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.

While I would love to protect myself and others from being around cigarette smoke, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist,  Karen Heller makes an important point by questioning how when we begin to regulate certain behaviors (such as smoking cigarettes on a college campus in the outskirts of Philadelphia) we may be setting ourselves up to fall along the slippery slope that leads to other rights being infringed upon? When institutions start to ban behaviors that have been legal and mainstream, I think that we need to question it really deeply rather than simply respond by saying “Oh” - which is precisely what I might  have done had I not read Karen’s article today.  Read on to see what you think.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/20100109_Karen_Heller__Let_students_choose__even_the_wrong_ways.html

Karen Heller: Let students choose, even the wrong ways

By Karen Heller

Inquirer Columnist

College administrators have been acting recently more like parents than educators. Widener University announced an all-campus smoking ban - including outdoors - to be launched this summer. Lincoln University instituted a fitness graduation requirement for obese students, later downgrading the class to a suggestion after being charged with discrimination.

I don’t know about you, but I went off to the University of Chicago to make my own choices, wise and otherwise. The dumb ones - an exceptional number committed during freshman year - were as instructive as any classroom lectures. Long after I forgot most basic laws of chemistry, I know that running laps on an outdoor track in winter, fueled by beer while sporting scant clothing, is an enterprise better in concept than execution, and not worth repeating.

With the best of intentions, Widener, Lincoln and other schools are taking greater steps in deciding what’s in the best interests of their students, who, despite behavior to the contrary, are legally adults. Administrators are extending the definition of in loco parentis.

“Regulating this behavior is completely antithetical to freedom, especially as they’re not really harming anyone other than themselves,” argues Vic Walczak, the ACLU of Pennsylvania’s legal director. “If people aren’t doing something illegal, doing something they may find pleasurable but is bad for them, then they’re just showing bad judgment. Universities should not be taking steps to prohibit something that is otherwise lawful.”

Many of us loathe tobacco, but that doesn’t abrogate its legality. Some studies indicate that outdoor smoking poses health risks to non-smokers but, let’s face it, all smoking poses health risks, while “outdoors” constitutes a sizable territory. Despite massive efforts promoting healthier diets, obesity remains a national health problem, epidemic among African Americans. Lincoln is an historically black college. But that doesn’t make reforming the overweight an educator’s job.

“College is the first opportunity for most students to be responsible for what they do 24/7. They’re going to make mistakes like we all do,” says Temple constitutional law professor David Kairys. “We are in this period where we should be aware and worried that more kinds of government and institutions are compelling conformity that is being thrust on us.” The courts are filled with cases arguing the legality of restricting off-campus behavior, including “sexting.”

Even with the best of intentions, governing conduct in higher education seems an impediment to the very learning and freedoms schools promote. It’s infantilizing students on the cusp of adulthood.

“This is a little like the virtue police, determining what constitutes pure living,” Walczak says. “What’s next? Regulating when and what kind of sexual relations you can have?” Some religious colleges and universities already do that.

These schools mean well. A healthier population is generally more productive. And promoting better choices is a sound investment. Healthy citizens tend to work and live longer, less dependent on social and health services.

Civil rights experts see these lifestyle rules as a start towards moderating behavior, a way to enforce conformity. “With the more conservative Supreme Court, we may see much more leeway for regulation, many more limitations on free speech, privacy and discrimination,” Kairys says. “Schools may become more involved in regulating student behavior though you think of universities as bastions of freedom promoting the whole marketplace of ideas.”

Rather than repressing poor choices, why not promote and reward good habits long before college? In America, as long as an adult isn’t harming anyone else, we’re entitled to our foolish choices. Without them, there would be no beer pong, rush week, the freshman 15, or Big Ten rivalries verging on holy war. Indeed, college seems predicated on the yin and the yang of great ideas and questionable conduct.

Contact columnist Karen Heller at 215-854-2586 or kheller@phillynews.com.

During this season of reflection, consider the words of my colleague, Beth Weinstock. May her musings inspire you to think outside of the box for ways to share of yourself in the coming new year.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/beth-weinstock/reflections-on-giving-and_b_399602.html

It’s that time of year for active giving and receiving. As I choose which of the soliciting envelopes to open, and which worthy organization will receive small checks from me, I’ve been reflecting on my own different ways of giving and receiving back.

As a psychologist, some people say that I am giving all the time. For some reason, I suppose because it’s my profession, the offering of my skill and attention does not feel like I am in service; it does not feel like a gift given feely. Well, it’s not, is it, if I get paid for it.

For the last number of years I have committed myself to one offering of time and energy a year. After hurricane Katrina I went with a friend to New Orleans for a wild, wonderful, wacky, poignant four days. We were the two middle two middle aged women in a dorm with a million spirited college kids, sweating and shoveling out the remains of people’s homes. It was one of those heart opening experiences that instilled a sense of connection with all of humanity. I was awestruck with the team leaders who spontaneously emerged from the work groups sent out to different sites. I was inspired by the young people who will inherit our future. When I returned from our days of shoveling I promptly got pneumonia from the dust and mold stuck in my lungs, but it was worth it.

The next year I volunteered a week in Amsterdam chaperoning and emotionally supporting an Iraqi victim of sexual violence who was seeking citizenship outside her country. (My expenses were paid for by an American concerned citizen.) My tasks involved accompanying this frightened and traumatized woman to appointments with lawyers, doctors, Amnesty International, etc. Hers was a story with mysteries that still escape me. I know not if her tale was 100 percent true, but if only half the events she alluded to happened, she was worthy of my efforts. In my week away I got the gift of leaving the normalcy of my life and pushing my own envelope on comfort for the possible good to a lost soul.

This year I just finished a pro-bono series of sessions in Leadership Development for senior staff women, and project managers, who work for agencies under the umbrella of Women’s Way in Philadelphia. I like running groups. I like facilitating leadership development workshops. I know that these women, the next generation of smart and capable female activists, don’t get the opportunity, or funding, for advanced and expensive leadership programs that are most often paid for by large corporations who have an investment in their potential high performers. I decided to offer my time and energy towards their development. It was truly gratifying.

Recently I heard Barbara Greenspan Shaiman speak about her new book Living Your Legacy: Ten Simple Steps to Find Your Passion and Change the World. She reminds us that too often we think of giving, or volunteering, as time spent being good people, divorced from activities that come from our passions. She invites us, instead, to find what we love, and how to offer it to others. It’s a good message for any time of year.

I look forward to my next year’s adventure in service; it feeds my soul. I hope, and trust, that in the process of satisfying my own personal need to feel connected and a part of something outside myself, I am truly giving.