http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-shure/spanx-shaping-anxiety-for_b_595596.html

Leave it to the fashion industry to find new and improved ways for instilling fear in consumers. As if it weren’t bad enough that women were hooked on products that “enhance,” “flattern,” and “camouflage” our natural features, now we have men at center stage being sold a new category of clothing - “men’s shapewear.”

Reporting in the New York Times, Catherine Saint Louis tells us that in February, the Spanx line of modern girdle-like garments introduced its first line for men. Major department stores now carry them and they are expected to fly out of the stores like hot potatoes. Spanx will, of course, sell men on the idea that their products will help them “feel better” about themselves and do so at bargain prices since their clothing is priced well under the cost of the initial compression T-shirt designs of Australian based Equimen.

These “profile enhancement” undergarments are the female equivalent to a push up bra and girdle. Men now get to experience some of the worst that our modern day culture has to offer us in the way of self-empowerment. They, too, will get sucked in to believing that they’ll feel more attractive and hold greater confidence when wearing these apparel. Anxiety about men’s natural features (in particular their bellies) will grow exponentially. Ah, the insecurity and self-consciousness that ensues is sure to do wonders for intimacy and authenticity in relationships.

No doubt that men are capable of being convinced that these products will help relieve their back pain and support their muscles. That line was used on women for years and it successfully hooked many into wearing all sorts of uncomfortable undergarments.

My mother was one of them. A tall, beautiful woman, I remember her daily use of a girdle. She believed it helped her “aching back,” but years later dealing with my own aching back, I know otherwise. Strengthening your abs helps an aching back; strengthening core muscles helps an aching back. Not lycra or any other synthetic fabric.

I hope that boys and men have their eyes wide open and are cautious of stepping into a potential trap. Women need also be alert since many women buy clothing for sons or husbands. Be aware of the slippery slope in which one begins to “feel great” in their new look, followed by a growing sense of self-doubt and worry about appearing flabby. Then comes the natural body sensations that remind you of the ways your body is not firm, activating you to compare your body image to that of the ultra-firm one you have when wearing spanx.

Suddenly the “F” word creeps into your vocabulary far more often - that’s F for FAT - and with time, a cycle of body angst sets in. Beware - beware of the fashion and diet industries who have so much to gain while we have so much to lose.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-shure/how-to-diet—-the-dietin_b_535062.html

I’ve been waiting a long time for this day. Oprah has finally come to see the light, recognizing that dieting promoted more of her negative body image rather than remedy it. This is a huge leap forward and provides hope that her influential voice may now be heard touting a different, more empowering public message.

A lifelong devotee of weight loss at any cost, Oprah has come to see that her years of yo-yo dieting have kept her on a roller coaster ride of weight gain, weight loss, with concomitant highs of excitement and lows of defeat, never guiding her toward fuller body-esteem. “I don’t like the term food addict,” she said recently in O, The Oprah Magazine, “but I realize that I’ve been one, and it has taken me years to learn (and relearn) that the choices we make about what we put in our mouths are only stand-ins for the beliefs we carry in our minds and our hearts.”

Throughout her life, Oprah rejected her mesomorph shaped body and revered the gods and goddesses of thinness, committing herself to battle with her hunger and her body. We know from watching the changes in her physical self, that Oprah struggled with the demons that drive obsessions with food, weight and body size. As a professional keenly aware of the complexities involved with body image, I’ve ached at particular moments when Oprah’s actions lent direct endorsement to the diet industry’s marketing gurus, reinforcing messages that encourage striving for a body size, shape, and thus, image, discrepant from one that can be sustained with a healthy approach - involving acceptance of our genetic body structure, willingness to feed our bodies enough foods to quell hunger and sustain energy and the practice of speaking to ourselves without judgment and blame for “who we are not,” and “what we do not look like.”

After all, we live within our bodies; they are the vessels that house us. If we support attitudes of dislike toward our bodies, not accepting them and cherishing for all they do for us, our deepest self suffers.
Oprah was hooked on the fanatasy that having a different body would heal her deepest wounds and release her into a life of internal ease. In fact, years of dieting did nothing of the sort for Oprah, nor does it do so for anyone else. Instead, it releases the follower in to a state of dis-ease…a path of continuous anxiety about how long they will stay at their worshiped weight and what they will feel like when they lose that “position” in life.

The statistics on dieting are staggering, suggesting that 95% of people who lose weight from diet regimes are certain to gain most of it back within a year or two. The multi-billion dollar diet industry seduces us into believing that cycles of dieting are the best way to achieve the “right” body for each one of us. They never admit that diets prevent us from learning how to regulate our body weight or balance our eating patterns, and they never mention that diets increase binging, moodiness, and the potential for developing an eating disorder -the full spectrum from anorexia to obesity - they don’t mention that patterns of dieting increase cardio vascular disease, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, and even some cancers.

Despite the facts, many of us fall under their spell and argue in favor of dieting - saying that it is healthy and good, even something to be admired and rewarded, a virtue worth pursuing. Talking to Oprah in March, author Geneen Roth, assures us that “Unless you really see what your core beliefs are, what’s making you overeat, and until you name those beliefs, they will shape your life willy-nilly. You’ll just keep acting them out by punishing yourself with food. But if you can finally get to understand the beliefs underneath, you can learn how to live.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-shure/yet-again-the-media-sells_b_424201.html

In the past week, the fashion industry and its promoter, women’s magazines, have yet again sold girls and women down the river. First, Marie Claire’s Austrlian division took the spotlight with its February cover that refrains from using photo shopping with its nude photo of former Miss Universe 2004, model Jennifer Hawkins. Then the New York Times reported “The Triumph of the Size 12s,” a story about “plus size model” Crystal Renn. There is something very wrong when exposing the real curves of a beautiful woman in the nude is deemed a radical move (because she is presented with her real body, not a fake one) and when a knock out gorgeous woman, with a terrific figure is touted to be a “plus-model,” suggesting that she is still too large to be deemed “normal” bodied.

The thin, athletic, sexy ideals of beauty have become the “new normal” and that’s frightening for our kids and all who are coming of age - not to mention the parents who are raising them. I hear the refrain of “I’d feel less guilty about eating food when I eat fewer calories” way too frequently. What do we do with the reality that just 15 years ago 35% of high school students thought they were overweight while today 90% think they are overweight. Do we sit around and suck it up, accept that this is the best we can hope for from our modern culture. Not this mother’s daughter; not this mother of two grown daughters.

We deserve to be really angry about the current state of affairs that has a fashion culture and media industry feeding us ideals that cause us to feel guilty for our hungers, obsessed with our appearance, and hating the very bodies that we need to sustain us. In leading ParentTalk workshops for A Chance to Heal Foundation, I hear fathers and mothers expressing fear for their children and confused about how to help them. They, too, are influenced by the perfectionistic, lookist American culture and are scared for their children if they don’t measure up to the current body-ideal standards.

Trouble is lurking around the bend when the norm requires girls and women to choose the lower calorie option over the food source that will satisfy their hunger and sustain their energy and mood. As my client this week so aptly stated “When I eat the lower caloric food, I end up getting hungry and then feel guilty for feeling hungry.” She is left criticizing herself for having the very thing that she is trying to get rid of - her appetite. One way or another she is faced with guilt – either for having hunger or for depriving herself of that hunger. “I don’t deserve the food because I’m not at my lower weight.” With the goal of having a body size that is smaller than what is natural and healthy for one’s body, deprivation is required. But we don’t have deprivation without the inevitable backlash in the form of compulsion, often culminating into a binge.

The cycle goes on in variations on the same theme for many. Angry that they “can’t” eat the food they are hungry for (food that would satiate their hunger and nutritionally anchor them) and angry that they aren’t able to maintain a lower weight because it’s an unrealistic weight to support their body. It is the rare teen or women’s magazine that includes articles on eating to maintain a healthy weight for each person. Instead we are inundated with articles on tricks of the trade for losing weight, selling the concept of losing as a virtue for which to aspire.

Dieting is no virtue, it’s a ruse. The diet industry is greedy and much like other industries, wants to make money at our expense. Diet programs hook us on the idea that we are more likable if we are losing weight and less likable if we do not strive for a body weight that is “lower.” How else would they become a multibillion dollar industry if they didn’t convince us to hate the way we look and drive home the idea that we would feel so much better if we looked some other way…any way, just not the way we look without dieting.

We deserve better. As my client tells it, the battle is “never ending,” because whenever she reaches her goal, “it’s never good enough and there is none of the promised relief.” For others there is immediate relief that is followed by deep grief and disappointment when they inevitably gain most of their weight back.

My client and others wish that the voice within would go away and shut up, once and for all. I remind her that won’t happen. Hoping and thinking it could actually happen will only make the drive to lose that much greater. Instead I suggest to you, as I did to her, to take on the voice within and talk back to it. Talk back, disagree, argue, recognize the lies, dismiss the idea of the perfect body as ridiculous and damaging. Treat the fashion designers and the media like drug dealers, don’t just accept what they’re pushing, resist it and fight back.