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'?
Monday, 23 June 2008
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.
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