what Coulter had to sell to television producers was that she was a conventionally attractiveRead more at location 3704
young woman with a law degree, some strong opinions, and a willingness to express them in no uncertain terms.Read more at location 3705
its more interesting to see a young person talking about issues than a big old fat white guy.Read more at location 3708
Estrich possessed a dazzling array of academic, professional, and political credentials:Read more at location 3710
Are we now choosing female pundits for beauty, not for experience, insight and acumen?Read more at location 3726
These are excellent questions. Coming as they do from someone who has been considered a notable figure in the feminist movement,Read more at location 3728
Considering the identity of its author, its contents should have caused a scandal.Read more at location 3732
the culture of thinness has overwhelmed even people who ought to be leading the protest against that cultures oppressive grip.Read more at location 3734
Estrich makes the following confession: Nothing that I do now or have done in the past... has made me prouder, happier, or more fulfilled than losing weight and getting in shape.Read more at location 3737
Over and over again, she affirms that she only feels good about herself when she looks good, and she only looks good when she fits into a size 6or on a good day, size 4(theRead more at location 3748
What Estrichs mother mostly worried about, it seems, was her daughters weight:Read more at location 3758
My mother considered it her job to watch everything we ate, to make sure we wouldnt get fat. It worked, sort of. I grew up always believing I was on the fat side, never confident that I looked just fine. Now I look at old pictures, and I dont get it. I look thin.Read more at location 3760
To be blunt, how can someone with an IQ thats no doubt four or so standard deviations to the right side of the mean manage to produce such a painfully naive interpretation of the evidence?Read more at location 3763
the propaganda of the weight loss industrythat there is no reason why a middle-aged mother ought to weigh more than she didRead more at location 3774
marginally overweight, even by the absurdly restrictive and scientifically baseless standards of the BMI tables;Read more at location 3794
Estrich was fat, in other words, in only two closely related places: in her own mind, and in the context of a culture (contemporary America in general, and Southern California in particular) that has enshrined a medically dangerous degree of thinness as the feminine ideal.Read more at location 3796
Third, remarkably for a self-identified feminist, Estrich never notes the obvious political implicationsRead more at location 3806
If its lower than 9 (well reserve 10 for your familys good health, solvency and world peace), youre not ready and youre going to fail.Read more at location 3816
is correct about this: A person who wants to maintain a body weight 10 or 20 or 30 pounds below what she would maintain if she engaged in normal eatingthatRead more at location 3819
What could possibly justify dedicating a large part of ones life to avoiding such fundamental pleasures as bread, chocolate, and wine?Read more at location 3834
two basic answers to this question: protecting your health and salvaging your self-esteem.Read more at location 3835
All of this, of course, is absurd. There is not a shred of scientific evidence that a 160-pound womanRead more at location 3846
Indeed, the heavier woman will have far better health, on average, than the thinner women, if the latter are sedentary.Read more at location 3848
health benefits of exercise appear to be almost completely independent of whether it results in any weight loss.Read more at location 3850
Estrichs attitude toward exercise is typical of people who work out primarily to lose weight: She hates it.Read more at location 3851
almost all people who engage in strenuous physical activity on such a basis will be unable to maintain a commitmentRead more at location 3855
Estrich merely asserts that everyone knows fat kills: You dont need the doctor to tell you to lose weight.Read more at location 3860
one would never guess from reading Estrichs book that eight million Americans suffer from eating disorders, or that the health effects of precisely the sort of yo-yo dieting she has spent almost all of her adult life engaging in are far worse than all but the most extreme levels of obesity.Read more at location 3863
Losing weight, Estrich emphasizes, is not merely or even primarily about saving your life. It is about saving your marriage, your sense of self-esteem.Read more at location 3870
people who diet end up, on average, weighing more than people of similar initial weight who dont,Read more at location 3890
succeeding at any difficult long-term project requires feeling good about those aspects of oneself such a project engages.Read more at location 3892
No novel worth reading was ever written by anyone who didnt believe he was a good novelist.Read more at location 3893
reconnecting with their bodies in a beneficial way requires accepting the simple truth that there is actually nothing wrong with their bodiesRead more at location 3896
as generations of ex-dieters have discovered, for most people the only way to deal with their weight successfully is not to diet at all.Read more at location 3897
But then it all goes wrong: A sexy woman is a woman who likes her body so of course she takes care of it which makes her lose weight which makes her like her body even more which makes her even sexier which makes her exercise more which makes her lose more weight... A more precise description of the theoretical pretzel logic behind the practice of anorexia and bulimia would be difficult to formulate.Read more at location 3900
She doesnt deny that trying and failing to lose weight is often psychologically devastatingRead more at location 3910
The notion that thinness equals fitness, and fat equals ill health, is demonstrably false.Read more at location 3914
an academic of all people has no excuse for not actually examining the evidence before writing a bookRead more at location 3916
Would she, for example, advocate eliminating Social Security on the grounds that there has never been any need for such a program, given that sufficiently self-disciplined people have always been able to save enough money for retirement?Read more at location 3921
self-hatred is a product of failure, and failure is a product of the nature of the enterprise,Read more at location 3925
dieting results in failure, which produces unhappiness, which leads to compensatory bingeing, which produces more unhappiness, and so on and so forth,Read more at location 3927
Indeed, this neurotic cycle probably plays a larger role in making people fatterRead more at location 3929
Most people who diet would be happier, healthier, and thinner if they never dieted.Read more at location 3931
because we are suffering from a contemptible combination of laziness and neurosis:Read more at location 3938
You are not fat because you have a hard life. You are not fat because you have a slow metabolism. You are not fat because you are poor, harried, hurt, lonely, overworked, stressed out, depressed, or disabled. You may have been victimized, but youre not doomed to be a victim. You are fat because you dont eat right, and dont exercise enough, for you.Read more at location 3939
If there is one thing that is not in doubt about Western medicine, it is that it cannot tell people how to successfully lose weight.Read more at location 3944
How is it possible for a person of your intelligence to be so blind? Surely there must be some level of consciousness at which you have some inkling of just how perverse, wrongheaded, and ultimately destructive the things you are saying actually are.Read more at location 3950
advice she gives on the matter is no different than that which she herself was unable to follow,Read more at location 3954
Anyway, how exactly is Susans Miracle Diet (Im not making that title up) supposed to work its miraculous transformation, when almost all diets fail?Read more at location 3955
Estrich understands her previous twenty-five years of recurrent dietary disaster as the product of an intellectual failure.Read more at location 3960
What finally worked for Estrich, at least temporarily, was nothing new, but rather a collection of the most basic tenets of dieting: Come up with strict rules regarding what you can and cant eat in advance, and stick to them no matter what. Eat your vegetables. Dont eat standing up in the kitchen or late at night. Keep a food journal. Exercise regularly. Most important of all, avoid bad foods. This doesnt just mean doughnuts either. In order to achieve and maintain a desirable weight, Estrich advises her readers to always eat fruits and vegetables, to sometimes eat chicken, fish, egg whites, and non-dairy fat, to rarely eat potatoes, bread (!), pasta (!!), rice, bagels and oil, and to never eat anything else.Read more at location 3964
for people who want to stay 20 pounds below their natural weight, dieting in this fashion is pretty much a life sentence.Read more at location 3969
Predictably, Estrich ascribes her success to the same qualities that have served her so well in her career: a talent for breaking down problems analytically, a capacity for hard work, considerable reserves of sheer willpower, and so on.Read more at location 3977
Ann Coulter is not a woman of really great beauty. Ann Coulter is tall and extremely thin and has very long blonde hair.Read more at location 3991
(Studies indicate that women tend to underestimate what the typical man considers the most desirable body type for women by about 20 pounds.)Read more at location 3993
What should appall and anger us is not so much Estrichs book, but rather the culture that made it possible.Read more at location 4001
a woman of such brilliance and accomplishment should waste years of her life agonizing over something as trivial as her inability to lose 20 poundsRead more at location 4002
