Entries from February 2009 ↓

You can never, ever, not-in-a-million years, love and accept yourself from the couch.

If feelings were math “accepting your body” is a mathematical impossibility if you are not in touch with and caring for your body.

It’s not only ineffective, it’s dangerous advice that glamorizes, justifies and promotes obesity. It’s time to get over it America.

Accept what is and then love yourself.

Love yourself enough to make effort. Love yourself enough to care about what feeling is behind your eating. Love yourself enough to get off the couch and hit the gym or go to the track. Love yourself enough to make the time. Love yourself enough to find the money. Love yourself enough to make it a priority. Love yourself enough to go to an Over-eaters Anonymous meeting or Weight Watchers. Love yourself enough to put one foot in front of the other. Love yourself enough to break a sweat. Love yourself enough to read the packaging and labels. Love yourself enough to learn what you don’t know.

Love is not a feeling.

Love an action verb.

You can not teach what you don’t know.

Love your kid enough to go first.

Love your kid enough to say no.

Otherwise, otherwise, it’s just talk.

Fit Girl Series: Friends, Strangers With Candy

Fit Girl Series: Comparing Children

Fit Girl Series: Exercise Poll

Fit Girl Series: Eat This, Not That!

Fit Girl Series: BIG FAT LIARS!

Fit Girl Series: Obese Teens on Oprah

Fit Girl Series: Weight = Moral Failure

Fit Family = Fit Girl

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Image: Sadie, www.littleblueschool.com

By Leola Dublin

Growing up, I used to love those Virginia Slims magazine ads that featured pictures of women from the 19th and early 20th centuries juxtaposed with saucy looking modern women smoking cigarettes. I grew up in a smoke-free home, and somehow the ads never convinced me that I should be a smoker when I grew up.

What I liked about them was the window into the past that they offered. I wondered what those women’s girlhood was like. Did they like school? Was it in a one-room schoolhouse? Did they have to do homework by candlelight? Did they secretly wish they could wear pants while riding those funny looking bicycles with the really big wheels? Looking back, I can see that part of the magic of those ads was that they made me think about how girls’ understanding of what is possible is completely context-dependent. This notion is at the heart of my research.

As a doctoral student, among other things, I examine the impact of marketing and media on adolescent girls’ identity development. What has been most surprising to me on this journey to my PhD is the resistance that I encounter from unlikely sources.

My favorite example involves a program I designed during my first year as a graduate student. The inspiration for the program was a halftime show at a home football game. All during the first half, I kept seeing really young looking girls flitting about in (to my old-lady eyes) the daringly short skirts and tight sweaters associated with cheerleading. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, and assumed that there was some promotion where middle and high school cheerleaders got reduced admission to the game if they came in uniform. The stands were filled with young men who had clearly gotten an early start on their drinking. You could tell because they weren’t using their inside voices as they checked out the cheerleaders.

For their part, the girls seemed filled with the heady sense of their burgeoning sexuality: they danced suggestively to the music, squealed when they saw each other, fixed hair and makeup, and in general performed gender as only young girls can. The mystery of their presence went unsolved until halftime.

The announcer invited the stand to give a big welcome to a delegation of cheerleaders from across the state. As several hundred young girls took over the field and performed their routine, I was overwhelmed by sadness. It seemed clear to me that for many of those cheerleaders, this moment might be the pinnacle of their youth. I looked on the field and saw a bleak future of young women battling disordered eating, struggling to form an identity that wasn’t centered on their sexuality, growing up in an environment that encouraged them to be pleasers – of others – rather than themselves. I couldn’t stop crying.

I wondered why we weren’t celebrating all the girls who had made it to the state science fair, or who had gotten an A in math class, or were on the honor roll. The analytical part of my brain took over, and after a week, I had sketched out my program.

WINGS (Women in Graduate Studies) would be a one-week residential program that allowed girls between the ages of 9 and 15 to be paired with a woman in a graduate program. Participants could attend some classes, tour the campus, and get a sense of life both in and beyond graduate school. Girls could be matched up based on academic interests, hobbies, hometown, or other similarities. The point would be to reach out to girls who would otherwise never think about going to graduate school and broaden their realm of possibilities. WINGS could be like those Virginia Slims ads from my childhood, by sparking imagination.

I took the idea to the chair of my department (Women’s Studies) and asked what she thought of the program. Expecting her response to be similar to the one I got back from the Dove Corporation (this sounds great, please keep us posted), I was stunned to hear her shoot it down. What bothered her the most was that my project seemed “a little elitist.” My shock was visible, and she explained that the project seemed to be founded on the underlying assumption that every girl should go to graduate school. In her opinion, my project didn’t account for the fact that some girls simply might not be interested in going to graduate school. Despite my assurance that I just wanted girls to know that there were options beyond cheerleader, many of them with benefits that could significantly impact their lives, my chair was unconvinced.

It was at that point that I wondered how far we really have come in terms of advances for women and girls. The point of my project was never to tell girls what to do. It was simply to provide a window into a world that many girls will never know.

We know that educational attainment is directly related to earning potential. At a time when women still make 77 cents to every dollar men make, why wouldn’t we offer girls an opportunity to increase the amount of money they can make? Greater educational attainment has also been demonstrated to result in increased life expectancy and improved health (both physical and mental).

Why is it elitist to want more girls to live longer, healthier, better-paid lives? What does it mean when a woman who has dedicated her career to fighting sexism and patriarchy thinks that exposing young girls to something they might like constitutes some social coercion?

I’d like to hear from other folks, particularly mothers of young girls. If a local college or university offered a program (like mine, or differently structured) where your daughter could have age-appropriate exposure to the world of graduate education, and be partnered with a woman who is committed to being a positive role model and a force for change, would you consider letting her attend? Or would you dismiss it for being too elitist?

Leola Dublin is a third year doctoral student in the Program in American Studies at Washington State University. Leola’s interdisciplinary research examines the effects of mass media on identity development in adolescent girls, investigating the ways that gender, sexuality, race, and beauty are constructed and marketed. She is especially interested in the representations of African-American women’s bodies and the ways that young African-American girls negotiate these images as they attempt to define themselves. A native of North Carolina, Leola grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC. She is currently preparing to take her preliminary exams this spring, and hopes to successfully defend her dissertation by May 2010.

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Check out this year’s Amelia Bloomer List – a list of books that are great for girls.

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Mark your calendars. You don’t want to miss Tracee Sioux of The Girl Revolution on PunditMom’s Blogtalk Radio Show on next Tues., Feb. 17.

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Ainsley’s in the other room reading to her brother and my husband and I are having a consultation with her doctor. And I’m hearing myself say this,

I don’t understand how this could be happening. This doesn’t make any sense. We’re doing most things right. We don’t keep junk food in the house, we probably eat better than half of America. We rarely go out to eat. She doesn’t eat school lunch. We have a trampoline, she rides her bike around the neighborhood, and we put her in karate and soccer. She gets gym 3 times a week at school.

And it occurs to me, somebody has to be lying.

Since I’m the one talking – it’s probably me.

Maybe we’re not looking in the right places. Maybe we’re not paying close enough attention to what she’s eating. Maybe the foods we’re eating aren’t what we believe we’re eating. She’s getting exercise, but its obviously not enough.

My husband was counting his calories at the time and frequently commenting, “did you know that lunch I had at that business meeting was 1,200 calories?” Uh, No.

So we counted Ainsley’s calories for about 2 weeks to get a clear picture of what was really going into her mouth.

The first surprise was that neither one of us, myself or my husband, really knew how many calories a kid her age should be eating.

The second surprise was that we were feeding her several foods that we didn’t think were high calorie, but were super-high in calories. One of the major things was the “real fruit slushes” at Sonic. We didn’t have air conditioning in our van (still don’t) so I was having mercy on my poor sweltering little children frequently. When we looked it up they were taking in about 1,000 extra calories and I was being distracted by the healthy-sounding, misleading “real fruit.” We cut their daily calories a good deal when we started ordering diet sprite slushes.

The 3rd surprise were the number of unauthorized and unaccounted for calories given to them by kindly strangers. I started noticing that we are rarely in public without someone giving my children sweets.

In one single day, some kid came up to Ainsley at an indoor playground and gave her a box of Dots. I had already allowed the ice cream in the child’s menu at Dairy Queen because we were rushing and out of town. Later someone was having a birthday and gave her a massive piece of cake. I was saying NO to the sugared gumballs when a kindly stranger came in and gave both the children quarters for gumballs. We visited my grandmother and I just couldn’t stomach her stricken look when I uttered a firm NO to her offer of pie, jelly beans, a cookie, and a piece of chocolate.

I started asking what Ainsley was eating over and friends’ houses and discovered that the lady down the street fed her an entire extra lunch – peanut butter and jelly on white bread, Cheetos and 2 juice boxes. Extra 500 calories. At another friends’ they were chomping down entire bags of chips, eating ice cream bars, sucking on suckers, etc.

I started noticing the ridiculous amount of candy, cookies and sweets they were getting at church and school. Ainsley gets rewarded with 10 animal crackers for good behavior. Zack gets a sucker nearly every day for being cute. The sweet church ladies think its so fun to make these giant bags of candy to hand out at various “special occasions” and functions.

The parents, coaches and organizers at sporting events are handing out sweets after sports or to reward athletic achievement. The irony of this one really baffles me. Go out and get some exercise and if you do well – we’ll take the team for ice cream cones at McDonalds or have a pizza party. Stop and buy some Skittles at the snack bar after the soccer game as a fund-raiser. Duh. With such a double message – its no wonder there’s an obesity epidemic.

One of my inherent flaws as a mother is my total lack of desire to be “mean mommy.” I hate that role. I think it sucks. It makes me clench up my stomach and grit my teeth to “make a big deal out of nothing.” So, when all of these strangers, teachers, coaches, neighbors, grandparents are offering up sweets and fattening foods I’m going along to avoid being rude to them or mean to my kids.

I say “okay” when I should be saying “No freaking way.”

What I learned in our 2 week calorie counting experiment is this:

Lots of people were lying. Food makers are BIG FAT LIARS. Every day can’t be a special occasion. No one eats “just one cookie.”

Strangers, neighbors and friends won’t offer your kids candy laced with LSD or full of razors, but it will be laced with sugar and fat, which has pretty negative consequences too.

Ainsley and I agree on this now:

Which is kinder, the mother who lets her kids eat everything, but her child gets really fat, gets diabetes, is very unhealthy and feels too lousy to exercise?

OR the mother who teaches her children how to eat healthily, make good food choices and says NO to foods that will make her children sick and unhappy in the long run?

The second one people – the second mother is truly the kindest.

It’s a pretty radical change. When the church ladies give them bags of candy, we confiscate them and secretly eat them when the children are in bed toss them in the trash or dole them out slowly. Same applies to birthday parties, school valentines parties, Halloween booty, Christmas, rewards at school and soccer. Thank goodness my husband has no guilt or conflicted feelings about this whatsoever. Because, I am likely to cave to whining, pleas and negotiations any second.

Fit Girl Series: Comparing Children

Fit Girl Series: Exercise Poll

Fit Girl Series: Eat This, Not That!

Fit Girl Series: BIG FAT LIARS!

Fit Girl Series: Obese Teens on Oprah

Fit Girl Series: Weight = Moral Failure

Fit Family = Fit Girl

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