"Mothers are selfish bitches" according to Jane Kirby of the Sindo

Isn't it amazing in this modern 21st century world that mothers still bear total responsibility for raising children. Those working hussies should feel guilty for abandoning their children, according to Irish Independent reporter Jane Kirby:

Mothers who work raise unhealthier children than those who stay at home, researchers said yesterday

Mothers not parents. What about the other parent? Fathers caring for children is not taken into account. Despite the increasing number of fathers who take the primary caregiving role, and the equal caregiving by both parents, the Sindo decides to take a blast from the past and attempt to shame working mothers. It is an old tactic but pulls nicely on the Catholic guilt that most schools succeed in infusing in their charges.

Do men have no influence or responsibility for their offspring? How about children of a gay couple or a poly couple or any other non traditional family unit? Should single mothers give up work, draw social welfare, require social housing and basically become the stimatised straw dole-queen that middle class conservatives have railed against for decades?

Won't somebody please think of the children?



And the British Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health considers this a mother's responsibility, not a parent's responsibility. As usual, total heteronormative bullshit.

Mothers who worked full-time had the unhealthiest children, followed by those who worked part-time. They typically worked 21 hours per week (with a range of 16 to 30 hours) and for 45 months (with a range of 25 to 55 months). Overall, many children had habits that could lead to them becoming overweight. For example, 37pc of children mostly ate crisps or sweets between meals and 41pc mostly drank sweetened drinks.A total of 61pc watched television or used the computer for at least two hours a day.

Ah everything becomes clearer, some children have habits that could led to the dreaded obesity. Apart from the conditionals, the invocation of the sin of fat, and the lack of any sort of empirical research, correlation is not causation.

I have a couple of questions for the Sindo, as they dive into the goldmine that is the "obesity crisis". It sure does sell papers but is devoid of fact.

• Do you know that children need fat and sugar to grow?
• Do you know that the person who invented BMI (standard medical measurement) totally rejected its use to determine health of adults and never for children?
• Do you know that medical insurance companies arbitrarily changed BMI in the 80s and millions became overweight overnight?
• Do you know that BMI has been proved to be bullshit?
  
• Do you know what "overweight" looks like?
• Do you know that being "overweight" makes you more likely to survive a heart attack?
  

You cannot tell the health of a person by looking at them or what they eat. The current obsession with fat as unhealthy is dangerous.

Children know when they are being discussed and the shame gets a hold. I am fat now but I wasn't when I was a kid. Adults told me I was fat and I saw my body as hideous. That is a learned behaviour. I grew up to be fat and healthy. The emotional damage took a lot longer. I visited anorexia and bulimia until I accepted myself as I am through plenty of fat acceptance reading. Publicly worrying about children's weight is dangerous. I was not the only child that was deeply affected by adults' comments to me or about me.

In the second last paragraph of this sexist, heteronormative, homophobic piece of tripe, there is the standard classism. The Sindo says:

But when the researchers took away factors that might influence the results, such as socio-economic background, they found a definite link between a mother working and the child's health.

Yes, those mothers are so selfish as to work when we live in the Irish socialist paradise. Mothers who are the sole earners who consider the "health" of their children and give up their aul jobs.

Forget about the mortgage or rent, food on the table and luxuries like school uniforms or heat. Forget the notion of an equal partnership. Forget about equal responsibility. Forget that the definition of what constitutes a family has changed. Forget the undervaluation of mothers' work. Forget all the progress that women have made to achieve equal rights.

Because the article basically boils down to nuclear two hetero parents, in which Daddy earns and Mummy gets belittled for doing likewise. Stupid bitch, get back in the kitchen and think of the children because you cannot have a life or work outside the home without being accused of selfishness and neglect. It's all your fault for not slaving over a hot stove and feeding your children three home-cooked meals a day.

Jane Kirby is sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, heteronormative, conservative and has written a piece full of hyperbolic sensationalist lies. It's hard to believe that this piece was cleared by three Sindo editors. But then again, what can be expected from a paper that pays and gives an platform to a racist, misogynistic asshole.

People are assholes

That is all...

until I come up to a polite way to say "fuck you Ryanair". It's their responsibility to provide seats that fit people rather than discriminating against people because of a physical characteristic.

New kind of Special K

Not only can women get stalked by a giant chocolate muffin but now we can spell contraceptive a whole new way.



Bloody brilliant isn't it! More spoofs please.

Special K gendered advertising can kiss my fat ass.

Been stalked by a giant chocolate muffin lately?

Avoid the Muffin wit..
Watch the ad...

Me neither.

Apparently it's normal to obsess over "bad" food if you are a woman. Disordered eating, much? Eat the damn muffin. It's better than those cardboardy Special K bars -

Kellogg’s Special K Cereal (51%) (Rice, Wheat {Wholewheat, Wheat Flour}, Sugar, Wheat Gluten, Defatted Wheatgerm, Dried Skimmed Milk, Salt, Barley Malt Flavouring, Vitamin C, Niacin, Iron, Vitamin B6, Riboflavin (B2), Thiamin (B1), Folic Acid, Vitamin B12), Glucose Syrup, Chocolate Pieces (11%) (Cocoa Mass, Sugar, Emulsifier {Soy Lecithin}), Fructose, Dextrose, Sugar, Humectant (Sorbitol, Glycerol), Vegetable Oil, Emulsifier (Soy Lecithin), Antioxidant (E320).

Yum!

The perfect doctor

With the experience of the past 30 years on earth, I thought nothing about medical professionals could surprise me. I've been told to get bariatric surgery because it's a magical cure for PCOS. I've been told to lose weight or die. I've been told that not hating my body means I have a personality disorder. I've been told to look it up on the web seconds after a diagnosis. I've argued with doctors and corrected doctors (many don't appreciate that)

After all that I'm fairly cynical about doctors. The majority see a fat woman and think that I eat too much and don't exercise because I weigh around 120 kgs. Even the more respectful doctors suggest losing weight for health reasons. There are reasons why I weigh 120 kgs but I refuse to categorise myself into a "good fattie" or a "bad fattie". However, I do find it particularly evil and ignorant of doctors to suggest losing weight when I have a certified medical disease that prevents weight loss.

Dengue fever struck me two weeks ago - a final gift from the developing world. I have since been seeing a very hot, witty and intelligent doctor who was already ticking all my boxes. Very competent and thoughtful.

Today he took the cake, as it were. My ankles are swollen for some unknown reason probably unrelated to the dengue. They've been swollen for the past six months. He's given me diuretics and requested to weigh me. This was the first mention of my weight. I refused. He explained his reasoning.

He reckons I'm carrying about 5 kilos of water weight. He wanted to weigh me to track that 5 kilos until I got back to the right weight for me.

Yes he said the right weight for me. I almost started crying. He implied that I'm fine the way I am. I know that but first time ever that a medical professional treated me as a person rather than a big fattie.

I almost launched myself across the desk to shove my tongue in his mouth but I restrained myself.

How am I gushing so much about human kindness? Why is his behaviour exceptional when it should be standard? I am used to walking into a clinic with gritted teeth prepared to fight for my right to be treated as a human being and not an insect. It's a relief to know that I don't have to always play defence.

Happy thoughts to Dr N, the perfect doctor

Is half the population crazy or is is just the shrinks?

From the great Junkfood Science comes the latest "kids nowadays" - shrinks claim that one is every two college kids has a psychiatric disorder. The mind boggles.

Wild and crazy toga parties, food fights, drinking, smoking, and foolish pranks made National Lampoon’s Animal House a cult classic thirty years ago. Today, college kids like Bluto, played by John Belushi, and his friends would be diagnosed as needing psychiatric treatment.

Nearly half of all college-age young people had a psychiatric disorder in the past year, according to psychiatrists from New York in the latest issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. More precisely, their behaviors, as reported to interviewers during a 2001-2002 epidemiological survey, matched symptoms listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV).

Right. And there was I thinking that "outlandish" behaviour was a result of freedom after restriction since childhood. But then again, I'm thinking logically not emotionally.

I had a few wild years in college, as did most of my classmates, and guess what? Now most are perfectly normal adults leading good enough lives. The very idea that we somehow have a psychiatric disorder is ludicrous. Seems to me like the shrinks want to scare us into therapy, where they make a mint.

I've no doubt that a particularly bad shrink may label me paranoid for writing this but it seems to me that there is more of a emphasis put on diagnosing the masses than treating with compassion and respect. I've seen two shrinks and both sucked: shrink A because she treated critical incident stress as an ongoing clinical issue; and shrink B because she pathologised my personality based on my fat.

That's a ridiculous assessment. Either shrinks are crazy or I am. As someone who has a mental illness, I am within the system. I don't think that accepting what I cannot change is a symptom on a personality disorder.

When I read shit like this it pisses me off because I know so many people that are utterly failed by healthcare systems, public or private. It also starts me wondering that if half the population has a psychiatric disorder then (a) can we really call it a disorder and (b) why is it so stigmatised?

When I go to see a doc, a mental one or otherwise, I evaluate care based on these criteria:

• Respect for patients
  
• Diagnosis
• Ability to work with me
• Listening to me
• Hearing me
  
• Disagree when you need to but try not to hit me over the head with it
• Talk to me as I am, not as a child or an idiot
• Do not ever express that you know more about my body then I do. So tired of explaining to each doc that my temperature is normal at 36 not 37...
  
• Don't be afraid to admit ignorance
  

A medical professional is in the business of providing and not creating services. If a doc provides a crappy job then ze doesn't get paid. As for the doc who told me to "look it up on the internet", I'm never paying that bill.

Since when does fat equal crazy?

I tried to submit this story to First, do no harm but I have failed. I have been subjected to the same fat hatred from doctors on many occasions. One of the worst was when a specialist recommended bariatic surgery for PCOS. When I asked whether it would cure my PCOS (knowing that it wouldn't) he replied that it might. It gets scary when I know more about my disease than the specialist. It's especially scary when a specialist tries to make a patient go for an expensive and dangerous operation based on misinformation. That's gotta be illegal, right? Should I sue the pants off that asshole?

What happened to me last week, though, just takes the cake. I suffer from depression and was going to see a shrink. She was manipulative and so I fired her months ago. Last week, my current physician needed a report from her. She had destroyed the records as I requested and was doing it from memory. So all of that is fairly normal.

Then I got the report. She pulled a diagnosis out of her ass of Borderline Personality Disorder and/or Narcissistic Personality Disorder and blames my depression on these "personality" disorders (instead of PTSD which is the actual cause).

And why did I get such a diagnosis? She thinks I have a personality disorder because I don't hate my body. She thinks I'm narcissistic and out of touch with reality because I am "morbidly obese" at 270 and I'm fine with it. Her damning report is because I am content with being fat.

I don't know how many ways I can say that before I can believe it myself. If I was living in a country with a medical board, I would report her but I'm in the developing world at present.

Basically, her point is that the entire fat acceptance moment is composed of people with mental health problems because we accept ourselves or at least try to accept and love our bodies. Now that's fucked up.

Teh fatz they kill

Oh please. There's another scare story on the Beeb. I want to ask whether people believe this kind of story but I know people actually do.

Carrying extra fat around your middle dramatically increases your risk of early death, even if your overall weight is normal, say researchers.

A study of almost 360,000 people from nine European countries found waist size a "powerful indicator" of risk.

Each extra 2ins (5cm) raised the chance of early death by between 13% and 17%.

The New England Journal of Medicine study stressed GPs should regularly measure patients' waists as a cheap and easy way to assess health.

...

A British Heart Foundation spokesman welcomed the findings, saying they supported previous research which found the risk of heart disease to be higher when fat was concentrated around the waist area.

"It is important a variety of measurements are used to assess body weight and shape. - as well as BMI (Body Mass Index), waist circumference and waist-hip ratio can help to provide a better assessment of health risk.

"If you tend to gather weight around your middle, increasing the amount of activity you do and watching what you eat will help to reduce your risk of heart disease and of dying early."

I have belly fat. Lots and lots of it. I live with PCOS which is a genetic disease, which 1 in 5 women suffer from across the world. One of the major symptoms is belly fat.

I went to an endocrinologist in Singapore, supposedly an expert, who told me to go and lose weight. Wow. What a fucking expert? Nobody had ever thought to advise that particular remedy before. I asked him how to lose weight considering that there is no safe medical way to make a fat person thin or a thin person fat. He told me to consider bariatic surgery. Despite my rising rage, I asked him whether it would cure my PCOS, knowing full well that it would not, and he said maybe - lying sack of shit. I replied that thin women suffer from PCOS too, and asked him what he would advise in that case. He said diet and exercise. I eat healthily and exercise most of the time. It's not a solution to losing weight. It's the solution for being healthy as long as you don't have depression, fibro, PCOS, CFS...

And fyi BMI is a crock of shit. Loads of research has come out on fat and heart attacks. Plus, the image of the fatty stuffing their face with doughnuts all day long is a stupid stereotype and is not upheld by the facts.

There are many reasons why people are fat but the primary reason is genetics.



Go peddle your scaremongering elsewhere.

ETA: Kate Harding's essay "Don't you realise fat is unhealthy" is recommended reading.