I’m thinking of deleting this blog.
10 things never to say to someone with an eating disorder
1. But you eat!
Of course they do. They have to or they would die, very quickly. It doesn’t matter if you saw your friend eating a chocolate bar two weeks ago, or they eat something at lunch every day: they can still have a serious problem. They might calorie count, purge, only eat ‘safe’ foods, restrict what they eat: but they will still eat something, sometimes.
2. But you have a great figure! (especially when said to an underweight person)
Society has managed to twist everybody’s eyes to the point where underweight or ill looks normal or desirable. If somebody ever says ‘I’m Xlbs underweight’ and you reply with this, that’s telling them ‘there’s nothing wrong with you’. We hear it as ‘if you gain anymore, you’ll lose that figure and be fat’.
3. But you aren’t thin?
Eating disordered patients are not always underweight. A diagnosis of anorexia has a weight requirement at the moment, yes- but being 5lbs underweight isn’t always obvious. Unless somebody is very underweight, it can be difficult to tell. That isn’t even the point- severity is not the same as weight. A person can be very ill with an eating disorder and be normal or overweight. Not to mention that actually telling a sufferer that they aren’t thin is often heard as ‘you’re fat’. Plain and simple.
4. Just eat [X] and avoid [Y] and you’ll be fine.
This tends to be the ‘just eat a healthy diet and you won’t get fat!’ type thing. It’s more than a diet. It’s not like a sufferer can just ‘snap out of it’. Advising a healthy eating routine is sweet, but it’s a little like showing a person with cleanliness based OCD a light cleaning routine. The second part gets its whole own entry-
5. Avoid [Y].
On stories about treatment, people are always asking ‘well why are they feeding them pizza and things? Can’t they have grilled fish and vegetables? It’s healthier!’ It’s healthier in that it has may have nutrients, sure. But you’re mixing up ‘good for weight loss’ with ‘healthy’, as many people do. Low calorie foods are hard to gain weight on- not to mention that learning to eat all foods is very important in recovery. If I somehow managed to gain weight on lean meat and salads but couldn’t consider chips without a breakdown, I wouldn’t be recovered or healthy.
6. Just snap out of it!
If we could do this, none of us would have a problem.
7. Let me tell you about my diet-
Not only is this boring (sorry, it’s true), it’s very triggering. If you enthuse about how you feel sooo much better and happier and you’ve lost 8lbs since you cut out bread, I’m going to think about the toast I ate this morning and feel like crying. You may be in a very different place from me- you might genuinely need to lose some weight. But I’m not in a place where I can make that distinction right now: if you talk about how you never eat carbs, I’ll think ‘clearly I don’t need to either’- which isn’t true.
8. Wow, you ate a lot at that meal! Well done!
I’ve heard this used to mean ‘you tried hard, well done’. It’s a sweet sentiment, but all I hear from that sentence is ‘wow, you ate a lot’. And I tend to hear ‘a lot’ as ‘too much’.
9. Why don’t you just go out for a run if you feel fat?
I’ve had this advised as a way to deal with the food I’m eating. You can see the logic- anxious over being unhealthy/overeating could be answered with healthy activities like exercise. But exercising whenever you eat is unhealthy. It’s very unhealthy. Doing actions purely to burn off calories is purging, and that’s not a habit any of us need.
10. Oh, I had a friend with an eating disorder! Yeah, she got down to XXlbs and was in hospital for months, it was awful, she didn’t eat for days on end…
We’re competitive. We shouldn’t be; but we are. If you stand there and tell me about how thin your friend was, I think ‘well, she was really sick. I’m nothing like that, I can’t be sick!’ I feel ashamed and upset and- yes, jealous because she did it better than me. If you’ve come to identify yourself purely as your weight and your disorder, as many people do, hearing this is like hearing ‘you aren’t good enough’.
http://recoveringinspirings.blogspot.com/2011/12/10-things-you-shouldnt-say-to-eating.html
I cannot emphasize how triggering this ish can be when you’re on the receiving end.
(Source: i-am-ambivalent)
This is a post of birds who look like they’re yelling.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
AAAAAAAH
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
AAAAAAAAAAAAH
Thank you that is all.
This made me feel a bit better
Dear “Colorblind” people,
Sciences says you’re probably racist:
http://news.illinois.edu/news/10/0421online.html
“If you subscribe to a color-blind racial ideology, you don’t think that race or racism exists, or that it should exist,” Tynes said. “You are more likely to think that people who talk about race and racism are the ones who perpetuate it. You think that racial problems are just isolated incidents and that people need to get over it and move on. You’re also not very likely to support affirmative action, and probably have a lower multi-cultural competence.”
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/cou/47/1/59/
The purpose of this investigation was to develop a conceptually grounded scale to assess cognitive aspects of color-blind racial attitudes. Five studies on the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS) with over 1,100 observations provide initial reliability and validity data. Specifically, results from an exploratory factor analysis suggest a 3-factor solution: Unawareness of Racial Privilege, Institutional Discrimination, and Blatant Racial Issues. A confirmatory factor analysis suggests that the 3-factor model is a good fit of the data and is the best of the competing models. The CoBRAS was positively related to other indexes of racial attitudes as well as 2 measures of belief in a just world, indicating that greater endorsement of color-blind racial attitudes was related to greater levels of racial prejudice and a belief that society is just and fair. Self-reported CoBRAS attitudes were sensitive to diversity training.
If you really don’t want don’t want to be racist, you should actively discuss race and racial privilege. It is especially important that you discuss race if you’re a parent or work with kids, because it will help children to be more aware of social issues.
The Dictator and The Zionist - The Trouble with Sacha Baron Cohen.
This morning, Sacha Baron Cohen is on my mind. Not a pleasant image to have to confront, but he’s been all over the place with the press for his new movie, The Dictator, which premiered in London earlier this week. He plays a composite character based on Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi - but I also see a lot of Iran’s Ahmedinijad in there. I don’t even really know what the plot of the movie is, but SBC’s movies have never really been big on plot.
I read this blog on CNN by Dean Obeidallah which calls out Cohen on the racism he displays in “browning up” to play an Arab man. Obeidallah’s argument is that Arabs and Indians themselves should be in movies that make fun of them. Fair enough. He doesn’t go far enough, in my opinion, to address all the stereotypes of Arabs that come out to play in the movie, but that’s because he hadn’t seen the movie when he wrote the piece. I wonder if he will.
What bothers me is that nobody’s addressing something more complex and, in my mind, more dangerous. So I’m going to attempt to do it. I know what I’m going to say is controversial, but I believe in speaking my mind when I see something that bothers me.
You see, SBC is a Zionist, a very publicly declared one. Which is not a problem for me personally, really. He’s got the right to hold his political views even if they are very bigoted ones that have been the root of most of the strife in the Middle East since 1948. But he’s got a very deliberate agenda which he expresses not-so-subtly in all his movies, and it’s not being said by commentators because of the fear that they will be called anti-Semitic.
Zionism is the belief in a Jewish nation, and the accompanying fierce loyalty to that nation, no matter what it does in the name of protecting itself and perpetuating its survival. It’s Zionism, not Judaism, that has seen the worst atrocities committed against the people of Palestine. Now, SBC doesn’t go around spouting things about the greatness of Israel in his movies. But if you look carefully, each one of his productions - from Ali G to Borat to Bruno to now, The Dictator, advances a certain element of Zionist propaganda against Muslims. Which is that Muslims are laughable, unintelligent, idiotic people with no intellect at best, and terrorists at worst. And Cohen uses buffoonery to do this.
How? By taking the stereotypes, derived both from Orientalism and from anti-Islamic Zionism, and playing them out to such ridiculous extremes, that his audiences laugh. And in laughing, they feel entertained. And in being entertained, they swallow the stereotypes and the racism whole, without pausing to critically analyze what they’ve been presented with. You could call this SBC’s particular genius. Yes, it’s pretty clever. But it’s also dangerous.
With Ali G, Cohen presented a fairly innocuous character: a rudeboy of uncertain ethnicity* (but everyone assumed he was Asian, or at least an Asian persona taken on by a white man for even more irony and laughs) who was stupid, racist, anti-Semitic, and sexist. A genius comedic character who made people laugh and believe that Asians, especially Muslim ones, of a certain age, class, and educational level, are all like this.
With Borat, I almost don’t have to say anything. We all know the buffoon he played who was from Kazakhstan who went to the United States and displayed all sorts of inappropriate behavior. He spouted off truisms about life in Kazakhstan, which included some pretty nasty jibes at village life - “My sister is best prostitute in village” - implying that again, Kazakhs - who happen to be Muslim - are backwards, idiotic yokels who engage in incest and bestiality. Of course it’s ridiculous, you say, we know it’s not true. Yes, but when you pick a country that most people know virtually nothing about and you assign values and mores to it, you know that because of the vacuum of knowledge, people will subconsciously adopt those values, or at least associate them with the country in the absence of better knowledge. Again, very, very clever.
In Bruno, the story of a gay Austrian fashionista, there’s no overt racism against Arabs or Muslims for a while. But then Cohen pulls the stunt of interviewing a Palestinian man who he claims is a dangerous Muslim terrorist. The man, in real life, is a Palestinian Christian who has nothing to do with terrorism. Cohen made him sign a release form before appearing in the movie, and didn’t tell him that he was going to brand him as a terrorist. On screen, this is a big joke, but in real-life Palestine, this can result in your death at the hands of Israeli security forces.
Most people think of Sacha Baron Cohen as a comedic genius, as I said before, as a trickster, someone who stands conventions on their heads to get laughs. I see him as someone else: a very intelligent man with a political stance and a stage on which to make that stance known. That he’s being subversively funny about it and using comedy rather than straight political discourse to do so is a sign of his brilliance, but also of his duplicity. He is advancing the worst of Zionist propaganda against Muslims with his movies, and the worst part is, you’re paying $15 each time to see him do it.
*I’ve had several people tell me Ali G was a parody of whites who want to be gangsta, Jamaican, or black. This wasn’t revealed until later in the series, though - and to be honest, when I saw him, the first thing that popped into my mind was that he was a parody of an Asian. Perhaps it was the name “Ali” (which was later revealed to be short for Alistair), a Muslim name that is very common amongst British Pakistanis, not so common amongst Afro-Carribbeans. Anyway, even if it was a white wannabe, critics rounded on him for making it “safe” to laugh at that culture from an imagined politically correct stance because it was buffoonery. I stick to my original claim that he was lampooning Asians (in addition to blacks, a more definite identity that I think evolved and became clearer as the series went on), and that his Zionist, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab stance has become more bold over time and become more and more overt in his films. And one thing people don’t know is that when he talks in the supposed language of each character, he’s actually making in-jokes in Hebrew.(x)
josé julio sarria, gay latino who ran for public office in 1961 - many many years before harvey milk
he ran for the san francisco board of supervisors and almost won by default, until people noticed there was a gay man running and immediately submitted everyone possible for the position. he didn’t win, but he still got 6000 votes, which shocked conservatives
he was also a drag queen popular at many of the balls at the time…and he still does it today (lookin good for a guy in his late 80s)!
It’s so funny how White “Queerstorians” conveniently never tell us about this beautiful querido right here. <3
80?!
Can I get this on a t-shirt or?
FASCISM IN EUROPE
France: The National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, won nearly 18 per cent of the vote in April’s first round of presidential elections. The party is eyeing seats in June parliamentary elections.
Greece: Golden Dawn is the chief right-wing movement in the country, an openly neo-Nazi party that is one of Europe’s most extreme. Could take a dozen seats in May 6 parliamentary election.
The Netherlands: The Freedom Party, led by Geert Wilders, is the third-largest in parliament - and brought down the minority government by withdrawing support.
Austria: The Freedom Party, having 34 of the 183 seats in parliament, is the second-strongest party in opinion polls.
England: British National Party has a policy that restricts membership to ‘indigenous British people’. Ten local councillors, a fall from 50 in 2008.
Germany: The NPD has two of 16 state legislators but no seats in national parliament. Support base in former Communist east German states, where unemployment and discontent is high.
Norway: The Progress Party holds 41 of 169 seats in parliament and is Norway’s biggest opposition party. More moderate than many European counterparts.
Denmark: The Danish People’s Party is the nation’s third largest political organisation, and has pushed Denmark to adopt some of Europe’s strictest immigration laws.
Sweden: The Sweden Democrats entered parliament in 2010 with 19 of 349 seats, but has had no major impact on legislation.
Finland: The Finns party won 19 per cent of parliamentary election votes in 2011 - up from four per cent four years earlier.
Hungary: Jobbik won nearly 17 per cent of the 2010 vote, and is one of two leading opposition parties.The conservative Fidesz party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has passed laws restricting civil rights and basic freedoms that go against the country’s EU membership.
I feel like I want to add a shitload unto “Denmark” but I don’t really have the patience. If you ever read anything from “180grader” or “uriasposten” these are practically nazisites.
(Source: pengpenguins)
Fighter from the Free Syria Army in a foxhole in Homs province in Syria. (by @baysontheroad)
I just found out that a 14 years old Saami boy was attacked and physically abused by three men in Märsta, north of Stockholm.
The reason why? He was apparently wearing a Saami hat that his attackers didn’t like.
The fuck?
This is the shit people who dare to publicly ‘out’ themselves as Saami in Sweden have to deal with on a regular basis.
…yet we keep hearing about how there’s no racism over there.
YEAH BECAUSE IT’S FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE TO FIGHT FOR BOTH ANIMAL WELFARE AND HUMAN RIGHTS AT THE SAME TIME.
(Source: circlearoundthesun)
Afghan war amputees and children practice walking at the International Committee of the Red Cross orthopedic center on Sept. 10 in Kabul. After more than 30 years of war and a decade since the 9/11 attacks in the United States, thousands of Afghans, both military and civilian, continue to pay a heavy price from the conflicts.
