A new Facebook group, Busts4Justice, has been hitting the papers recently calling on lingerie retailers to stop adding to the cost of bras above the high street standard (A to C/D) size.
It has long been a mystery to me why high street shops carry on with limiting their stock to such small sizes when the average woman, if correctly measured, would apparently wear a 34E. On the one hand we are told to get measured and, usually, once measured, we are told we are some ridiculously large cup size - and on the other hand, the only bras available on the high street are in teensy sizes. Surely the stores would be raking it in if they started selling bras that fit the average woman?
Thursday, 24 July 2008
Tuesday, 1 July 2008
Putting an end to ASBOs for fat
The problem with controlling your size and shape in one area of your body is that invariably the 'fall-out' makes itself noticed somewhere else. It's a bit like giving fat an ASBO - it just turns up elsewhere causing the same problems.
This has long been a problem with lipo, and also with bras - by squeezing the chest into a great cleavage, you end up with bulges around the bra straps on your back. OK, so it's not a major world problem, but it's enough of an issue for bra manufacturers to invent a back-fat-less bra, the Bra-llelujah. (Which is one of most unattractive but practical-looking bras I have ever seen). The jokily religious connotation of the name is not all that inappropriate - women are clearly expected to worship this ingenious garment.
Was there any time in history, I wonder, when a woman's back fat was considered sexy, when the sight of a roll of flesh oozing out of the top of a corset-back was seen as sensual and beautiful?
An article from the Women's Home Companion in 1912 makes it clear this was not the case a century ago: 'Let me tell you that the fat woman looks much better in a corset an inch or so too large for her, where her fat can sink down into it, rather than in a corset two or three inches too small which presses her fat up and out until it appears in many unsightly bulges and bumps....The woman who has perfect corset sense is she who wears a corset right in size, right in shape, and so perfectly fitted that the corset and figure seem one.'
But it's not just 'fat' women who have this issue - any woman not very slim who wears a tight corset or bra is going to end up with back fat.
This has long been a problem with lipo, and also with bras - by squeezing the chest into a great cleavage, you end up with bulges around the bra straps on your back. OK, so it's not a major world problem, but it's enough of an issue for bra manufacturers to invent a back-fat-less bra, the Bra-llelujah. (Which is one of most unattractive but practical-looking bras I have ever seen). The jokily religious connotation of the name is not all that inappropriate - women are clearly expected to worship this ingenious garment.
Was there any time in history, I wonder, when a woman's back fat was considered sexy, when the sight of a roll of flesh oozing out of the top of a corset-back was seen as sensual and beautiful?
An article from the Women's Home Companion in 1912 makes it clear this was not the case a century ago: 'Let me tell you that the fat woman looks much better in a corset an inch or so too large for her, where her fat can sink down into it, rather than in a corset two or three inches too small which presses her fat up and out until it appears in many unsightly bulges and bumps....The woman who has perfect corset sense is she who wears a corset right in size, right in shape, and so perfectly fitted that the corset and figure seem one.'
But it's not just 'fat' women who have this issue - any woman not very slim who wears a tight corset or bra is going to end up with back fat.
Monday, 23 June 2008
Can you change your genetic size?
I was intrigued to read yesterday in the Observer of a machine called the Hybrid Body Reformer invented by personal trainer to the stars Tracy Anderson. The article mentions Anderson's '10-year quest for a method that would convert 'any person from any genetic structure into this teeny-tiny dancer body.''
What she came up with was a workout machine that crosses pilates with aerobics - you use pulleys to do aerobic dance movements that encourage the body to exercise muscles which are weak - for instance, a pear shaped woman may have weak quads, and the machine will focus on tightening them up. Instead of doing repetitions with weights, she apparantly gets clients like Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow to rotate their weights to hit the muscles afresh from different angles.
She told the Daily Mail last year: 'Instead of over-using the major muscles, I focus on the muscles around them. When the accessory muscles are properly developed, they pull in the larger ones, creating a tinier body structure. In this way you can reshape your body.'
Interesting, her repeated use of the word 'tiny'. There is, it seems, no escape anymore from the need to be 'tiny'. It's a hot word, a word that makes women - including me - sit up and notice. Your genetic inheritance, your natural body size, is supposed to be modified in today's world, whether by cosmetic surgery, starvation diets or workouts. Presumably the change brought about by this machine is temporary and letting the exercise go would result in falling back into your old, natural size - so you need to do constant upkeep to stay this tiny.
I honestly don't see what is so attractive about being a very small size unless it is someone's natural size, in which case you can almost always tell. To me it is obvious when somebody is at a lower weight than is natural for them, as much as it is obvious when someone is plump. They usually look rather strained and hollow-cheeked. Why does Hollywood think this look is good? In Bollywood, the stars are truly gorgeous by comparison - lusciously and sexily curvy, neither skinny nor plump but just natural-looking. They have breasts and bottoms and hips, unlike, to name a few, Keira Knightly or Paris Hilton. What is it about the west that has made tininess so essential? Is it our wealth, the amount of food we have on offer, that makes thinness the ultimate moral discipline, just as in the 19th century, not wearing a corset was seen as morally and sexually 'loose'?
What she came up with was a workout machine that crosses pilates with aerobics - you use pulleys to do aerobic dance movements that encourage the body to exercise muscles which are weak - for instance, a pear shaped woman may have weak quads, and the machine will focus on tightening them up. Instead of doing repetitions with weights, she apparantly gets clients like Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow to rotate their weights to hit the muscles afresh from different angles.
She told the Daily Mail last year: 'Instead of over-using the major muscles, I focus on the muscles around them. When the accessory muscles are properly developed, they pull in the larger ones, creating a tinier body structure. In this way you can reshape your body.'
Interesting, her repeated use of the word 'tiny'. There is, it seems, no escape anymore from the need to be 'tiny'. It's a hot word, a word that makes women - including me - sit up and notice. Your genetic inheritance, your natural body size, is supposed to be modified in today's world, whether by cosmetic surgery, starvation diets or workouts. Presumably the change brought about by this machine is temporary and letting the exercise go would result in falling back into your old, natural size - so you need to do constant upkeep to stay this tiny.
I honestly don't see what is so attractive about being a very small size unless it is someone's natural size, in which case you can almost always tell. To me it is obvious when somebody is at a lower weight than is natural for them, as much as it is obvious when someone is plump. They usually look rather strained and hollow-cheeked. Why does Hollywood think this look is good? In Bollywood, the stars are truly gorgeous by comparison - lusciously and sexily curvy, neither skinny nor plump but just natural-looking. They have breasts and bottoms and hips, unlike, to name a few, Keira Knightly or Paris Hilton. What is it about the west that has made tininess so essential? Is it our wealth, the amount of food we have on offer, that makes thinness the ultimate moral discipline, just as in the 19th century, not wearing a corset was seen as morally and sexually 'loose'?
Tuesday, 17 June 2008
Monday, 9 June 2008
Clothes that make you thin
'The wardrobe diet' was the headline of a first-person piece this Sunday in the Style section of the Sunday Times. The writer, Francesca Gavin, explains how the fashion of recent years for smocks and voluminous draped clothing allowed her to gain weight unnoticed. She then lost the weight by forcing herself into tight tailored outfits which simply refuse to let the stomach expand a centimetre. The piece is illustrated by a box on how to 'dress yourself thin' with waist-girdling belts and tight dresses and skirts.
'If I literally restricted my clothes...my flesh would inch off,' she writes. 'At first it was darned uncomfortable. Eating is hard if your stomach is bound by fabric...I kept in mind Joan Collins's mantra about a flat stomach - if you hold it in at all times, it will stay there.'
Of course in centuries gone by, women submitted to tight, boned clothing in exactly this way, knowing the very act of wearing it regularly would 'train' the figure to be smaller.
Today, we are free to dress baggily in the morning, knowing we have a big lunch ahead. We rely on our clothes getting tight to tell us when we are expanding. It can go too far. Many women feel fat and dress in clothes that are too loose, not realising that body-skimming clothes would actually show off their figures to their advantage.
For the sake of being thin, is it worth being perpetually in discomfort and never able to slob out on the sofa in sweatpants and baggy t-shirts?
'If I literally restricted my clothes...my flesh would inch off,' she writes. 'At first it was darned uncomfortable. Eating is hard if your stomach is bound by fabric...I kept in mind Joan Collins's mantra about a flat stomach - if you hold it in at all times, it will stay there.'
Of course in centuries gone by, women submitted to tight, boned clothing in exactly this way, knowing the very act of wearing it regularly would 'train' the figure to be smaller.
Today, we are free to dress baggily in the morning, knowing we have a big lunch ahead. We rely on our clothes getting tight to tell us when we are expanding. It can go too far. Many women feel fat and dress in clothes that are too loose, not realising that body-skimming clothes would actually show off their figures to their advantage.
For the sake of being thin, is it worth being perpetually in discomfort and never able to slob out on the sofa in sweatpants and baggy t-shirts?
Tuesday, 3 June 2008
Back to the 1970s?
On last night's Tonight, a programme about a government plan to bribe overweight people in the UK to lose weight, it was stated that in Britain, our caloric intake has actually declined since the 1970s. Yet as we all know, British people in the 70s were much thinner than they are today. The collective weight gain, then, is more because of the lack of an active lifestyle than because of what or how much we are eating.
If this is true, it's extraordinary that so many people are spending their lives engaged in dietary battles, when all they need to do is become more active. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that if faced with a choice between dieting and exercising, most of us would go for exercising.
It's curious, too, how the way we exercise today makes our bodies bigger and stronger rather than the lithe, slender sizes of women in the 70s and before.
My mother recently recalled how in the 1950s, when she was a teenager, women simply did not 'work out' as we do today. The odd woman with muscles, who did a lot of sports, was considered rather freakish. Presumably, though, women were still far more active than today because of walking everywhere, not watching TV for hours most evenings, and not sitting all day at computers. Children of the 70s, like me, ran around and played outside. Today, it seems, they are all indoors, playing computer games and watching DVDs.
Today, we have segmented exercise from the rest of our lives. Like so many others, I work at a computer all day, then go to the gym for an hour a few evenings per week. Many of the most popular classes at my gym involve weight lifting combined with aerobics - there's Body Pump, Circuits, Boxercise, Total Body Conditioning. Or we use the machines - running on the treadmill, rowing, skiing, then lifting weights - we are told that to build muscle is good because it burns fat and raises the metabolism. Women today are muscular - the bulging biceps these classes build are considered sexy, a sign of being fit and toned.
And yet we eat less than in the 70s. In a way, this isn't so surprising when you compare the roast meat and two veg at lunchtimes, teatimes and elevenses and high teas and trifles and creamy sauces we enjoyed in the 70s with the ready meals of today. Although ready meals are typically high in calories and fat compared to homemade food, they are not nutritious or filling and the calories per portion size are usually around 4-500, which is quite a small meal. So there you have it - we are guiltily consuming unsatisfying diet ready meals with quite low calorie counts, doing our workouts, and developing big, muscular bodies, bigger than women's bodies have ever been in this country before. The solution then, the way to get back the pre-1980s bodies we all prefer, is perhaps to sit less, walk more, put the weights down, and eat home-cooked, nourishing meals.
If this is true, it's extraordinary that so many people are spending their lives engaged in dietary battles, when all they need to do is become more active. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that if faced with a choice between dieting and exercising, most of us would go for exercising.
It's curious, too, how the way we exercise today makes our bodies bigger and stronger rather than the lithe, slender sizes of women in the 70s and before.
My mother recently recalled how in the 1950s, when she was a teenager, women simply did not 'work out' as we do today. The odd woman with muscles, who did a lot of sports, was considered rather freakish. Presumably, though, women were still far more active than today because of walking everywhere, not watching TV for hours most evenings, and not sitting all day at computers. Children of the 70s, like me, ran around and played outside. Today, it seems, they are all indoors, playing computer games and watching DVDs.
Today, we have segmented exercise from the rest of our lives. Like so many others, I work at a computer all day, then go to the gym for an hour a few evenings per week. Many of the most popular classes at my gym involve weight lifting combined with aerobics - there's Body Pump, Circuits, Boxercise, Total Body Conditioning. Or we use the machines - running on the treadmill, rowing, skiing, then lifting weights - we are told that to build muscle is good because it burns fat and raises the metabolism. Women today are muscular - the bulging biceps these classes build are considered sexy, a sign of being fit and toned.
And yet we eat less than in the 70s. In a way, this isn't so surprising when you compare the roast meat and two veg at lunchtimes, teatimes and elevenses and high teas and trifles and creamy sauces we enjoyed in the 70s with the ready meals of today. Although ready meals are typically high in calories and fat compared to homemade food, they are not nutritious or filling and the calories per portion size are usually around 4-500, which is quite a small meal. So there you have it - we are guiltily consuming unsatisfying diet ready meals with quite low calorie counts, doing our workouts, and developing big, muscular bodies, bigger than women's bodies have ever been in this country before. The solution then, the way to get back the pre-1980s bodies we all prefer, is perhaps to sit less, walk more, put the weights down, and eat home-cooked, nourishing meals.
Friday, 30 May 2008
The breakdown of sizing
An article from Colorado's Gazette on Sunday makes the point that modern sizes are around half what they were 50 years ago. Marilyn Monroe is always being held up today as an inspiration for curvy women of today as a size 16, as a mark of a bygone age in which women's roundness was considered sexy. Yet according to this article, and to many other sources too, the 1950s size 16 is today's size 6-8. Which makes Marilyn pretty skinny. We have got much bigger - curves clearly weren't what they are today back in the 50s.
The article also raises the point that women are now so aware of vanity sizing and the differences between the same size between brands that they no longer expect to be any one size. The average woman may, I would guess, have clothes spanning two or three sizes in regular circulation in her wardrobe (my own wardrobe ranges from 10 at the smaller end to 14 at the larger end), plus even bigger and smaller clothes put away which she plans to wear when she gets thin, or becomes pregnant (no comment...). And I think it's fair to say we do enjoy the fact we can fit into different sizes depending on where we shop.
When sizes have become so utterly meaningless, it makes me wonder for how long we will even attempt to classify ourselves as any one size. Could shops start selling clothes as 'size 10-14' or by actual inch/cm measurements (as is suggested to standardise sizing in a current European proposal)?
I don't think women will like knowing -let alone comparing - what exactly they measure in inches, or, on the other hand, the vagueness of being a '10-14'. It seems to suit us much better psychologically to fed our vanity by saying we are the lowest size we can get into - a 10-12 for instance - and buying some garments of that size and others a size larger.
The article also raises the point that women are now so aware of vanity sizing and the differences between the same size between brands that they no longer expect to be any one size. The average woman may, I would guess, have clothes spanning two or three sizes in regular circulation in her wardrobe (my own wardrobe ranges from 10 at the smaller end to 14 at the larger end), plus even bigger and smaller clothes put away which she plans to wear when she gets thin, or becomes pregnant (no comment...). And I think it's fair to say we do enjoy the fact we can fit into different sizes depending on where we shop.
When sizes have become so utterly meaningless, it makes me wonder for how long we will even attempt to classify ourselves as any one size. Could shops start selling clothes as 'size 10-14' or by actual inch/cm measurements (as is suggested to standardise sizing in a current European proposal)?
I don't think women will like knowing -let alone comparing - what exactly they measure in inches, or, on the other hand, the vagueness of being a '10-14'. It seems to suit us much better psychologically to fed our vanity by saying we are the lowest size we can get into - a 10-12 for instance - and buying some garments of that size and others a size larger.
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