TOO YOUNG TO KNOW

That extremely thin women weren't considered beautiful or fashionable, even by the fashion world, until a model named Twiggy became very popular in the 1960s. The majority of women in this country were born after 1950 so they're too young to know the history of "skinny vs. fat." The advent of skinny being sexy hadn't existed before Twiggy. I know because my nickname in high school was "Broom." No one thought I was attractive. I think I paid my first date to take me to a high school dance or maybe I blackmailed my brother into doing it.  Everyone thought I was too skinny. Then came Twiggy and she made skinny beautiful. So, without doing a thing I went from being "Broom" and unattractively skinny to an overnight sensation (O.K. That's an exaggeration but you get my point). With a flip of the advertising industry I could stop being embarrassed and start being cool, which, it turned out wasn't that much fun anyway. In the 1950s Marilyn Monroe had the "ideal" body and was considered one of the sexiest women on the planet. Marilyn was a size fourteen. Today she would be considered chubby or even fat. Here is a...

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WHY DIETS DON’T WORK

O.K. You've heard it, read it, said it to yourself, yet you continue to do it, so I'll tell you again, just in case you didn't believe it: DIETS DON'T WORK! That's not to say they won't work for a few weeks, months, or even a year or two but eventually they don't work and the dieter feels frustrated and like a failure. So why do people continue to put themselves on diets? I think it's because they don't know what else to do. We live in a culture that is fixated on physical beauty for women and for men. A desirable body size in this culture isn't the body size many people inherited. If everyone in your family is big boned and leans toward the plump side, you might find that's your body type as well. And haven't we all heard about "six pack abs?" Admittedly men seem to be more visual than women but women have their biases as well. So people who find themselves not fitting into the "beautiful people" category are often not happy with themselves. And an odd thing happens to people when they don't like their body size. They often use food to make...

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