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Excessive
Focus on Concerns About Dieting....Functional
Distraction
I believe that when people become weight or diet preoccupied,
it is often "safer" to focus on food and eating than
on emotional issues. That is, for some people it may be easier
to focus on their weight than to focus on the overwhelming
feelings that they have learned to cope with through eating
behaviors. People use food to nurture themselves or to
literally "swallow" their emotions. Food is often
used to cope with emotions such as grief, sadness, boredom,
and even happiness. If food loses its power to aid in
distracting or avoiding difficult situations, it may be quite
overwhelming to confront the issues that were previously
avoided through weight preoccupation or abnormal eating.
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Acceptable Body Size For
Women
From a young age, a woman is often given the message that
she must be beautiful to be worthy. Attractive people are
not only seen as more attractive, they are seen as smarter,
more compassionate and morally superior. Cultural ideals of
beauty are often transient, unhealthy and impossible for
most women to live up to. Women are encouraged to be
delicate, frail or "waif-like." There is a very
narrow range of what is considered to be
"acceptable" body size. Shapes that are not within
this range are met with discrimination and prejudice. Women are taught early in life to be
wary of what they eat and to fear getting fat. Trusting
one's body often evokes tremendous fear for most women. Our
society teaches women that eating is wrong.
Young women have long been taught to control their bodies
and appetites, both sexually and with food.
Women are expected to constrain their appetites and
pleasures.
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Obesity...Linked to
Increased Sickness and Death Rates
The physical risks to the obese have
been described in terms of increased risks of hypertension,
gall bladder disease, certain cancers, elevated levels of
cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease and stroke, and some
associative risks with conditions such as arthritis, gout,
abnormal pulmonary function, and sleep apnea. However, increasingly there have been
conflicting opinions about the health risks of being
overweight.
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Vague (1991) suggests that the health risks of
being overweight may be more determined by genetic factors,
fat location, and chronic dieting. Obesity may not be a major
risk factor in heart disease or premature death in those who
do not have pre-existing risks. In fact, there are some
indications that moderate obesity (about 30 pounds overweight)
may be healthier than thinness.
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