QUESTIONS FOR SUSIE ORBACH

Her Beautiful Mind

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
Published: March 4, 2009

As a British psychoanalyst known for your social activism and literary output, you argue in your new book, “Bodies,” that all of the globalized world — men and women alike — is suffering from a warped sense of beauty.

What I am seeing is franticness about having to get a body. I wish we could treat our bodies as the place we live from, rather than regard it as a place to be worked on, as though it were a disagreeable old kitchen in need of renovation and update.

“Body hatred,” as you call it, has become a leading Western export. Young women in South Korea are undergoing surgery to Westernize the appearance of their eyelids.

It’s supported by their parents. They don’t experience this as a terrible thing, that they’re being passive victims and idiots. They see it as a chance at modernity. Fiji is the country where 11.3 percent of girls were bent over the toilet bowl three years after television was introduced.  [ Click here to read the full article. ]

Millions of people will probably entertain themselves this holiday season by watching TV, playing video games, or surfing the Internet. One thing they likely won’t do is haul the bathroom scale from the bathroom to the dining room and make everyone weigh themselves right after dinner.

Crazy, right? Well, back in the day (the 19th century, to be precise) it was considered quite the amusing parlor game, according to Deborah Levine, an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. She studied the fascination with weight and scales as part of her doctoral dissertation, “Managing American Bodies: Diet, nutrition and obesity in the United States from 1840 to 1920 (She’s currently writing a book about the subject.).

During the early part of the Victorian era, Levine says, babies or sick people were usually the only ones weighed. “If you were an adult you wouldn’t have known what your weight was. It wasn’t common information until the railroads started shipping freight, and people started to weigh themselves at train stations on the public scales.” [ Read full article from Los Angeles Times blogs: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2008/12/a-weighty-subje.html ]

Wacky (But it Works) Wednesday: A Scale with No Numbers!

As a girl with a quick metabolism, I’ve basically weighed the same since I hit puberty. As you may know from my introductory blog (hooray!), it wasn’t until this past year that I really dug my teeth into fitness. One day, after about a month of weight training, I stepped on the scale and stared down at the number–surely I must have lost weight; I looked so much thinner! Nope. I had gained weight. 7 pounds of weight! Suddenly, my newfound confidence flew out the window. I knew that I wasn’t fat, and knew that I had gained weight because of muscle gain, but I instantly became fixated on my weight. [ Click here to read the rest of the article from Self.com ]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJIjy0B2dxw