Conclusion to "The Lie" series

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All I can do is agree with Kat, she is right on about so much. I've been following her series, and crying every time I see another installment. Crying for all the girls/women who have bought the lies and lost their lives before they had a chance to realize that they had beauty all along, that they were worthwhile human beings who didn't need to change anything.
To quote her:

Sadly, I believe the anorexia pushers will continue to do almost anything to perpetuate this myth of perfect beauty. Why? Because if our girls ever find out just how stunningly perfectly beautiful a simple smile, a passionate interest, a sense of humor, kindness, intelligence, enthusiasm, joy, laughter and confidence makes her, regardless of her size & facial features, the anorexia pushers will go broke!

Exactly!!!! There is just too much money to be made by making women unhappy with the way they look. It doesn't matter how thin/beautiful/rich/famous/whatever a woman is, she will always be told there is something else that needs to be fixed, there is always some little flaw that is keeping her from being perfect. By focusing on those supposed imperfections, women are kept from reaching their full potential in whatever endeavor they attempt.

Conversations

Fillyjonk's post at Shapely Prose made me stop and think about conversations women have, and what my conversations with other women were/are like.
Ya know, I don't talk to many people outside of family any more (not since I got married and quit working), but even when I'm talking to my daughter-in-law, or my DH's step-son's wife, we don't talk about weight, or diets, or how we hate our bodies. We talk about their kids, the books we've read, how their jobs are going, what kewl movie we've seen, and any neat recipes we may have tried. For me, that's a first, since I've never gotten along with most women well enough to even want to talk about those kinds of things. I was always the girl who was out in the garage with the guys, talking about cars, guns, hunting, fishing, farming, and politics.
I guess I was lucky, when I was working, that most of the women I talked to at work weren't into dieting/weight loss. We talked about work, our kids, our parents, shows we'd seen on tv, movies we'd seen, repairs we'd had to do/have done around our houses (a lot of the ones I hung out with were divorced/widowed/never married), places we'd been, and places we wanted to travel to when we were lucky enough to retire.
But I've had some women friends that diets, exercise, and how much weight they've lost/still have to lose is all they can think about/talk about. I just kinda nodded and yeah, uh huh, really? until they were ready to talk about more important things. Even when I was dieting, it wasn't something I wanted to talk about, because talking about it was one sure way to make me want to binge (I hated talking about food I couldn't eat, and ways to make it less calorie-filled so I could eat some of it). It got to the point where, when I finally quit dieting for good, when anyone even mentioned dieting, I was going through the cupboards looking for something/anything to eat. It didn't have to be a friend who mentioned it, it could have been a commercial about diets or diet pills on tv that set me off. I don't do any of that any more, but it's a conscious effort on my part not to binge when people start talking diets/weight loss.
Now, when I talk to the two female friends I have that aren't related to me, it's understood that we don't talk about dieting or weight loss, but everything else is pretty much fair game. Those are the kinds of conversations I like, where we can crack jokes about fashions we've seen and think are atrocious, what their kids/nieces/nephews/grandkids are doing, books/movies/tv, debate politics (and we're good at agreeing to disagree, a lot of the time), and how men can be such a pain in the ass, but we love them anyway (and yeah, we agree that we can be pains in the ass too). We can talk about global warming, the environment and what we can do to help preserve it, and not have to bring weight into it. I just hope that more and more women find out that they not only don't have to talk about dieting all the time, they don't have to diet at all anymore in order to be considered a worthwhile person with something constructive or interesting to say.

Fat acceptance in France

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This is a very interesting article, and there didn't seem to be any OMGOBESITYEPIDEMIC slant to the majority of it. Granted, the first woman Cox interviewed was French and thin (a former fattie) who does not believe you can be fat and happy and that it has bad repercussions on your health. She also doesn't think you can dress well if you're fat (of course not, designers haven't yet come to the conclusion that some fat women have money to spend on their clothes, so they aren't designing for larger bodies). She says when you are fat, your self-confidence and esteem go down (well duh, when you hear/see on a daily basis how disgusting and worthless you are because of your size, it's damned hard to be self-confident and have any self-esteem at all). I think she is maybe projecting how she felt when she was fat onto all fat women, and not all fat women think they are lumps and ugly (hooray for them, and for those of us who are working on loving ourselves at whatever size we happen to be).
But the rest of the article explains why the French find fat distasteful, what a small group of women have done to change the way fat people are treated, and then an interview with Velvet D'Amour. There is also an audio clip of what Velvet said to a woman at a swimming pool who called her a whale. That clip alone was worth going to read the article.