From #10: The Beauty Issue Feb/March 2006
By Taryn Hillin

“French women don’t get fat,” or so says the top-selling book by Mireille Guillano. But Americans do. America is getting fatter by the second. With every 64-ounce Big Gulp and double Big Mac, America is packing on the pounds. Of course, none of this information is new. We all saw the triumph of the independent film Super Size Me and we all heard claims that people actually stopped eating at McDonald’s. However, 33 percent of America’s adult population is overweight. It seems to me like we should all go on a diet!

Wait a minute, I’m confused. America spends over $50 billion per year on weight-loss pills. Since 1997, there has been a 465 percent increase in plastic surgery rates, while there are now more low-fat, low-carb, and no-sugar foods than ever before. Over 90 percent of companies now offer employees fitness promotions, which a majority of their workers take advantage of. It actually seems that we are all diet-obsessed. How can we be getting so fat, yet be so obsessed with looking good?

Could the answer be that Americans are becoming extremists? In our culture, bigger is better, thinner is better, faster is better, richer is better…anything that is more is better. Maybe some people are getting fat and the others are just exhausted. Maybe the new “gym craze” is just a response to the old “fat craze.” Just type the word “diet” into a search engine and you will be bombarded with the newest trend, whether it be Mediterranean, anti-carbohydrate (“sugar busters”), Atkins, French, organic, or all-fish. Someone has almost certainly had an idea on how to eat anything and everything in sight while still losing weight. Maybe it is all of these failed diets that have been leading to the new obsession sweeping the nation: exercise.

Didn’t you hear, exercise is the new eating disorder? Forget anorexia and bulimia; people (especially girls) are now over-exercising. Even the elderly are catching on, as gym memberships of those 55 and older has risen 266 percent since 1987. But why? Why do we have to either be too fat or too thin (shout out to Lindsay Lohan and the Olsen twins)? Even our celebrities that were once considered curvy, like Beyonce and Jennifer Lopez, have dropped three sizes and twenty pounds which they attribute to running over six miles a day. Meanwhile, full-sized women such as Queen Latifah and Kirstie Alley are considered rarities. So I asked myself why are we all so obsessed with, well, ourselves?

We are all at fault. I am at fault. We all look in the mirror everyday. Some of us even use every window we walk by as an excuse to catch a glimpse of our hot selves. Ever walk into a dining hall and see girls eating plates of lettuce and carrots? Ever walk through your residential college basement at midnight and see that every cardio machine is still in use? Have you ever run up Science Hill at 4 p.m. and seen half the people from your morning class? We are obsessed with looking good and being thin. As college students it is acceptable to drink thousands of calories in one night, but you better be sure to work it off the next day because, honey, thin is in. Gym membership rates are up, one in three Americans is on a diet, and $40 million dollars are spent annually on advertising for weight-loss pills alone. If Americans weren’t diet obsessed, there wouldn’t be a market for pills or any other weight-loss gimmick. So, where does it come from? Who says we all need to be gorgeous and beautiful and young forever? The easy answer is Hollywood.

I turned on VH1 the other day and stumbled across the show “101 Sexiest Bodies” - literally five hours of hearing just how gorgeous celebrities are. By the end of the show, I was ready to give up forever and chalk it up to celebrities’ good genes. But at the same time, I had the urge to eat spinach, drink green tea, and run five miles. After staring at perfect specimens of human bodies, I wanted to look like that too. We are inundated with images of beautiful people everyday. Walk into a bookstore and see the amount of magazines with breathtaking celebrities on the cover and right below their perfectly flat abs is a weight loss story: “How to Get Toned in 10 Days,” “Lose 20 Lbs. By Easter,” “Finally Get Rid of that Flab,” “The New Diet Trend That Has Hollywood Shrinking.”

I will tell you what has Hollywood shrinking: eating disorders and plastic surgery, with just enough airbrushing to create a masterpiece. Sure, some of these celebrities are legitimately gorgeous, but notice how they always become better-looking after they become famous! They have trainers, make-up artists, stylists, cooks, and the most expensive products money can buy. Yet, we all still compare ourselves to them. If Brad Pitt’s trainer says that he lifts weights three days a week, and does two hours of cardio fitness on top of that, I guarantee someone will copy it. But when did this happen, when did Hollywood equal size zero? Better yet, when did the definition of beautiful become so hard to achieve?

Marilyn Monroe was a size fourteen. Of course, sizes were different then, but she is still considered a beauty icon. Women were curvier then, men were less muscular. Then it all changed, and now working out six days a week is considered normal. Humans are the only animals that have to exercise. No one has ever seen a lion just go for a 30-minute jog around grasslands to “stay thin.” This is something we created. We like food too much and we want to look like Angelina Jolie so we run (stationary) on a treadmill for an hour. In today’s world, it is normal when 70 percent of girls are on a diet by age 10, or when Botox injections are no longer reserved for the elderly. Hey, soccer moms, want to look sexy, too — but at what cost? What is this obsession for beauty going to do for us in the long run except skew our perceptions of what beauty really is?

In the early 20th century, when plumpness was considered a sign of wealth, Connecticut sported its own “Fat Men’s Club of Connecticut” – the place to be for businessmen. Then, words like “plump” started to pick up negative connotations, and words like “butterball,”” porky,” and” jumbo” became disparaging. America had fallen into a depression, and if you were eating, you were not the average American (who was struggling to feed himself and his family). The whole dieting phenomenon is a 20th century idea, which started to take off after Dr. Graham stressed eating better (as in eat his “graham crackers”). Over the years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) repeatedly changed its idea of what was healthy and what was not. After decades of changes in the food pyramid, however, it seems that people don’t even pay attention to it anymore. It’s not about being healthy, it’s about looking good. We idolize supermodels, but do you think they get their daily intake of 2500 calories and 30 percent carbohydrates? I think not. Kate Moss was recently chastised for abusing cocaine. News flash – the entire fashion industry probably consumes more cocaine than water. Why? Because cocaine makes you lose weight. Why are celebrities smoking all the time? Because nicotine curbs your appetite. It’s not about eating right or working out to be healthy and reducing your chance of a heart disease or type-2 diabetes. It’s about looking thin and beautiful, and giving off the illusion of happiness. Jennifer Lopez got ripped apart for having an ass in Hollywood: “Oh no, she’s not a stick fi gure! Someone call the police!” Yet guys still think she’s hot and plastic surgeons are actually asked to create her former behind on other women. But then again, after taking so much flack for her larger derriere what did she do? She lost more weight.

America is one giant oxymoron. Either we are the country where everyone is fat because we eat at Taco Bell and 7-Eleven, or we are the country that exercises too much and attempts to subsist on no-carbs, no-fat, and a lot of Diet Coke. It’s true that yes, people are exercising like never before, and that the number of health club memberships has tripled since 1990, but I have to ask: are we doing it for ourselves, or are we doing it because we have to? Are we all so brainwashed by TV and magazines that we feel inadequate if we don’t look a certain way? At some point, everyone looks in the mirror and thinks their life would be better if they lost that 10 pounds, or, for guys, if they bulked up a little more. This mentality is obviously driving a generation into the gym a lot more often than they used to. In a world where entire aisles of the supermarket are filled with whey protein, Slim-Fast, Dr. Atkins’s products, and Weight Watchers, it seems that we aren’t even eating real food any more. Working out is great — don’t get me wrong, but maybe we should ask ourselves why diet and exercise has taken over our lives and our culture. Personally, I would take bootylicious over emaciated any day.

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