also find a growing number of doctors offering layaway plans to help them afford operations. If the price is still too high, illegal surgery by unlicensed practitioners is available in many neighborhoods.

As these specialized clinics reshape Asian eyelids and Latina silhouettes, they provide a pore-level perspective on the aspirations and insecurities of immigrants in 21st-century New York — a mosaic portrait buffed with Botox.

“When a patient comes in from a certain ethnic background and of a certain age, we know what they’re going to be looking for,” said Dr. Kaveh Alizadeh, the president of Long Island Plastic Surgical Group, which has three clinics in the city. “We are sort of amateur sociologists.”

The extreme makeover is, in many ways, a tradition among the city’s immigrants. A century ago, in the early days of cosmetic surgery, European Jews underwent nose jobs and Irish immigrants had their ears pinned back in attempts to look “more American,” said Victoria Pitts-Taylor, a professor of sociology at Queens College who has written about popular attitudes toward plastic surgery.

“The bulk of those operations were targeted at assimilation issues,” Ms. Pitts-Taylor said.

So, I might be a little all over the place here, with this, and that’s okay. But does this mean that other minority groups also struggle with embracing and representing their own ethnic identities in a country with a mostly Eurocentric standard of beauty? And if other non-Europeans in America are struggling with the idea of representing themselves – eyelid surgery? – what does it say about the standard?

Am I mildly throwing shots at people who’ve endured elective plastic surgery with this post? I’m trying not to, but I can’t help but ask questions about why we choose to embrace certain standards imposed upon us by a society that doesn’t have our best interests in mind or at heart… and I can’t help but ask why we let these things push us toward going under the knife to conform.

…and if “surgery is no big deal” to you, that’s fine. It’s a huge deal to me regardless of whether it is cosmetic or vital.

Moving on, though:

Dr. Holly J. Berns, an anesthesiologist, feels as if she is on a seesaw when she travels from Dr. Yager’s office to suburban clinics. On Long Island, she said, “they’re doing everything they can to get the fat taken out of their buttocks.” In Washington Heights, “it’s the opposite — they just want their rear ends enlarged and rounded.”

Italia Vigniero, 27, a Dominican patient of Dr. Yager’s, received breast implants in 2008 and is considering a buttocks lift to attain, as she called it, “the silhouette of a woman.”

“We Latinas define ourselves with our bodies,” she said. “We always have curves.”

“My personality doesn’t go with small breasts,” she added. Using the words “pecho” and “personalidad” — Spanish for “breast” and “personality” — she coined a term that could serve as Dr. Yager’s motto: “Now, I’m a person with a lot of ‘pechonalidad!’ ”

I mean, the issue that I have with cosmetic surgeries – like butt lifts and lipo – is that you “need” the surgery because something in your lifestyle prevents you from obtaining that body without intervention of surgery… which is why people who have these kinds of surgeries regularly. It may be no big deal to them to have that procedure done regularly… but I’m cheap. I’m just sayin’.

Moving on, again:

Perhaps the most sought-after procedure among Asians is “double-eyelid surgery,” which creates a crease in the eyelid that can make the eye look rounder. Some people criticize the operation, which is hugely popular in many Asian countries, as a throwback to medical procedures meant to obscure ethnic features.

“You want to be part of the acceptable culture and the acceptable ethnicity, so you want to look more Westernized,” said Margaret M. Chin, a professor of sociology at Hunter College who specializes in Asian immigrant culture. “I feel sad that they feel like they have to do this.”

During consultations before surgery, Dr. Lee shows patients a slide show of a white woman with a natural crease in her eyelids and Asian women without it. He discusses the techniques — a stitch here, a cut there — that can bridge the anatomical differences. But he, like several other Asian plastic surgeons, said the procedure had little to do with assimilation.

“One of the traits of beauty is to have large eyes,” Dr. Lee said, “and to get that effect you have to have the double eyelids.”

For all the cultural differences, New York plastic surgeons acknowledge that ethnic neighborhoods are not islands. American pop culture, they say, has strongly influenced how immigrants and their children believe they should look, and reality television shows like “Bridalplasty” have encouraged surgical solutions.

In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Dr. Elena Ocher, a Russian immigrant, attributes the wave of young Russian women requesting breast implants — by far her clinic’s most popular procedure among that group — to American culture, not Russian. “The new generations of Russians are very American, and there’s something in America about large breasts,” she said. “What is this fixation?”

Maya Bronfman, 30, an accountant from Moldova, said many of her Russian friends had undergone procedures, but she shrugged off notions of American beauty ideals. “Everyone in New York is some sort of an immigrant,” she said. “They’re just doing it to feel good.” [source]

I mean, by the definition in this article, Black Americans aren’t immigrants, but um…. is there anyone else that is seeing the same similarities that I’m seeing, here?

As I read this article, my heart just sank lower and lower. Sure, there are examples of individuals who didn’t seek to obscure their ethnicity, but think of those numbers – 5% of Asians, 3% of Latinos and 4% of whites? Each year? And the doctor shows a patient a powerpoint of white women with “desired eyelids” next to Asians who don’t have them? People need surgery to “feel good?” Television – one of the most non-diverse environments ever – is influencing how children think they should look?

“One of the traits of beauty is to have large eyes,” Dr. Lee said, “and to get that effect you have to have the double eyelids.”

In other words… “one of the traits of beauty is this thing that isn’t found in my culture at all, but I’m going to embrace this foreign standard anyway and undergo surgery to obtain this trait.” I mean, that’s basically what that means, right?

That leads me into my final point.

I’m at a point in my journey where I have to truly sit and think about what I want my body to look like… and every time I try to decide on an acceptable personal standard, I take the time to think about “why.” Did I want to be “thick?” Why? Did I want to have huge boobs? Why? Did I want to have an extremely curvaceous figure? Why?

The trick, here, is not to conform to someone else’s standard of beauty, but to identify and feel secure in defining my own. My own standard that isn’t in existence because I want to attract a mate or because I want to use my body as a status symbol among other women (hell, other men, either.) My own standard that exists because it not only keeps me fit, but protects my health, as well. No keeping an excess of fat because I’m scared of losing my booty; no starving myself because I want to look like [insert actress].

If I create my own standard while keeping in mind that it exists because of my own health and happiness, not creating a body that makes me happy because it makes “someone else” – usually men, especially since they seem to like a lot of pechonalidad – then guess what? The amount of confidence that comes from that can never be shaken. Ever.

From Retouching To Plastic Surgery: Minorities And Assimilation is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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1. Choosing The Right Plastic Surgeon
2. MSNBC: Gaining Weight To Quality For Lap-Band Surgery?
3. 400 Pounds Lost? No Surgery? Stop Lying!

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Post tags: aesthetic, Beauty, blackness, Body Image, cultural standards, plastic surgery, plastic surgery clinic, retouched photos, surgical enhancement, upturned noses

Food for thought (and no, no pun intended):

I feel like this relates to our ongoing development of a better sense of body image. How do we think and feel about what he’s saying, here?

For those who cannot view the video? Guess who’s got the transcript? Me!

Delighted to be here and to talk to you about a subject dear to my heart, which is beauty. I do the philosophy of art, aesthetics, actually, for a living. I try to figure out intellectually, philosophically, psychologically, what the experience of beauty is, what sensibly can be said about it and how people go off the rails in trying to understand it. Now this is an extremely complicated subject, in part because the things that we call beautiful are so different. I mean just think of the sheer variety — a baby’s face, Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy”, movies like “The Wizard of Oz”, or the plays of Chekhov, a central California landscape, a Hokusai view of Mt. Fuji, “Der Rosenkavalier”, a stunning match winning goal in a World Cup soccer match, Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, a Jane Austen novel, Fred Astaire dancing across the screen. This brief list includes human beings, natural landforms, works of art and skilled human actions. An account that explains the presence of beauty in everything on this list is not going to be easy.

I can, however, give you at least a taste of what I regard as the most powerful theory of beauty we yet have. And we get it, not from a philosopher of art, not from a postmodern art theorist or a bigwig art critic. No, this theory comes from an expert on barnacles and worms and pigeon breeding. And you know who I mean — Charles Darwin. Of course, a lot of people think they already know the proper answer to the question, what is beauty? It’s in the eye of the beholder. It’s whatever moves you personally. Or, as some people — especially academics — prefer, beauty is in the culturally-conditioned eye of the beholder. People agree that paintings or movies or music are beautiful because their cultures determine a uniformity of aesthetic taste. Taste for both natural beauty and for the arts travel across cultures with great ease. Beethoven is adored in Japan. Peruvians love Japanese woodblock prints. Inca sculptures are regarded as treasures in British museums, while Shakespeare is translated into every major language of the Earth. Or just think about American jazz or American movies — they go everywhere. There are many differences among the arts, but there are also universal, cross-cultural aesthetic pleasures and values.

How can we explain this universality? The best answer lies in trying to reconstruct a Darwinian evolutionary history of our artistic and aesthetic tastes. We need to reverse engineer our present artistic tastes and preferences and explain how they came to be engraved in our minds. By the actions of both our prehistoric, largely pleistocene environments, where we became fully human, but also by the social situations in which we evolved. This reverse engineering can also enlist help from the human record preserved in prehistory. I mean fossils, cave paintings and so forth. And it should take into account what we know of the aesthetic interests of isolated hunter-gatherer bands that survived into the 19th and the 20th centuries.

Now, I personally have no doubt whatsoever that the experience of beauty, with its emotional intensity and pleasure, belongs to our evolved human psychology. The experience of beauty is one component in a whole series of Darwinian adaptations. Beauty is an adaptive effect, which we extend and intensify in the creation and enjoyment of works of art and entertainment. As many of you will know, evolution operates by two main primary mechanisms. The first of these is natural selection — that’s random mutation and selective retention — along with our basic anatomy and physiology — the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails. Natural selection also explains many basic revulsions, such as the horrid smell of rotting meat, or fears, such as the fear of snakes or standing close to the edge of a cliff. Natural selection also explains pleasures — sexual pleasure, our liking for sweet, fat and proteins, which in turn explains a lot of popular foods, from ripe fruits through chocolate malts and barbecued ribs.

The other great principle of evolution is sexual selection, and it operates very differently. The peacock’s magnificent tail is the most famous example of this. It did not evolve for natural survival. In fact, it goes against natural survival. No, the peacock’s tail results from the mating choices made by peahens. It’s quite a familiar story. It’s women who actually push history forward. Darwin himself, by the way, had no doubts that the peacock’s tail was beautiful in the eyes of the peahen. He actually used that word. Now, keeping these ideas firmly in mind, we can say that the experience of beauty is one of the ways that evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest or fascination, even obsession, in order to encourage us toward making the most adaptive decisions for survival and reproduction. Beauty is nature’s way of acting at a distance, so to speak. I mean, you can’t expect to eat an adaptively beneficial landscape. It would hardly do to your baby or your lover. So evolution’s trick is to make them beautiful, to have them exert a kind of magnetism to give you the pleasure of simply looking at them.

Consider briefly an important source of aesthetic pleasure, the magnetic pull of beautiful landscapes. People in very different cultures all over the world tend to like a particular kind of landscape, a landscape that just happens to be similar to the pleistocene savannas where we evolved. This landscape shows up today on calendars, on postcards, in the design of golf courses and public parks and in gold-framed pictures that hang in living rooms from New York to New Zealand. It’s a kind of Hudson River school landscape featuring open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copses of trees. The trees, by the way, are often preferred if they fork near the ground, that is to say, if they’re trees you could scramble up if you were in a tight fix. The landscape shows the presence of water directly in view, or evidence of water in a bluish distance, indications of animal or bird life as well as diverse greenery and finally — get this — a path or a road, perhaps a riverbank or a shoreline, that extends into the distance, almost inviting you to follow it. This landscape type is regarded as beautiful, even by people in countries that don’t have it. The ideal savanna landscape is one of the clearest examples where human beings everywhere find beauty in similar visual experience.

But, someone might argue, that’s natural beauty. How about artistic beauty? Isn’t that exhaustively cultural? No, I don’t think it is. And once again, I’d like to look back to prehistory to say something about it. It is widely assumed that the earliest human artworks are the stupendously skillful cave paintings that we all know from Lascaux and Chauvet. Chauvet caves are about 32,000 years old, along with a few small, realistic sculptures of women and animals from the same period. But artistic and decorative skills are actually much older than that. beautiful shell necklaces that look like something you’d see at an arts and crafts fair, as well as ochre body paint, have been found from around 100,000 years ago.

But the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts are older even than this. I have in mind the so-called Acheulian hand axes. The oldest stone tools are choppers from the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa. They go back about two and a half million years. These crude tools were around for thousands of centuries, until around 1.4 million years ago when Homo erectus started shaping single, thin stone blades, sometimes rounded ovals, but often in, what are to our eyes, an arresting, symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop form. These Acheulian hand axes — they’re named after St. Acheul in France, where finds were made in 19th century — have been unearthed in their thousands, scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa, almost everywhere Homo erectus and Homo ergaster roamed. Now, the sheer numbers of these hand axes shows that they can’t have been made for butchering animals. And the plot really thickens when you realize that, unlike other pleistocene tools, the hand axes often exhibit no evidence of wear on their delicate blade edges. And some, in any event, are too big to use for butchery. Their symmetry, their attractive materials and, above all, their meticulous workmanship are simply quite beautiful to our eyes, even today.

So what were these ancient — I mean, they’re ancient, they’re foreign, but they’re at the same time somehow familiar. What were these artifacts for? The best available answer is that they were literally the earliest known works of art, practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects, contemplated both for their elegant shape and their virtuoso craftsmanship. Hand axes mark an evolutionary advance in human history — tools fashioned to function as what Darwinians call fitness signals — that is to say, displays that are performances like the peacock’s tail, except that, unlike hair and feathers, the hand axes are consciously cleverly crafted. Competently made hand axes indicated desirable personal qualities — intelligence, fine motor control, planning ability, conscientiousness and sometimes access to rare materials. Over tens of thousands of generations, such skills increased the status of those who displayed them and gained a reproductive advantage over the less capable. You know, it’s an old line, but it has been shown to work — “Why don’t you come up to my cave, so I can show you my hand axes.”

(Laughter)

Except, of course, what’s interesting about this is that we can’t be sure how that idea was conveyed, because the Homo erectus that made these objects did not have language. It’s hard to grasp, but it’s an incredible fact. This object was made by a hominid ancestor — Homo erectus or Homo ergaster — between 50 and 100,000 years before language. Stretching over a million years, the hand axe tradition is the longest artistic tradition in human and proto-human history. By the end of the hand axe epic, Homo sapiens — as they were then called, finally — were doubtless finding new ways to amuse and amaze each other by, who knows, telling jokes, storytelling, dancing, or hairstyling. Yes, hairstyling — I insist on that.

For us moderns, virtuoso technique is used to create imaginary worlds in fiction and in movies, to express intense emotions with music, painting and dance. But still, one fundamental trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: the beauty we find in skilled performances. From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall, human beings have a permanent innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts. We find beauty in something done well.

So the next time you pass a jewelry shop window displaying a beautifully cut teardrop-shaped stone, don’t be so sure it’s just your culture telling you that that sparkling jewel is beautiful. Your distant ancestors loved that shape and found beauty in the skill needed to make it, even before they could put their love into words. Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? No, it’s deep in our minds. It’s a gift, handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors. Our powerful reaction to images to the expression of emotion in art to the beauty of music to the night sky will be with us and our dscendants for as long as the human race exists.

Thank you.

I love TED talks… if, for no other reason than to compel us to think.

Besides that gigantic bolded portion, I want to pull a few of these quotes out of here, though, that I thought were of particular value to a collective of individuals who may be at a point where they’re reassessing what they consider beautiful and what the value of that word may truly be:

“Beauty is in the culturally conditioned eye of the beholder.”

“People agree that [things] are beautiful because their cultures determine a uniformity of aesthetic taste.”

“Beauty is nature’s way of acting at a distance, so to speak. I mean, you can’t expect to eat an adaptively beneficial landscape. It would hardly do to your baby or your lover. So evolution’s trick is to make them beautiful, to have them exert a kind of magnetism to give you the pleasure of simply looking at them.”

Now… I could insert a very long paragraph about loving a curvacious figure and intentionally rejecting the images I see in every lingerie ad – the very things that are meant to market TO women, yet compel men to also market on their behalf – but I won’t. I could even mention, again, that we are more compelled to believe something is beautiful nowadays because of what commercials shove in our face as “the standard,” causing those of us who don’t look similar to “the standard” to feel “less than”… because “less than” also implies “less than the standard“, but still says “less than”… but I won’t. I could even use this video as a further reason why we need to protect our young girls from images that show them anything other than who we want them to be, for fear that they may feel compelled to embrace standards created for monetary gain (thereby marketing to the majority, not the minority), but I won’t.

Instead, I’ll just walk away from my laptop, swing my hips a little harder and know that my curves, my skin and my hair (huge, though it may be) are beautiful for reasons other than “Well, because I think they are.”

On Body Image: The Darwinian Theory of Beauty is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Retouching, Body Image and The Photoshop Diet: When Playboy Models Aren’t Even Enough
2. Retouching, Body Image and The Photoshop Diet
3. Body Image, Self-Worth & Sexuality: Dark Skin, A New Documentary

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beauty, blackness, Body Image

I’ve never read Push. (I know someone’s gonna get on me for that. I spent more time in music books than I did anything else. My bad.) I haven’t seen the movie Precious and probably never will, simply because I’m not a movie person. However, you cannot ignore the fact that something awesome happened last year, and that awesomeness manifested itself into Oscars, Golden Globes, Solar Systems, and whatever else Hollywood uses to pat itself on the back.

I’m inspired by the roller coaster ride that the Precious team has enjoyed. From thinking that the story could never be done justice on the screen, to winning an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. From thinking that plus-sized women – especially women of color… especially Mo’Nique  – could never be recognized playing “these kinds of roles,” to watching a very gracious and charismatic 26 year old be nominated alongside the Meryl Streep and the Helen Mirren… and watching Mo’Nique win that Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

Really, do I need to go on?

There is something really powerful and refreshing here. While there are people who have their concerns about details within the movie (which don’t mean much to me, since I won’t be seeing it), I can only give credit to one thing. The fact that this climate, in this day and age, allowed for a movie like Precious to be funded, screened, lauded, awarded and successful. Forget what you think about “fat Black chicks.” That movie made $47 million dollars in only 200 theatres (if you take a peek at this chart, you’ll see movies who made $70mil but were shown in thousands of theatres) – there was clearly success to be had regardless of how few people were willing to give it a chance.

That’s not enough, though. Collectively as a nation, we need to be able to tear you down and rebuild you. So… let the attempts to tear down Miss Sidibe commence.

Howard Stern and that genius sidekick of his, Robin, lose their freaking marbles calling Gabby “the size of a planet,” and loudly proclaiming that she could never get another part because Hollywood simply doesn’t write for fat Black broads. I mean, that’s putting it bluntly, but it’s still a hell of a lot more polite than Stern’s original words. I’m not really sweating Howard Stern.. no one should. People who like him tune in to hear him say “what everyone is thinking” in the most crass and disrespectful way possible. It’s how he gets down. Big whoop.

This, for some reason, was the straw that broke my back. Some scammy acai berry magic elixir sellin’ company (y’all know how I feel about anything “magic“) tries to capitalize off of Sidibe’s attention by “leaking” a letter supposedly sent to her representatives about their fake-concern for her health. For the purposes of my rant, the letter is typed out for you below:

Dear Ms. Sidibe,

After viewing the recent pictures taken of you strolling around Santa Monica earlier this week, we at [website redacted] have decided we can no longer sit back and keep our mouth’s [sic] shut! Obesity is a major epidemic in the United States, and we would like to help you rid yourself of this terrible affliction. Life doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s time to prove Howard Stern and all of your naysayers wrong! We, along with Oprah agree that you DO have a bright future ahead of you in the entertainment business, and the only way you can reach your goal of someday winning that Oscar is by being active, fit, and most of all, healthy!

Thousands of people around the world say that [company name redacted]‘s Acai berry products help them live a healthier life that is full of energy and vitality. [redacted] has taken Acai Berry one step further by combining Acai extract with a combination of nutrients that help with weight-loss, increasing energy levels, and antioxidants that help promote healthier looking skin.

[redacted] would like to offer Ms. Sibide [sic] a ONE YEAR FREE SUPPLY of [redacted] in return for her glowing testimonial after she sheds her unwanted pounds.

Please get back to me at your earliest convenience with your or your representative’s shipping address so that we may ship out your first month’s supply.

Best Regards,
Total Jerk
CEO scammycompany

That last part might be my addition, but the rest of the letter is real. This is where I blew my lid.

First of all, I’m not gonna lie. I can hear it now. “Create a letter offering Si-bi-de – oh, it’s Si-di-be? Who cares! You know who I mean – some of our product for free, and send copies of the letter to the major gossip outlets. Tell her all she has to do is agree to promote for us, and she can have the supply for free. At best, she says yes. At worst, she says no and we still have all the publicity. Can’t fail!” That’s smart marketing… even though it’s rather vulture-like.

However… telling her that losing weight is the ONLY way she’d ever win an Oscar? Is that what this country is coming to now? That we believe that someone with stellar, outstanding, amazing talent would get passed over for recognition simply because they’re “fat?” That’s what we support and perpetuate? Is our collective self-esteem and respect for our peers that poor? Even more so, is that what we want to perpetuate? We don’t want to change that? Can’t change that?

Sigh.

Do I think Gabby is overweight? Yes. Do I think she’s unhealthy? Of course I do. Do I think that my opinion is important enough for her to care what I think? Not at all. Does any of this have anything to do with the amazing talent this woman has? Absolutely not. It makes her human. And I’d stand to believe that her “visible imperfection” made her that much more real in her portrayal of an… imperfect person. A real person playing a real role. How… unique.

I’m not even going to get on the fact that the letter repeats that motto that the fitness and weight loss industry LOVES to beat into our heads… that a magic little product will magically make us healthy. ‘Cause health is as easy as being skinny. ‘Cause being healthy is the same as being skinny. I mean, I don’t need to go there on this site, do I?

Nah.

My eyes kind of just glaze over when I have to face people’s need to talk about Gabby’s weight. Do we… need someone to know that we feel some kind of way about someone’s body? Are we getting some kind of satisfaction from highlighting someone else’s flaws? Is it just open season on people, nowadays? Or do we feel that we are so above criticism that we can say whatever we want about others… since, clearly, the same couldn’t be said about ourselves?

Like I said in the beginning… I don’t care, and I wish more of you felt the same way, too. I support Gabourey as a very incredible and witty personality, and I wish her the best (apparently.. thanks to Showtime, she’s already on her way). My time is better invested in me and making myself a better person, than expelling energy on people that don’t know me or give a damn what I think.

Update: Robin Quivers, the aforementioned sidekick on The Howard Stern Show, wrote for The Huffington Post just so that she could honestly “explain” her and Stern’s comments… without all the snark and crudeness required while on air. Maybe I’m just too much of a cynic to give it any weight, no pun intended.

In an effort to end this rant on an uplifting note, I present you with the best thing to come out of a celebrity’s mouth in a long time:

“I learned to love myself, because I sleep with myself every night and I wake up with myself every morning, and if I don’t like myself, there’s no reason to even live the life [...] They try to paint the picture that I was this downtrodden, ugly girl who was unpopular in school and in life and then I got this role and now I’m awesome, but the truth is that I’ve been awesome, and then I got this role.” – Gabourey Sidibe

Amen.

My Thoughts on Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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2. Q&A Wednesday: My Thoughts On The Master Cleanse
3. A Few Thoughts on Cravings, Deprivation and Indulging

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 24 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-fat society, blackness, celebrities, fatophobia, media, mentality, weight loss

Until…

I just so happened to read Naked & Unashamed, and catch this quote at the end:

“People have to be comfortable in their own skin before they can be comfortable with someone else’s.”

Since this is a website about embracing oneself, being aware of one’s shortcomings and loving oneself enough to put in the effort to make ourselves better, I had to take a stab at it.

In all honesty, I’m beyond the video. I do enough analyzing all day… I’m not really moved by a music video, no matter how compelling it may be. I’m way more interested in the reactions to the video than I am the video itself.

Among one of my favorites, we have this:

“Typical…black women stripping nude in a video and debasing themselves. And you wonder why you are the least respected and sought after.”

Obviously, I don’t agree with that, but there’s a larger issue at play, here.

Sports Illustrated can have an entire magazine devoted to white women in swimsuits – suits, mind you, made of much less fabric than what Badu was wearing before the blurring began. SpikeTV can host some of the most misogynistic garbage I’ve ever seen (though, full disclosure, I do my fair share of laughing at it, too… What? They show CSI repeats.) Playboy has women showing their cookies, their cupcakes, their twinkies and their muffins. That’s just what they do. They model... They act – it’s a job… It’s Playboy – what do you expect?

A Black woman appears in a music video – saying nothing about whether or not she’s fully clothed – and she’s “just a video ho.” A Black woman poses in a bikini in a magazine, and it’s “She couldn’t wear more clothing than that?” A Black woman working on her flexibility must be doing it for sexual reasons. Don’t let her admit she takes a pole dancing fitness class.

Hell, Badu even tweeted the link to the video that inspired hers – a white male/female duo running Buck. E. Naked through Times Square, NYC. They’re just lovable, playful scamps running ’round an already sinful city, though. No big deal there. Erykah, however, is showcasing why no one loves Black women… by doing what the hell she wants to do in her music video.

There’s “debasing” going on, alright. It’s not self-imposed, though.

“People have to be comfortable in their own skin before they can be comfortable with someone else’s.”

Either we’re apologists for the sexuality of our non-Black counterparts, or we have set standards so high for Black women that exploring ourselves is no longer acceptable. We’re doomed to be one monolithic mass, regardless of our individuality… because someone we don’t know – someone who, essentially, doesn’t really give a damn about us – insists on trying to save us from ourselves. Since, y’know, we’re turning ourselves into whores. We’re always seeking to make a Black woman somebody’s Jezebel, in dire need of our “help.”

Not familiar with Jezebel?

The portrayal of Black women as lascivious by nature is an enduring stereotype. The descriptive words associated with this stereotype are singular in their focus: seductive, alluring, worldly, beguiling, tempting, and lewd. Historically, White women, as a category, were portrayed as models of self-respect, self-control, and modesty – even sexual purity, but Black women were often portrayed as innately promiscuous, even predatory. This depiction of Black women is signified by the name Jezebel.

There’s also this one, that I love:

Next, there is Jezebel, the bad-black-girl, who is depicted as alluring and seductive as she either indiscriminately mesmerizes men and lures them into her bed, or very deliberately lures into her snares those who have something of value to offer her.

I can’t help but wonder if our need to make a Black woman into a Jezebel comes from our failure to understand ourselves: what parts of us are sexual in nature, what is not; what should be seen as sexual, what should not; what should be considered hazardous, and what is harmless exploration – the kind from which lessons are learned.

Am I an advocate for sexual irresponsibility? No. Am I saying it’s ok to “be a slut?” If we share the same definition of “slut” (see: sexual irresponsibility), then I’ma go on and say “no.” Make no mistake, I don’t give passes for behavior that is not my own. However, I am a hippie at heart, and while I have my own standards for how I behave and interact with others in public, I can’t force those standards on others. I’ve never turned down the opportunity to offer up my opinion when asked for it, but making judgments and imposing those judgments on others as guidelines by which they must abide… are two different things entirely.

And while there are many who might not see – nor care about – what I’m saying here (and that’s okay), it’s worth pointing out – when we, as Black women, insist on reducing even the most innocent of our actions to Jezebelism, we perpetuate the notion that that’s all Black women are. That’s all you can expect of them. Being the Jezebel. Being the sirene.

Having said that, all I have from here are questions. Are so many of us so uncomfortable with the concept of sexuality – our own sexuality – that we can’t even identify when something is sexual or not? Has it stifled our intellectual understanding of sexuality? If we have “passes” to dole out, why are we not doling them out for ourselves? Do we often see inherently sexual messages in inherently non-sexual situations? Collectively, are we so repressed and limited in our self-comfort, that we can’t help but to project this repression onto others? Why care so much?

Must we make everything a Black woman does publicly be about her “whoring?” Or, are we really just projecting our own discomfort on other women who look like us? Like I said: from here, all I’ve got is questions. Well, questions… and this:

“People have to be comfortable in their own skin before they can be comfortable with someone else’s.”

On Badu and Our Bodies: Are We Comfortable In Our Own Skin? is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Body Image, Self-Worth & Sexuality: Dark Skin, A New Documentary
2. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: The Booty
3. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: Straight Hair

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: black women, blackness, celebrities, mentality, sexuality

I think people who really have your best intentions at heart are allowed to express their concerns to you about becoming healthier; however, there is a thing called tact! – Chanel

i’d rather not have anyone call me fat except for me. I decide when I need to hit the gym and i decide when and if i am happy with how I look. – Elledub

Honestly, though I may dislike hearing it, I think my family and friends should be allowed to call me fat. I’ll tell you why. As I’ve stated before (maybe not here, but on my blog or Twitter), I didn’t really notice the weight gain. I knew it was creeping up, but I still looked (in my mind) pretty good. When people started making comments, inclusive of a student that had absolutely NO tact whatsoever, I took stock in what they were saying and decided that I needed to do something about it. – Tracy

Honestly, anyone who loves me had better tell me if I’m picking up weight. – Winnie

I wish to God one of my friends or family members had had the courage to tell me I needed to do something about my weight a few years ago. [...] Now that most of the excess weight is gone, everyone is all “OMG, you look great”, but I can’t help but to wish someone had remarked on my weight before. But that’s easy to say on the other side of the fence… – Sister Toldja

I think that “other side of the fence” is a big part of this. As I wrote about the conversation between my Mother and my sister, it’s hard for me to think about what my response would’ve been to someone telling me I was gaining too much weight. I mean, I was a snappy chick… quick to rain jokes down upon the head of anyone who was willing to step to me about my weight. I could only imagine what kind of torrential terrible twenties tantrum fit I might’ve thrown had someone told me that I was any less sexy, dope, amazingly gorgeous, downright stunning and perfect than I believed I was in my own head.

And that’s not to say that being overweight means that I couldn’t be sexy, dope, amazingly gorgeous, downright stunning and perfect. It means that since I saw “fat” as a flaw (and let’s face it, most of us do), having someone remind me of a flaw I was diligently ignoring felt like the chink in my armor turning into a hole. And that’s, well… unacceptable.

I think of the countless times my girls tried to get me to hit the gym with them. My best friend, an avid runner, actually offered to walk with me one day. (Do you know how hard it is to get a runner to slow down for your slow behind?) My mother made side salads for dinner, while making sure that the more calorie-heavy parts of the meal were “all gone” by the time I’d go to fix my plate. Apparently, everyone had something to say… but no one was saying it. Meanwhile, I was gaining weight at a rate of about 20lbs a year.

Am I making that gain everyone else’s fault? Nope. It’s my body, my responsibility to learn how to care for it, and care for it properly. However, what kind of climate was I creating where the people around me couldn’t even tell me – in love and in kindness – that something was going on with me? Couldn’t express their concern for me?

Frankly, I ain’t the one. I can’t afford to be the one.

Let’s say that you and your girls are getting ready to hit a major event. Before you all walk out the door, you check each other out to make sure you’re all looking good. Isn’t the expectation that one of them will tell you if you’re the one looking a mess? We expect our friends to tell us if we’re looking a fool before we walk out of our houses, but they can’t tell us we’ve put on too much weight?

Is it the fact that we, as women, tend to be so objectified – everything has to do with sexuality and sexual appeal – that we’ve equated “you’re gaining weight” with “you’re unattractive?” Are we so used to everything being about attraction, that being told we’re packin’ on the pounds must also be about being attractive (or, in this case, less than attractive?) It couldn’t simply be a “Hey… check on your health.” type situation? It has to be about “cute?”

Or is it the fact that everyone’s threshold is different? Southerners have a different definition of “putting on weight” than Northerners. Miami’s definition is different from Houston. Mississippi wouldn’t understand California. An extra ten pounds vs an extra hundred or so. For someone to acknowledge that I’ve put on the pounds, when “put on the pounds” means “ten pounds” to them? I won’t even lie. They just might get the finger.

I think about myself now. I get at least one comment/email/tweet/anonymous whatever a week calling me a “fat bitch.” I usually laugh, but every now and again I raise my eyebrow and wonder… “Once upon a time, I couldn’t get people I love to tell me I was too big. Now, I’ve got strangers telling me I’m fat? What part of the game is that?” 330lb Erika might not’ve had that reaction. 180lb Erika, however… is tickled.

It goes back to that “other side of the fence” note I made earlier. Looking at the person I am today, I can acknowledge that this is the person I needed to be to get to where I am. Allowing the people I love to feel comfortable addressing my flaws might’ve helped me become this person much earlier on in my life. If I keep them close to me because I trust their influence to make me “better,” why exclude health? Why exclude weight? If the people who love me want to offer me solutions, why not be open to them? What do I have to lose?

And let me clarify.. I’m talking about people who love you. The ones invested in you as a person. The ones who are there for you at your worst. They deserve to be able to help make you better, and enjoy you at your best. We can talk about “haters,” but I fully believe they’re not worth talking about. Nor are they worth thinking about. People who mean you no positivity aren’t worth time or brainspace.

No, really. I mean that. So those family members who insist on spitefully bringing up your weight – the ones you know mean you no earthly good, and usually never have any support to offer you beyond “Yo booty gettin’ kinda big” – you can give them a polite “I’ll take that under consideration,” and change the subject… while mentally giving them the finger.

My plea is just that we not shut out the people who we trust to see the worst of us. Don’t prevent them from helping to develop the best in you: the healthy you! I’m talkin’ about those people who – like my friends (who, I’ll have you know, are still my tried and true friends fat or skinny) – are willing to walk through the fire with you, support you and offer you solutions to help you get to where you want to go. Where you need to go.

This journey isn’t one that we can go on alone. You will always need a support system that will giggle with you at your failures, cheer you on through your successes, and help you learn from both. You trust them to have your back, so trust them to tell you about something you might be overlooking… like your weight. If you love them and they love you (and you know it), give them a chance. They very well may have the answers, resources and support you need.

Be happy, but most importantly… be healthy.

Who Should I Allow To Call Me Fat? is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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Post tags: blackness, fat, mentality, social eating, stigmas

As much as I love her... she's doing exactly what I'm talking about - hiding her front (in a robe, no less) but accentuating her back? Why not work on both? Good grief.

I’m serious. In fact, the only post on this entire site full of excuses, explanations, “b-b-buts,” disbelief and complaints is the one post I did about building a fit booty. Women who don’t believe that it is possible to build a booty (why? because they haven’t been able to do it yet, of course) complaining and questioning me, all because I question the desire to cling to an unhealthy lifestyle all for the sake of holding onto a re-buildable feature.

When women talk to me about how they don’t want to work out because they don’t want to burn the booty, I often – in my head – question if they notice the other things that come with that choice. For example, the huge thighs attached to the fat booty. The spare tire that nests directly above it. The gut we’re constantly trying to hide with long, cute, flowy shirts. The saddlebags that come from thigh fat being pushed aside for our gut sitting on our laps. And somewhere, someone is wondering what the hell saddlebags are.

I think of the women often named to me in regards to having large booty, and it’s almost always a video chick. Why? Because that’s what they hear the men (or women?) near them desiring, and since they want to be desired too, this is what they covet. I giggle a little bit when I google them or when I reference the pictures they’ve shown me. There’s usually a chick in a bikini, typically photoshopped [poorly], with her booty turned flush to the camera. The first thing in my mind is “Okay, so what does she look like in motion?” Then, I hit youtube. I can usually see what they look like without the interference of photoshop. There’s usually something out of wack that cannot be hidden by creative photoshopping, clever positioning of arms and legs, or “interesting” costuming… but we’re willing to overlook that in our desire to glorify her booty.

So… let’s look at what we’re working with, here. Girls who make money off of their bodies being in tip top shape are being idolized by women who don’t want to work out… because they think that not working out will help them develop or maintain the same figure. There’s no logic in that. None.

There’s also always the occasional mention of the around-the-way-girl-with-the-giant-booty. The girl who has a phenomenal figure complete with a giant behind, and everyone – including her – knows it. This girl is usually shaping the hell out of her behind and thighs with the same brand of jeans every day, and telling everyone she was “just born this way.” I’ll tell you from personal experience – these girls are, more often than not, lying. There’s always something about being told you have an admirable feature, and being able to say “Oh, I was born with that!” with a sly smile tacked on the end.. knowing full well you’re enjoying fooling people.

It’s bull. Be it straight up exercise, dance, yoga positions – or, hell, sex positions – something is helping assist in the shape of that body. It can be hormones and genetics, but more often than not? You’re being hoodwinked… or snookered.

The amount of stock we put in this is crazy to me. I’ll even fire a few shots – some of the booties that I’ve seen women claim to want to protect… could use a lot of work. No one seems to notice that the booties belonging to these video and magazine girls don’t have creases… or dimples… or clumps of fat. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to denigrate anyone, here. I’m trying to understand why we would cling to a misconception of what a “great booty” truly is, to use as an excuse to not put in work. Three particular things can actually enhance the booty we all have: 1) decreasing the “spare tire effect” around the tummy actually increases the slope from the back to the booty; 2) decreasing the thigh fat increases the curve in the booty; 3) squatting, lunching and hopping for your life actually picks up your cheeks. But for some reason, we’d rather believe that proper booty shaping comes from being cornfed and allergic to the gym. I mean, I could assume that it’s simply because we don’t want to put in work… but that’s nothing new.

I’d ask the question of why the booty is so powerful among women that we’d risk our health to preserve it.. but I believe I’ve already answered it. “Because that’s what they hear the men (or women?) near them desiring, and since they want to be desired too, this is what they covet.” I’ve already shared my thoughts on this foolishness.

The reality is this. We all know how prevalent this thinking is in our community. And much like the mentality that you have to adopt to be anti-processed foods and pro-clean eating… you have to be equally strong-willed in your rejection of this booty talk. Have faith in the fact that you can build the booty you want along with the completely fit and sexy body you desire… and develop better health all along the way. That’s what I call a total win.

Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: The Booty is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: On Self Esteem
2. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: Straight Hair
3. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: “White Girl Stuff”

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 46 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blackness, mentality, myths

To me, that’s… funny.

For a number of reasons.

Make no mistake about it, I’ve said on here that I wear relaxed tresses. My own hair is a third of the way down my back, extremely thick, and I usually toss it up in a ponytail. I used to wear sew-ins, because they allowed me to do some insane things to my hair, still look good, and not manage to burn all of my hair off. For me, as well as a number of women, relaxing our hair is a manageability issue.

And, really.. I’ve got to admit: it’s absolutely a manageability issue for me because although I relax regularly, I still have the luxury of being able to rock my ‘fro. Quite frankly, I’m not interested in flat ironing my hair every day. Not in the least.

However, the conversation that this movie is forcing us to have involves the Black standard of female beauty. IS there a premium placed on women with straight hair? Is this a healthy concept for us? By healthy, I don’t mean health-wise, but more so in terms of what it says to us about ourselves? Don’t worry, this isn’t about to turn into a rant of natural vs relaxed.

I can’t help but wonder, though. What is out there that is so powerful, it can convince our girlfriends to spend a whole DAY in the salon to get their hair styled, but it’s too rough to spend a half hour a day walking? Where is the message that tells us we must spend THOUSANDS of dollars each year caring for our hair, sacrificing entire days in beauty salons, and why isn’t the message of being more physically fit getting through? Can someone measure the strength of THAT message for me?

What is it? I mean, if I look at the TV, the same images of women with straight, shiny, silky hair also contain images of women with stick thin figures and single-digit dress sizes. If I look at a magazine ad of a woman with gorgeous straight hair with long curls, she’s more often than not going to be rail thin. I’m not saying that “rail thin” is the way to be by ANY means, but I’m hoping to illustrate a point here. If the small figures are found in the same places we find the images of women with straight hair… why isn’t the message convincing Black women to put forth a gang of effort into losing weight getting through?

Now, I can’t identify or verify these numbers, but check this out:

Unfortunately, 46% of African American men and 57% of African American women are sedentary, with no time scheduled for exercise. – Lottie’s Health N Wellness

No time scheduled for exercise, but all the time in the world for the almighty touch-up?

Listen, I’m not railing against women who DO hit the salon at 6AM waiting to make sure they’re out by 2PM. I’m railing against women who can get up at 6AM for a hair appointment, while loudly complaining about having no time for the gym. A half hour a day walking helped me lose 18lbs in one month. Maybe we overestimate what it takes to actually invest in our personal health. Maybe because we get so few tidbits of advice on how to care for our physical selves, we’ve let commercials and infomercials and trainers with something to sell educate us improperly. Maybe we’ve been led to believe that it requires more than we can afford in time as well as money. Maybe, baby.

I think it’s funny that the movie could very well NOT address fitness in the slightest. Is it because the topic is wholly uncomfortable for at least 79% of us to talk about? Is it too much to think about why we find such comfort in seeing heavier set women in our community? Before someone tries to take offense, don’t take my words as saying there is something offensive to society’s sensibilities by having overweight women around. I’m saying that there’s something that makes it acceptable for us to live an unhealthy lifestyle, but would make us sacrifice a whole day (in some cases, a whole weekend) for different hair.

What is it going to take for us to re-educate and enlighten ourselves? Will it take our men to start openly and loudly shunning overweight women, as opposed to still giving us attention? Is that what it will boil down to, to get us to focus equal-if-not-more attention on our physical health? What are your thoughts?

‘Cause Your Good Hair Is More Important Than Your Health? is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Great Hair or Great Body? Straight Hair and Working Out
2. Open Thread: What Do YOU Do With Your Hair?
3. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: Straight Hair

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 28 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Black Hair, blackness, exercise and relaxers

Look at how they've got Khloe covered up by the text -- poor girl is already touted as "the fat one," what a way to perpetuate that "you shouldn't be seen as much as the skinny one" meme. Sigh.

Self-esteem is defined as a confidence and satisfaction in oneself. A person’s overall evaluation or appraisal of his or her own worth. If you were a stock on wall street, it’d literally be how much you think you should sell for.

If you listen to the national conversation about weight, one would presume that being overweight is a sin. It’s unsightly. It’s “offensive to the nation’s visual sensibilities.” The media regularly perpetuates this notion that if you don’t look anything like “X”, then there is something wrong with you. Never mind the fact that you may not look like “X” because you are simply a beautiful shade of “different.” All that matters is that you do not resemble “X,” and that this is a serious matter.

And we – innocent, unknowing, gullible, naive little us – we simply buy into it. Perhaps its too easy to go with the flow for many of us. Perhaps it takes too much time to challenge these ideas that tell us that we are “less than” because we don’t fit with an American cultural ideal. Perhaps this notion of being “less than” already fits in with perceptions we had of ourselves long before we recognized that the media agrees with us. The bottom line is.. “we” are told that we suck… and “we” agree.

As a woman who came of age around women who didn’t look much like me, I see how this affects everyone. I already wrote about how the young girls who didn’t need diet-anything were sucking down diet sodas for lunch. (Perhaps the corn syrup in the drink counted as a serving of vegetables? Just playing… maybe?) I remember my non-Black girlfriends getting relaxers to tame their curls so that it’d be easier to straighten their hair. I also remember those who refused to participate in the “race to be what they want us to be” being ostracized and mocked and shunned for their choice.

As a woman of color, I see how this affects women like me. We don’t see leading ladies with curly hair. Hell, we don’t even see leading ladies with their own hair anymore. (And please don’t take this as an insult toward individual choice.. it’s a direct critique of the images we see in the media.. not the people we see every day.) Black radio shows are full of advertisements selling weight loss pills, smoothies, shakes, and [insert random quick fix here]. We, as women of color, are often told everything is wrong with us.

It’s rare that you hear a conversation about why, though. Why are we told by the media that something is wrong with us? Why are we always told that we need to lose “that last five pounds?” Why is it so unappealing for people with heritage that doesn’t look like the mainstream image of “ideal” to be different?

Diet, diet, diet.... womp.

If self esteem is the perceived level of satisfaction in oneself, and you have imagery around you every day telling you exactly how “less than” you truly are… how hard is it going to be to develop a healthy sense of self? A healthy understanding of your worth?

The question I truly have, is why is so much of our self-esteem – essentially, our estimation of our worth – wrapped up in our appearance? Are we as a nation so superficial that we estimate a person’s worth by their appearance? Are we knowingly accepting a mentality that causes us to think less of ourselves and value ourselves even less? Because, let’s keep it real: if two thirds of this country is overweight, we don’t look like the girls who’ve got the magazine covers selling like hotcakes, do we? The value we place on them, inadvertently causes us to change the value we place on ourselves. How often do we look at an Us Weekly cover and say “Man, if only I could lose another 10lbs,” only to see a Women’s World magazine right next to it that says “Lose 10lbs in 10 days!” and thank our lucky stars?

Plain and simple, because if you didn’t believe something was wrong with you, no one could make money off of fixing you. As women of color, the message is often that everything is wrong with us because we are so different. We can’t get right for going left. We look differently. Our hair is different. Our facial features are different. We created magazines that would highlight what we were doing because we were shown our lives weren’t worth space in contemporary pop magazines. And as we scrambled to be like everyone else… we lost ourselves and lost sight of the things that truly matter.

Normally, I wouldn’t care about any of this. It’s capitalist principle – if you allow yourself open to be taken advantage of, then please believe there’s someone out there willing to do it. However, the conversation that tells people that they are less than and that they “must be skinny” has created an attitude that completely ignores health. In a country full of “fat-free,” “low-fat,” “low-carb” everything… in a country so obsessed with food bearing health labels, we are still two-thirds overweight. The irony of it all? No one’s doing any of this to be healthy. People do it to chase that “skinny dragon.” The perceived “healthy benefits” are just a “plus.”

When I was well over 300lbs, I didn’t gauge my worth by how “pretty” I was or by how much I looked like the current cover girl. Like I said before, “I didn’t need to be skinny to be a person of value to my community, my country, or my world. I mean, for crying out loud – skinniness isn’t what makes a person phenomenal! I don’t need to be skinny to be dynamic! I don’t need skinny to rock your world! Being skinny isn’t what makes a chick bangin’! I can do ALL of that without being a single-digit size.” I had the first part of self-esteem down pat – I understood what it did not consist of, but I failed to fully understand what I did include.

Now that I’ve lost most of that weight, my definition of self-esteem is a little more honed in. It sounds more like the stocks and bonds version. (What can I say? I’m a businesswoman.) I treat myself like a business that I want to see flourish. I invest heavily in me – without guilt – because I know the return on my investment is a longer, healthier, more fulfilling life. When I invest in my body, I know that only good can come of my investment, and it makes my stock more valuable. Why? Because when I invest in taking care of me, I am that much more capable of properly caring for those who depend on me. It’s as simple as that.

This may seem like a thinly veiled attempt to tell you to begin giving the media the middle finger (it is), but it’s not (it is.) It’s a simple suggestion to truly think about how we allow the outside world to influence our inside emotions, and how we allow the media to truly influence how we see ourselves. Especially as a woman of color, I’m beyond aware of the fact that the media hardly ever sees me, so why on Earth would I allow them to make me feel less than? I’m cool on that. I base my self-esteem on what I contribute to the people around me, and my investment in myself as a person worthy of love and care, and that’s all right with me.

Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: On Self Esteem is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: The Booty
2. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: Straight Hair
3. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: “White Girl Stuff”

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blackness, culture, marketing, media, mentality, self-esteem, society

Maybe it’s just her arms.

I’m not playing either. She looks like she puts effort – actual effort – into those bad boys!

I know that the media had a field day with her figure. She was too toned. Women are supposed to be soft, curvaceous [but not too curvy, lawdy lawdy heaven forbid we see too much of a curve], and reflect no form of masculinity. Like muscles.

Forget all that. I am soft. I am feminine. But if I leave these arms the way that my weight loss left them, I’m going to look like an old beat up pillow. Unacceptable. I want arms like hers… not cotton-stuffed appendages like what I’d been stuck with.

For me, I know that in order for me to get my arms looking normal again after this weight loss, I’m going to have to build some serious muscle. There was never any bulk there before – only fat. Honestly, it used to make me uncomfortable – if I really took a good look at myself before I left the house some days, I’d stop and turn sideways… try to flex my arm in hopes that some shape would appear… sigh and shrug it off… then go on about my partying. Not like I could build muscle in ten minutes before doing what I had to do, right?

I must admit, the past 8 months have been exciting for my upper body. I can finally see my collarbone. My spare tire is fading away, and an actual slope is appearing in my backside. My back fat is shrinking, and my breasts have shrunk (from a 42DD to a 34C.) How am I doing on my journey?

I’m sure the next question is, “HOW?” The answer, really, is not a silly shake weight or a “perfect push up” machine.

Between yoga and push ups, I’ve been able to tone up my arms, my back, and even keep the skin of my breasts taut. Why? If you take a look at one of the yoga episodes I’ve posted on the site, you’ll be able to identify how much you have to lift, stretch, pull and tug those arms. The plank position – a common yoga pose that looks a lot like a push up without the drop down – works not only your back, but the ligaments in your chest that tighten and lift your breasts. Add to that the fact that it works both your biceps and your triceps (your outer and inner upper arm area?) You’re in there like swimwear.

For me, these are the best options. These are things that I can do at home without purchasing any equipment and without needing to be at a gym. I just click “play” on a yoga video on this site, and I go for it. I’m still a little flabbier than I’d like for myself, but I’m pretty proud of how far I’ve come.

So, in the meantime… I’m going to continue to stare lovingly at these photos of a sleeveless First Lady Obama (not in a creepy way, though) and keep on with my push-ups and my yoga routine.. and hope that you’ll join me!

Got tips? Questions? Ideas? Share ‘em!

My Quest For Michelle Obama Arms is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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Post tags: Arms, exercises, workout at home, Yoga

Taken from Yahoo! News:

“In my eyes, I thought my children were perfect,” the first lady said. “I didn’t see the changes.”

But the family’s pediatrician, she said, kept a close eye on trends in African-American children and “warned that he was concerned that something was getting off-balance.” The doctor “cautioned me that I had to take a look at my own children’s BMI,” or body mass index, the first lady said.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that there were people who were actually put off by her statements publicly addressing Sasha and Malia’s weight. Actually, don’t. Hold that thought.

I’m not surprised because honestly, this kind of uproar is why our children are in such dire straits as it is. Did you know that one in three children develop type 2 diabetes; that one out of every two Black children in America develop type 2 diabetes? That, although being overweight doesn’t cause these directly, it absolutely serves as a symptom that goes hand in hand as the result of a larger problem?

So… in knowing this, the blogosphere has still decided that it doesn’t make sense that the pediatrician might say to the First Lady, “Perhaps you should keep an eye out for your daughter… we don’t know if this has to do with a genetic predisposition, a distribution of the population being predisposed to foods that cause these issues (i.e. too many Blacks living in environments that encourage unhealthy eating), or whatever… but just be careful and keep an eye on that number.” Now, you can imagine my surprise.

I am understanding why my former doctor was so apprehensive about discussing my weight with me. Now, I am understanding how the conversation about health, weight, and where the two actually merge is able to be derailed so easily. Now, I see what the problem is. Are we that easily offended by conversations about weight that we think this kind of chat must remain private? Do we hold so fast to proving to everyone that we are the Joneses (as opposed to keeping up with them) that anyone showing that their armor has a chink in it gets the side eye?

Apparently, First Lady Obama (since bloggers tend to forget that the Obamas have titles) did just that.

A fundamental lack of understanding of what was said, it seems, is what’s causing the uproar. Couple that with an article claiming she put her girls on a diet, and you’ve got the ingredients for a very spicy topic. Although the link from the Daily Mail (a verrrrrry reputable source… that’s sarcasm, by the way) is titled “Reform begins at home: Michelle Obama puts daughters on a diet as she launches anti-obesity campaign,” the only information you will find within includes the following:

Michelle Obama started a campaign to tackle childhood obesity in the U.S. on a personal vein – with an admission that her own daughters were becoming overweight before a diet nipped the problem in the bud.

The First Lady said that she had been warned by the family paediatrician that ‘something was getting out of balance’ with her two children Malia 11, and Sasha, 8.

‘In my eyes I thought my children were perfect – I didn’t see the changes,’ Mrs Obama said at an event organised by US health officials.

The girls then had to adhere to new ground rules – less burgers, low-fat milk, and fruits and water instead of sugary drinks; the change was significant, she said.

Doesn’t sound like a diet to me. Sounds like a lifestyle change. Too bad neither the HuffPo writer nor the StrollerDerby writer tended to that. Imagine how surprised I am.

Firstly, we have an inability to understand the quote about something being “out of balance.” Secondly, we have a failure to understand what a diet is. It’s not always of the “grapefruit/mashed potato/banana diet” ilk. Lastly, it’s the Daily Mail. I don’t know that I’d opt for that as the source of my anything. The heartfelt writings about eating disorders are… meaningful dialogue, but sorely misplaced.

If we want to talk to our young girls about their weight and their health, fine! Lets! Lets make sure that we explain to them the difference between losing weight for health and losing weight for aesthetic purposes. Let’s make sure that we talk to them what the body mass index (or BMI) actually is, and the difference between the BMI’s definition of “overweight” and society’s definition of “overweight.” Let’s make sure that we teach them the importance of good longlasting health. Let’s make sure that we help them understand how beautiful they are, how strong they are, how much world they will have to fight and face every day, how people will use words like “fat” even when they’re rail thin just to try to break them down and break their hearts, and how none of it will make a difference unless they own those understandings.

And most importantly, let’s make sure that we enter those conversations with healthy understandings of the above as well. ‘Cause if I see any more bloggers losing their minds over something so simple and stupid, I’m loading up my paintball gun.

First Lady Obama “Puts Daughters On Diet,” Blogosphere Goes Nuts is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 14 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blackness, eating disorders, obama

“I’m just so proud of you. You just up and decided that you weren’t going to be big anymore.”

In an effort to not start smelling my own roses, so to speak, I shrugged it off.

“Hey, I would’ve never got moving had you not suggested that I hit the gym that had just opened. I only wish you would’ve done it sooner!”

At this point, my sister chimed in. “Now, you know full well you wouldn’t have listened if someone said to you ‘Hey, you’ve gained some weight.’ You would’ve flipped out!”

I don’t even remember what happened after she said that, because I’m still stuck trying to remember the person I was, and how I would’ve responded. I do remember responding to my mother’s suggestion about hitting the gym with a serious eyeroll (the kind where, if caught, you usually get slapped – grown or not).

So my question to you is, who’s allowed to tell you that you’re putting on the pounds? Even better, who’s not allowed to tell you you’re gaining weight? Have you been there before? Let’s chat!

Note: If you know me, you know there’s something coming behind this… so stay tuned! Check out “Who Do I Allow To Call Me Fat?”

Who’s Allowed To Call You Fat? is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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2. Why Aren’t Feminists Allowed To Lose Weight?

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 17 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blackness, culture, family, fat, mentality, society, support system

Me, as a toddler... not a strand out of place.

My mother wasn’t having it, though. Born in the era of straightening combs on the stove, she was good for waking me up at the crack of dawn and burning the hell out of me trying to straighten my hair. I don’t even think I knew what my hair looked like without a handful of grease and a whole morning’s worth of heat in it… because we started doing this routine when I was approximately 4 years of age.

Say what you will about that – especially since it was a couple of decades ago – but I grew up believing that I was supposed to have straight hair, and this suffering was how I was supposed to get it. If ever my kitchen (you know what the kitchen is) was even remotely curly, my Mom was quick on the draw. “Um, what’s goin’ on with your natural? Come here, let me hit those naps real quick.” I never thought twice about it. That was Mom, for crying out loud. I pretty much worshipped the ground she walked on – always well dressed, properly put together, never a hair out of place – surely, she knew what she was talkin’ about.

I, much like most of the little Black girls in my area, grew up coveting straight hair.  Considering how difficult this was to maintain for girls like me with the most all-the-way-live-kinks and coils, this also made us resent anything that got in the way of us ruining that straight hair. Gym class was almost always indoors, and forget about getting us in any kind of swimming pool.

Eventually, all that hair pressing left my hair pretty lifeless. Horribly split ends, breaking off like nobody’s business.. I actually remember people clowning me about it. I didn’t really know any better. I just knew I needed to have straight hair, and I was succumbing to what I needed in order to get it.

It got worse once I entered high school. After having moved to my new neighborhood where all the hair was not only straight, but blond and long.. my mother and I dug all throughout the city to find a hairdresser who could help me at least accomplish the long and straight part. As a high schooler, I was in the salon weekly, spending $40 for a wash/rinse/press… and $80 once a month for my relaxer. Two hundred dollars a month to acquire this look that I had coveted since I was four years old.

Needless to say, I grew up prioritizing an inordinate amount of time strictly to straight hair. Never knew (or considered) why I did, why I needed to… never asked any questions. Just fell in line.

Hindsight is most certainly 20/20, though.

College-aged me... approximately 250lbs.

I started gaining weight somewhere around the fourth grade. I can’t help but wonder why no one was equally “quick on the draw” checking me about my weight instead of my hair. I wonder why I never prioritized an “inordinate amount of time strictly to” my physical and emotional fitness instead of… hair. I wonder why a more fit physique wasn’t “coveted” the same way straight hair was coveted. It just seemed like I wanted those things that seemed easiest to acquire – just spend your morning getting burned by the stove and you, too, can have straight hair just like “the rest of society.”I guess “being fit and healthy” wasn’t that easy to achieve.

When you grow up putting such a high priority on hair, it means that at some point, you start cutting things out to protect that priority. I can recall taking an F for a semester of PE because I wasn’t getting in any pool. (After an uber expensive hair treatment? No thanks.) I can recall walking the “one mile speed test” because I didn’t want to sweat… and I was out there for almost 18 minutes to do it. In college, I took a geography class that required not only hiking but kayaking… and I gave my professor hell the entire time, complaining that I “was going to have to take out a student loan to keep up my hair if he was going to have us out with Mother Nature every other darn day.” I dealt with it in order to get my “A,” but that was about it.

When I first started working out – as in, complete newbie status – I can remember stopping on the elliptical the moment I felt liquid on my forehead. I was literally allergic to sweat. It wasn’t until one night I happened to be at the gym the same time as The Cleaner was on, accidentally stayed on the elliptical the entire episode, jumped on the scale and saw that I lost a pound of water weight that I literally said “Man, f– this hair.” That was the end of that for me. Every night, I was wearing my sweaty shirt as a badge of honor.“Yes, that’s right, I broke it dowwwwwwwwwn on that there machine! I’m that chick!” I’ve been over it, since.

I don't remember even taking this picture, which means there might've been wine involved.

I listen to conversations that other women have about their hair, and I always keep quiet… though more often than not, I’m the one they want to hear from. Not because I’m anybody special, but because the assumption is that this is a hurdle I’ve encountered before. I don’t really have any popular or easy answers for them, which is why I usually keep quiet. I could say, “Why is straight hair such a big deal to y’all, anyway?” but that’d only be met with laughter and “Um, anyways…” and I’d rather not get extra indignant and say “What if you swapped your hair with your body in your list of priorities? This wouldn’t even be an issue then, would it? You’d be doing what you gotta do to make your hair work without interfering with your gym routine… not just doing what you can at the gym to feel like you did something, and protecting your hair investment.” That’d certainly ruin the mood. Instead, I just shrug my shoulders. Everyone has their “come to fitness” moment at different points of their lives.. I don’t know that a social gathering is the proper place to try to evoke someone’s moment without their consent.

In my mind, my priorities have shifted. They’ve shifted to the point where I find it hard to understand the logic anymore. If I’m going to devote my every sunrise to something, it’s going to be my health. If I’m going to go the extra mile for anything, it’s going to be my body. I’ve even decided to be a little vain about it. If I experience pain on a regular basis or a regular burn… it’ll be because I’m workin’ hard on getting my abs cut right or building my fit booty. To me, if I let my priorities switch back to what they were, then I’m going to start gaining weight. I don’t want that.

The usual me... if I'm going somewhere where my braids won't suffice.

Somewhere along the line, too many of us have grown to prioritize something as minor league as our hair over the major league issues, like health. It’s considered unnecessary vanity if I take pride in my abs or my legs (I’m showing off, and deserving of the catty conversation behind my back), but my hair better be on point or… I’m deserving of the catty conversation behind my back. You’re clowned for having “bad hair,” and – not saying you should be clowned for a “bad body” – praised for staying on top of your hair and not having a strand out of place. Hour long conversations can be had about hair products that are healthy for our hair.. “but what’s healthy for our bodies?” Silence.

Maybe I’m just hella skeptical… and I can accept that. But there’s a serious problem with the fact that we can figure out a thousand ways to keep our hair in tip top shape – some of us sitting with mayonnaise, avocado, egg, kool-aid and dill pickle mixtures on our heads because we heard it’ll make it “grow” – but no one’s willing to give healthy living a shot, trying different things to keep our bodies in tip top shape. Something is very wrong when it makes sense to allow something like hair to get in the way of our pursuit of health.

The wild thing about it, really, is that I don’t have any answers. For me, I haven’t put a flat iron to my head in almost ten months. My loved ones don’t even bother asking me to do otherwise. Folks know when it’s me running in the neighborhood because there’s usually about a foot worth of ‘fro bouncing behind me. If I have somewhere to go, I even occasionally jazz it up and put something in my hair. I spend too much time being active to want to sit around protecting a hairstyle. I just prefer to focus my efforts on my body.. and the more I do that, the more I find that others focus their attentions there, too. “For get her hair, did you see her body? Dang!” I’m OK with that. I put in the work, I shifted my priorities there.. that’s what I want… even if I’m rockin’ an attention-grabber like below.

Me... right now. Clipped in the back, up off my neck, breeze blowin' through my scalp? Winner.

b!g(g)2*w@l#

Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: Straight Hair is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: On Self Esteem
2. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: “White Girl Stuff”
3. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: The Booty

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 42 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Black Hair, black hair and working out, blackness, culture, hair and fitness, mentality, priorities, society

The photos contained within this link are not safe for work environments.

Perhaps it will show that society critiques every woman to an obviously unnatural standard – soften nipples? – and that’ll help us remember that this is why we shouldn’t aim to achieve society’s standard of beauty.

Retouching, Body Image and The Photoshop Diet: When Playboy Models Aren’t Even Enough is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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2. The Makers Of Photoshop Decry “The Photoshop Diet”
3. On Body Image: The Darwinian Theory of Beauty

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: airbrushing, Body Image, models, playboy, retouching, the photoshop diet

Anything to avoid the scale?

When my family left Cleveland, we moved to a predominately white city in central Indiana. Approximately 2% of the student population at my high school was Black. All of my dearest friends were white.

I remember going to lunch and always having a full plate on my tray, and at my table I’d see nothing but salads.. poorly made ones, at that. I’d see the single, solitary, lone bag of fries and a bottle of water. I saw girls chugging the diet soda, but nothing else in front of them. I rarely saw anyone with as much food on their plate as me, but then again… I was a size 18.

I suspect those girls were always told “you need to watch your figure,” but were never quite taught exactly what that meant. ‘Cause I know now, it certainly doesn’t mean “have a diet soda for lunch.”

Either way, “you need to watch your figure” was never a message I received. For me, it was genuinely harmful and catty statements something like “If you don’t quit eating all that crap, you’re going to be big as an elephant.” Well, seeing as how that “crap” was making me feel better about life (though it would be another ten years before I could understand why), and seeing as how hearing statements like that only made me miserable… you can imagine what being told “you’re going to be big as an elephant” did to a young girl who already thought she was “big as an elephant.” Not only did I not learn anything from the dialogue, but it ran me right back into a bowl of some-stuff-I-had-no-business-eating.

I bring this up to say that I am, interestingly enough, familiar with and can now recognize the philosophy of curtailing your eating and watching your figure at a young age because of those girls… even though I never embraced it myself (ironically enough.) Because those girls were white, I never really felt a need to adopt it for myself. To be fair, I never felt the need to dye my hair blond every month, either.

I get it. This healthy eating thing is hard. It requires a lot. But for some reason, eating healthy is often brushed off and regarded as a “white people thing.” You have no idea how often I hear “Um, naw – that’s white people food.” And I can’t help but think of really rude and snarky responses to this… because that kind of assertion often comes from the mouth of someone with a thin and bone straight haired weave on their head, or faux colored contacts, or someone fawning over “light” skin, or… whatever. I suppose that if I asserted that those were “white people things” as well, that would’ve ended the conversation. Quickly.

Using the excuse of “eating healthy is a white girl thing” makes me giggle that much more, because I think of those girls in high school who, apparently, didn’t know how to eat healthy, either. And sure, they were in high school… but one would think that if their mothers taught them enough for them to know to watch their figures, they would at least have shown them how to do so, as well. It also makes me laugh again because as 68% of America is overweight, 12% of America is Black and 60% of Black America is supposedly overweight. That means that 60% of 12% is roughly 8% of the overweight population. Black America contributes a whopping 8% to that overweight population… leaving about 60% unaccounted for. But “eating healthy” is a “white girl thing.”

Back to where I started, though. The Black female standard of beauty is so peculiar to me. For example… even the most unhealthy of us get “passes” because we have long (straight) hair, impeccable makeup, freshly finished nails and amazing shoes. We get a “pass” from our peers for being unhealthy if we have a fat booty. We don’t even call it “fat” anymore. We call it “phat.”

For some reason, we as women of color have allowed ourselves to embrace American culture’s (read: capitalist culture’s) materialism and Europe’s hair… but we’re doling out passes left and right when it comes to our bodies. What do I mean by “pass?” Simple. I mean ignoring and excusing the poor health of our loved ones because they’re “still pretty,” which should be an extremely insulting compliment, but ironically isn’t seen as such. I mean we allow ourselves to accept poor health because we can hide it by dressing to the nines or by having a mean shoe game.

So what keeps us from embracing an un-Black standard for figures, but embracing un-Black standards elsewhere? Questionably, everywhere else? That’s a question that, for every answer I can think up… still leads me to wonder why we don’t dole out passes for every other superficial concept we cling to and judge others by. For goodness sakes, we’re still judging people by the shade of their skin. If that’s not painfully European, I don’t know what is.

I was one of those girls with the perfect hair – spent every Saturday in the shop – perfect nails, perfect shoes, kept my clothing appropriate. Every girl should, no matter her size. But using those as justifications – “I don’t want to lose weight… I’m not trying to have to give up my wardrobe!”/”Why do I need to lose weight? I look good!” – to not pursue better health is more than likely what’s killing us.

I’m not even done… but there’s always tomorrow.

Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: “White Girl Stuff” is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: The Booty
2. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: On Self Esteem
3. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: Straight Hair

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2010. | Permalink | 33 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beauty, black women, blackness, emotional eating, mentality, myths, society

I know, I know. For some reason, it seems like you can never escape booty talk.

“I need to do something with this booty.”

Not even just her hips, but her thighs - that's hard work!

“My booty is perfect – I don’t want exercise to ruin that.”

Listen for long enough, and you’ll eventually hear “I need to get off my booty and do something.”

No matter what, this topic always comes up. And while I can’t help but be tickled, I’m also a little saddened by it.

More often now, I wind up having fitness-based conversations with people who “knew” me before and “know” me now, only because they’re trying to poke and prod at my understanding of what I want for myself. Much like the people who insisted that I “should be trying to get a man” instead of focusing on myself, I get people who want to talk to me about my booty.

Let me explain – I had a “giant booty.” I mean, giant. I was a size 28 – I didn’t have much choice except to have… a “giant booty.” And while in some circles a booty that large is “just wrong,” in other circles a “giant booty” is something similar to carrying a pot of gold on your back down the street. Everyone’s looking, wondering if you’ve got more in yours than they’ve got in theirs, if yours is better than theirs, wondering if they can get what you’ve got. And depending upon who you’re talking to, it might be worth just as much AS a pot of gold, for crying out loud. I’m sure you know what circles I made sure I stayed in, then – the ones that made me feel better about me and my,well.. giant booty.

As a woman, my weight is supposed to concentrate closer to my hips and thighs – it’s supposed to help protect our reproductive system. The extra fat keeps your eggs and various other goodies warm. (This is where the notion that “women with larger hips are better child birthers” or whatever comes from.) And while I cannot completely share the history of every bloodline in existence and how their bodies adapted to their environments… I can certainly share mine.

As a woman of color, I was blessed with being predisposed to a curvaceous, well-built figure. Meaning, if I treat my body right, the curves have no choice but to come. As my ancestors come from a place where countless generations built their muscle in certain places to help their bodies do what they needed to do to tend to their villages, my bloodline adapted – full hips and an ample busom to help me deliver and care for my children; strong calf, booty and thigh muscles; powerful neck and shoulder muscles. As a woman, I was built to be… well, built. Well built, to be exact.

And in a society where everyone makes money off of making life easier, I have to go out of my way to maintain that… build. I don’t have to work as hard as my ancestors in order to accomplish basic daily tasks.

January, '10

Somewhere along the line, any “giant booty” became acceptable. And as women, I often wonder if we ignored the fact that our frames were increasing because we were getting compliments on our derrierres. I mean, we were still getting complimented – we must be doing something right, right?

Let me mention a few important things that have to be a part of any resolution to be healthier:

First, just as being skinny is not an indicator of good health, neither is being or having fat. There’s no way around that – there is very little in the way of physical appearance that can gauge a person’s health. While we can talk about anorexics and the “super obese” as exceptions, the vast majority of us don’t fall on either end of the spectrum – we sit closer to the middle. So no, “getting a bigger booty” doesn’t mean “you’re doing something right.” It means you’re doing something, but “right?” I can’t call it.

Secondly, again – we have to stop basing our judgments of ourselves on what other people say or think. Thinking that I don’t have to “do anything” because other people like “how I am” is just an excuse to not consciously think about “how I am.” Almost like it’s putting the responsibility of “thinking about me” onto other people. Can I really trust other people to think about me in a way that’s best for me? If I could, I might’ve never been so overweight in the first place. Ownership. Gotta take it.

I had a lot of thinking to do. When I think about myself, am I happy with what I have? Regardless of your weight, I hope you are. You are you, and you should be happy regardless of what you have. But take it a step further – am I healthy? If not, am I willing to risk “what I have” to claim my health?

Lastly, and this is most important – our bodies are complex. With as many muscle groups as there are… you think you can’t build and rebuild and rebuild what you’ve got? You can do just about anything with your body if you commit to it AND commit to you.

Let me talk about my booty for a minute. When I started losing weight, the very first thing I lost WAS in my gut and booty region. I was so happy about the gut that I didn’t recognize that my booty was slipping away. Not until I started weight lifting that I realized it was deflated! Gone. Vanished. The case of the disappearing booty. I was gonna have to hire a PI and put out an APB for it.

So.. I had to do something. I mean, some serious body mapping. I had too much fat in my thighs to have an actual curve to my booty at the point where it met my thigh. I had a spare tire that was hiding the slope from my back to my booty. I needed to actually build a booty of muscle… which meant no more crease between my booty and my thigh, causing those saddle bags. I had work to do.

Since I was already burning the fat, I needed to work on rebuilding. Booty and thigh exercises on deck. And please believe, the squats are necessary. It is absolutely possible to rebuild yourself a fit booty – one that sits high, curves just right, and doesn’t cause skin to fold and protrude at the hips. If the fat was going to melt away, it needed something to conform to, in my mind. So, off I went muscle building. It’s working well for me.

All of this is to say… I need to make sure that I don’t cling to someone else’s perception of what I “should” look like, especially when that perception would bind me to an unhealthy lifestyle. I need to not believe that I can’t rebuild something like a booty in a much healthier way than cornbread and sweet potato pie. I need to resolve to be comfortable with who I am, and understand that wanting something else for my body doesn’t mean that I believe something is wrong with who I am. And lastly… a fit booty is a thousand times better than a booty I got through unhealthy means.. ’cause I worked for it, earned it and deserved it.

Who else out there is working on their fit booty? Let’s hear it!

(You might also want to check out my post on belly fat!)

How To Build A Fit Booty is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: The Booty
2. Q&A Wednesday: Does Sex Really Make Your Booty Big[ger]?
3. Victoria’s Secret Models, Runway Walking and Booty Paint

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2010. | Permalink | 48 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blackness, Booty, mentality, weight loss, workout tips

What I AM interested in is what the deciding factor is in the decision between choosing perfect hair and working toward a perfect body. Seriously. I asked my male friends about this, and each one said to me something to the effect of, “I’d rather my girl have a great body and a jacked up head, than beautifully straight hair and a jacked up body.” Besides, there’s some kind of debate about the type of men that a natural-haired sista will attract, anyhow.

Make no mistake about it – I’m NOT natural. In fact, I’ve done my own relaxers since I was a sophomore in high school, and keep my hair healthy all by my lonesome. It is thick, 2-3 inches away from my bra strap, and well… let’s just say that to the average person, I STILL look like I’m natural. However… because I know what my head would look like otherwise, I’m grateful for the relaxer. I go from looking like a lion to a lamb – still a little wooly but much better than the alternative – and that has nothing to do with any external factors. It’s just not what I prefer to sleep on, comb through, or see in a mirror.

Having admitted my own plight with my hair, I will tell you.. I’m not willing to let something as meaningless as hair get in the way of my goals for my personal health. I won’t act like it’s easy for every woman to make that kind of statement. I can’t imagine what women in more corporate settings go through, especially since once upon a time.. it was considered acceptable to call “afrocentric” hair a “corporate don’t.” I work for myself, so I set my own rules. Being beholden to the beauty standards of someone that might not understand the “limitations” of your culture is stressful to say the least. However, it simply cannot serve as an excuse for not taking care of ourselves. Maybe, in the future, I can find links for attractive hairstyles that are manageable and conducive to a good workout regimen.

I won’t lie.. I need ‘em too. I wear my hair in either two pixie braids or a giant afro puff all day. LOL.

All of that typing was a pre-cursor to this video, about women of color and how we allow our hair to get in the way of our health and well-being. The newscaster, Robin Robinson of Fox Chicago, made a pretty daring move in going against what her viewers are used to and wearing a style that they may not be accustomed to seeing. I think that’s pretty bold, and although I kind of snickered at her “benefits of wearing ethnic hairstyles – thank goodness there is one” line (because even though I know it’s received poorly, I felt her pain), I hope she chooses to stick with it.

What are your thoughts? Do tell!

Great Hair or Great Body? Straight Hair and Working Out is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Black Women, Our Bodies & Perceptions of Beauty: Straight Hair
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3. Open Thread: What Do YOU Do With Your Hair?

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2009. | Permalink | 23 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Black Hair, blackness, exercise and relaxers