Saturday, 28th of November 2009 at 04:28:09 PM 
I can haz pimento?
Last week Kate Moss enraged virtuous eaters of balanced diets everywhere by telling Woman’s Wear Daily that her motto is “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” How dare this skinny woman encourage herself not to eat? How morally decayed. How grossly irresponsible. Doesn’t she know that size zero women have been banned from showing their faces in Europe for years now? Not even Vogue can tolerate the tiny these days. Doesn’t she know that over a bazillion young women are suffering from skinniness already? One critic called Kate’s comment “shocking” and predicted that it would cause many more women to become anorexic or bulemic.
In other news, a fat lady somewhere adopted the motto “I can be as fat as I want to be and anyone who says anything about it is going to get a punch in the face” and the world applauded.
If skinny Kate Moss shares her mantra for skipping cheesecake, she’s not only self-destructive, but also indoctrinating a generation of teenagers to become skeletal. If a fat person loves herself for being fat, she’s well-adjusted. How exactly did that come about? I’ve never heard a fat positive spokesperson criticized for turning the world’s teens obese. That’s clearly the fault of fast food restaurants and video games. The blame for anorexia, however, can be laid at the (small) feet of Kate Moss. Never mind the parents taking any responsibility. Never mind the teens themselves having anything to do with it. They haven’t been shown how to properly love themselves. And the only way you can properly love yourself, we all know, is if you’re fat. Loving yourself as skinny is totally, absolutely wrong.
I realize the prejudice against fat is deep and wide. I realize that as a product of years spent looking at magazines and television and movie images equating skinny with beauty it’s impossible for me to step outside my media programming and truly know what I want my body to look like. However, I also know that it’s *my decision* what I want to do with my body, and if I want to lose weight because I don’t like being fat, and if I want to loudly and publicly say “I don’t want to be fat!” then that’s fine, and I’m not going to temper every utterance with “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
I find it a little ridiculous that here on a diet blog, on a blog whose sole purpose is to motivate us to lose weight, that we are being scolded for attaching value to a smaller size. Like we’re supposed to say “I’m going to lose ten pounds, but just for a random reason, just because I am bored, because I have nothing better to do on a Saturday, and Joshilyn asked me to.” Trying to diet and exercise off 10 pounds while maintaining a public position inside the socially acceptable limits of “Fat is beautiful!” would be ridiculous. I’m not motivating myself to lose weight by declaiming, “It’s too bad I have to do this to myself because of the bad culture of bad hypocrisy and bad body image!” Bah. Pish posh.
I want to lose weight because I want to be skinny. I want to exercise because I want to get fit. I want to be able to bound up stairs like a gazelle and fit into my cute jeans and jump on the bed and see my collarbones. I want to lose weight, because I want to see if Kate Moss is not crazy, or self-abusive, or what’s wrong with America, but maybe actually right. In fact, I’m kind of excited to find out.
I have seen one too many U Tube vids of her huffing powdered sugar — it has less calories if you take it in the nose, apparently — for me to want to get skinny HER way. *grin* I am actually about healthiness and living long enough to see my grandkids and enjoy them, and therefore nose candy is counter intuitive. Also, very 1992, cocaine. Went out with plaid.
I am not actually “about healthiness” so much, but if you insist, I promise not to do any cocaine in January. Now can I reject my fat without apologizing?
I just want to say that I have seen Lydia naked, and she is awesome.
Great article Lydia. Sure she does drugs, but that wasn’t the point of what she said. Skinny does taste much better than anything in my mouth. Now just wish I could internalize that and lose these 20 lbs.
My thoughts, as I’ve stated elsewhere, by all appearances Kate Moss has drug issues, so what she does or doesn’t eat to maintain her size is irrelevant.
That being said I don’t think you need to apologize for wanting to lose weight, but if you are doing it solely to be “skinny” because skinny people are smarter, sexier, have more fun and so forth then I think you are setting yourself up for failure. Most of the media images take already unnaturally skinny women, photoshop them to make them even thinner, then persuade you your life is worthless and unfulfilling if you can’t meet these unrealistic ideals.
I for one know that no matter how much weight I lose, I will *never* look like those models in the magazines. I am short, with an extra-large body frame. No matter how much I weigh I will always be built like an NFL linebacker, not a stick on stilts. I refuse to be sucked in by all hype and make myself miserable in the process.
Being healthy however is another story. Overall healthiness is attainable, desirable, and will actually improve the quality of my life. I can prove it concretely through reduced blood pressure, increased cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, stamina and flexibility.
So I guess I’d want to be healthy and realistic, not chasing the elusive “skinny and driving myself crazy.
I think it’d be much better if she’d said something along the lines of “nothing tastes as good as healthy feels” … But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with enjoying the taste of food either! Shouldn’t we be encouraging moderation instead of straight up deprivation?
Thank you all for interesting and even sometimes rational discussion of a topic that turns on all my crazy. I am loving this.
Can’t we modify – even personalize – Kate’s mantra to make it a little more sane . . . like ‘that Ben & Jerry’s doesn’t taste as good as skinny feels’? Can’t we all just get along, all the fat people and the thin people and the dogmatic, skeletal-waif people?
Though it’s probably not about her skipping cheesecake but rather skipping breakfast, lunch and dinner.
That being said, I lost some weight over the summer and got fit and “feeling skinny” truly isn’t a bad feeling at all. As long as you don’t kill yourself in the process getting there *cough*drugs*cough*
Fat is ugly. Who’s fat? Anyone more than seventy pounds overweight. I, at seventy pounds am still OK, but you fatties over the seventy pound limit…just look at yourselves!
Amen sister! Preach it! Skinny rocks.
I’m twice the weight I ought to be. & I don’t mean some ideal just out of school, pre-pregnancy weight. I mean, the high end of normal. Overweight but not obese. that range.
Currently, I’m carrying around an entire extra person. a woman half my weight would still be overweight. I love myself, but I can also admit, it’s pretty ugly. Loving yourself can = deluding yourself. I know, you can be curvy, well-rounded, etc. etc. and be healthy. I was that person for a while. But, feeling OK with my weight, accepting myself for who I am & not judging myself by my size resulted in continuing to eat whatever I wanted & exercise no more than I ever cared too. Then, as the weight gained, even less.
From where I stand, nothing tastes as good as skinny feels & I wish I’d been able to think that way 150 lbs ago. or even 50. No feelings of deprivation (regarding food choices) feel as bad as the fear of being a sick old woman when my two year old is grown. Or worse, being his ‘late’ mother.
I’m in a position where losing say…thirty pounds wouldn’t kill me or have people throwing an intervention. And that, I suppose, is sort of my healthy goal. Only, I’m doing this for me…so that I can buy jeans that don’t have to word ‘stretch’ in the description (Couldn’t they just say ‘forgiving’ instead?), so that I never have to wonder if said jeans will fit once fresh out out the dryer without me doing that laying down on the bed thing followed by jean yoga, and so that a muffin top will be a reference to the pastry in the the bakery case and not what’s hanging out over the jeans. It’s all about me being comfortable with me…in public. I’m ready.
Personally, I LOVE that quote and it is not Kate Moss’. It has been around for a long time. It loses some of its appeal because she said is the one who said it.
Nothing tastes as good as coke feels.
I think the original was Weight Watchers? Or IF NOT they stole it and used it in a big ad campaign years ago.
I want to lose weight because I’m tired of being fat. I do love myself. I do yoga and belly dance (in public even) and have fun. But I hate, hate, HATE the way clothes look on me. I hate that I can’t breath when I tie my shoes. I hate that when I’m driving my elbow pokes the fat bulging out at my sides. I hate that I don’t want to get nekkid for my husband anymore. I’m tired of all that and want the fat to just go away so I can live my life the way I want to without it being a nuisance.
I have heard this very phrase at Weight Watchers meetings. It has brought applause. It scares me.
I think part of this ends up being a deconstruction of what “skinny” means, too. Because I happen to think it’s just as unhealthy to be excessively skinny as it is to be excessively overweight, those crazy “only eat 1000 calories a day and live an extra ten years” people aside.
I’m all for body acceptance, but not when that body is unhealthy. Frankly, most of my “skinny” years I was still unhealthy. I let it slide because WOOHOO, I’M SKINNY. That was stupid. Now I’m closing in on 40 with no good healthy habits in place, and sure, I want to lose weight to fit into my pants better, but I also want to be HEALTHIER, because (like Joss) I want to be around to play with my grandkids.
And saying that doesn’t make me fat-phobic or fat-despising or whatever.
I want to lose weight not to be skinny; I want to lose weight because being truly overweight carries known health risks. I don’t have any yet but as I too close in on 40, I become aware that, in my family, the 40s is when it all happens.
The problem I have with Kate Moss is not the skinny sentiment, but that she’ll do anything to achieve it, including smoking and drugs. And if that is what it takes to be as skinny as she is, then I believe there are things that feel better than that.
Now Salma Hayek, America Ferrera, Kate Winslet, Jennifer Hudson, all are considered larger but in reality are more realistic and healthy sizes for many women to achieve. Why can’t we lift that up?
If Salma Hayek is wrong, I don’t want to be right. She’s smoking. And about my age.
wouldn’t it be lovely if we could share our viewpoints on weight, childcare, politics, religion…and add a generic phrase that would let everyone know “this is how I feel, so shut the yell up”. How does the option to ‘submit comment’ turn into “this is why you are wrong”? I love gathering viewpoints and sifting through them. What’s the phrase? One woman’s trash is another woman’s treasure.