On Fat Sistas

This guy has never been one to date fat women. That doesn’t mean a few age appropriate pounds in women my age – but it does mean once the scales tip above about 150…

I’m headed for the hills.

I am currently 5’7″ and 154 lbs. In High School and College I wrestled at between 113 and 127 lbs. So I grew up pretty skinny.

Now I know some of the brothers out there like fat women. And some of the ladies I know tipping over 200 don’t seem to be experiencing any shortage of interested men.  But far to many of these same women seem to be suffering from diabetes.

Interesting article here –

Black Women and Fat

FOUR out of five black women are seriously overweight. One out of four middle-aged black women has diabetes. With $174 billion a year spent on diabetes-related illness in America and obesity quickly overtaking smoking as a cause of cancer deaths, it is past time to try something new.

What we need is a body-culture revolution in black America. Why? Because too many experts who are involved in the discussion of obesity don’t understand something crucial about black women and fat: many black women are fat because we want to be.

The black poet Lucille Clifton’s 1987 poem “Homage to My Hips” begins with the boast, “These hips are big hips.” She establishes big black hips as something a woman would want to have and a man would desire. She wasn’t the first or the only one to reflect this community knowledge. Twenty years before, in 1967, Joe Tex, a black Texan, dominated the radio airwaves across black America with a song he wrote and recorded, “Skinny Legs and All.” One of his lines haunts me to this day: “some man, somewhere who’ll take you baby, skinny legs and all.” For me, it still seems almost an impossibility.

Chemically, in its ability to promote disease, black fat may be the same as white fat. Culturally it is not.

How many white girls in the ’60s grew up praying for fat thighs? I know I did. I asked God to give me big thighs like my dancing teacher, Diane. There was no way I wanted to look like Twiggy, the white model whose boy-like build was the dream of white girls. Not with Joe Tex ringing in my ears.

How many middle-aged white women fear their husbands will find them less attractive if their weight drops to less than 200 pounds? I have yet to meet one.

 

Thicke Sisters Happier

Keeping a positive self image with all the isht that has been unloaded on black women over the centuries in America is indeed a miracle of resilience. There is a difference between “Thicke” and “fat” though…

Black women heavier and happier with their bodies than white women, poll finds

In the pre-dawn darkness, the gym doors close, and the black women start to move. House versions of Whitney Houston’s “I’m Every Woman,” and Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” blare from speakers as the 30 or so women, most with curves, not angles, grab their jump ropes at the L.A. Fitness club in Capitol Heights. They double-time it as fitness instructor Michelle Gibson counts them down from the front of the class.

“Four more, three more, two more, one!” she yells, twirling her rope. She jumps faster and faster until the rope and her sneakers blur on the hardwood. Her ample bosom strains against the top of her sequined half-camisole.

“Show-off!” yells a woman from the back as Gibson laughs. She demonstrates hinge-kicks high above her own head, and sweat darkens the waistband of the fitted black pants that cling to the uber-roundness of her bottom. “Fight for your sexy!” she commands her class.

No one in this boot camp works out to be model thin. And nearly to a person, they reject any notion that they should, or that that standard is even cute. Or realistic. Or mentally healthy. That’s especially true of Gibson, 41, who has been a fitness instructor for 12 years, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it by looking at her.

Like many black women, Gibson describes her 5-foot-4, size 14-plus physique as “thick,” and considers herself ultra-feminine — no matter what the mainstream culture has to say about it.

She’s one of the most full-figured women in the gym, but she’s in love with her body. And it’s a sentiment that syncs perfectly with a recent survey conducted by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation that focused on African American women. The poll found that although black women are heavier than their white counterparts, they report having appreciably higher levels of self-esteem. Although 41 percent of average-sized or thin white women report having high self-esteem, that figure was 66 percent among black women considered by government standards to be overweight or obese.

This is not news to Gibson or the other women in her morning boot camp class. They grew up listening to songs like the Commodores’s “Brick House” and hearing relatives extol the virtues of “big legs” and women with meat on their bones.

The notion that all women must be culled into a single little-bitty aesthetic is just one more tyranny, they say. And black women have tools for resisting tyranny, especially from a mainstream culture that has historically presented them negatively, or not at all.

Freed from that high-powered media gaze, generations of black women have fashioned their own definitions of beauty with major assists from literature and music — and help from their friends.

At this gym in Capitol Heights at the crack of dawn, and in myriad other places, that thinking has made black women happier with their bodies than white women in many ways. And in some ways, it’s put them on the slippery slope toward higher rates of obesity…

 

First Lady Cuts a Dance Move, and Does the “Dougie”!

Our First Lady continues her campaign to help children become healthier through exercise and proper eating…

Along the way she shows off a few dance moves!

Go Michelle!

 

Right Wing Attacks Michelle Obama

The reich wing attacks Michelle…

Dangerous ground… Indeed.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Rachel Maddow Right wing culture warriors atta…, posted with vodpod