Men, women, food and weight
This is just going to be a rant. If you want to go look up the information I reference it is freely available, but I don’t feel like massive linkage today.
I’m tired of the bullshit story that men “need” more food than women and that women “need” to weigh less than men, even when they are of the same size.
Denying women food is a way to keep women weaker. This has happened in many cultures and continues to happen now.
Women are denied protein and fatty foods that men reserve for themselves. Women are supposed to exist on salads and vegetables to stay thin, to give them a calmer temperment, to aid in a clear complexion, for “health” reasons, for the good of the environment. Men as a class are not criticized for having a double cheeseburger with mayo and extra cheese and a large order of fries and an apple pie for dessert. A woman who eats the same thing will be considered a pig, even if she is slender. A man will claim, if anyone dares question his eating habits, that he needs this amount and quality of food to keep himself strong.
A woman who is 5′8″ and athletic, with a large bone structure, is told by uniform standards blindly applied to men and women that she should both weigh less and eat less than a man who is 5′8″, slender, and who has a sedentary job. A man is automatically assumed to have more muscle mass than a woman – athletic women simply don’t exist in the minds of doctors.
The BMI is crap.
Any health chart which automatically says a woman should weigh less than a man is crap.
Women have a biological need to carry more fat than men – 14% body fat in a woman is approaching dangerously low, but is a merely considered fit and trim for men. Women need 7% more body fat than men. If anything, women should be “allowed” to eat more and weigh more than men in order to be considered healthy. In our society most people do not go out and work at hard labor every day and sports activities are available to all. I know many women who work out several times a week. They don’t need to be denied protein and fat in their diet based on some strange idea that they are not muscular and don’t need it. I know many men who don’t exercise at all – they don’t need five times the amount of protein and fat than women to build up their muscles. In fact, men generally don’t eat enough whole grains and vegetables unless a woman cooks it for them. Men are “supposed” to eat red meat – women are “supposed” to eat a small green salad. Gee guys, since you’re so tough and strong, why don’t you ty practicing a little of the self-denial you insist on in women?
Furthermore, although men and women have the same rate of “obesity” in America, men are much more likely to have heart disease and are somewhat more likely to have diabetes. Clearly it is men who should be concentrating more on losing weight, as extra weight is much more dangerous to men than to women. Which, of course, suggests strongly that the standards set for men and women as far as weight goes are wrong.
And while women who are perfectly healthy are being chastised for being overweight, women and girls who desperately try to reach an unreachable goal of thinness by becoming anorexic are invisible as they die – 20% of all those with anorexia will die of it, often at a very young age. Meanwhile, those naughty women who are ZOMG TWENTY POUNDS OVERWEIGHT!!!!!! will probably live to be 80. Funny thing – very few anorexics are men.
And spare me the slanted stories that anti-feminists put out claiming anorexia kills almost no one. I will offer you one link here: http://web4health.info/en/answers/ed-psy-anorex-recover-incid.htm.
Starving for attention and beauty and their deaths aren’t even noticed – they are the nasty little secret everyone wants to sweep under the rug.
