I'm, Like, So Fat! Helping Your Teen Make Healthy Choices about Eating and Exercise in a Weight-Obsessed World

I'm, Like, So Fat! Helping Your Teen Make Healthy Choices about Eating and Exercise in a Weight-Obsessed World

Synopsis

Hit the gym for a workout - but sit for hours at your computer. Supersize your value meals - but downsize your waistline. Today's media-saturated teenagers are bombarded with mixed messages that distort their self-image and lead many to overeat and others to starve themselves. When "I feel fat" becomes a teen's common refrain, how can worried parents respond constructively? With "I'm, Like, SO Fat!" Dr. Dianne Neumark-Sztainer shows parents how to strike the difficult balance between bolstering self-esteem and offering constructive advice. Drawing on her landmark study, Project EAT (Eating Among Teenagers), and her experience as a mother of four, Neumark-Sztainer offers a wealth of science-based, practical ideas for instilling healthy eating and exercise habits, educating teens about nutrition and portion size, and talking about body image. Here is a rock-solid foundation that parents everywhere can build on to help their teens stay fit, eat well, and feel good about their looks in a world where too-perfect bodies are used to sell everything from cosmetic surgery to fast food.

Excerpt

“I’m, like, SO fat … why can’t I look like Heather?”

“Ewwww, I can’t eat THAT. Look at all that GREASE…. Wanna go get a

Frappuccino?”

“I’m being really good today: I haven’t eaten a single calorie.”

“No, I’m not eating dinner, Dad; gotta make weight. I’ll be at the gym,

probably till you’re in bed.”

Sound familiar? Even fleeting encounters with teenagers today will tell you volumes about the pressures they’re up against: “Supersize it” … but downsize yourself. “Just do it” … or just stay home watching reality TV and IMing your friends. Hang out at the mall with the other kids, where you’ll feel worse and worse about not fitting into those size 1 designer jeans, until you fs that promote obesity but reward thinness. We’re surrounded by high-calorie, low-nutrient food. Portion sizes have grown dramatically. Technological advances make it easy to get through the day without breaking a sweat. And I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but in my neighborhood kids aren’t out playing tag and hide-and-seek like we used to do. Yet we’re all supposed to stay thin and muscular.

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Weight Bias: Nature, Consequences, and Remedies

Synopsis

Discrimination based on body shape and size remains commonplace in today's society. This important volume explores the nature, causes, and consequences of weight bias and presents a range of approaches to combat it. Leading psychologists, health professionals, attorneys, and advocates cover such critical topics as the barriers facing obese adults and children in health care, work, and school settings; how to conceptualize and measure weight-related stigmatization; theories on how stigma develops; the impact on self-esteem and health, quite apart from the physiological effects of obesity; and strategies for reducing prejudice and bringing about systemic change.

Excerpt

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false

appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by

weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by

prejudice.

—ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER (1851)

In free societies, bias, stigma, prejudice, and discrimination are considered inherently evil, seen as a threat to the health, happiness, and social status of those targeted, but also to a nation's fundamental values of inclusion and equality. The behaviors resulting from prejudice range from minor infractions of civility to genocide.

Prejudice and the discrimination it breeds are passed through generations, socialized through multiple channels, and often occur in people who believe themselves to be fair-minded. In areas such as race and gender bias, there is a rich tradition of research, advocacy, social action, and public policy designed to understand causes and to design methods for prevention. Bias based on race and gender has not been eliminated, but progress has been made. This is less the case with weight bias.

Research and social policy on weight bias and discrimination lag far behind, to the point where negative attitudes based on weight have been labeled the last acceptable form of discrimination (Puhl & Brownell . . .

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The Loss of a Life Partner: Narratives of the Bereaved

The Loss of a Life Partner: Narratives of the Bereaved

Synopsis

Although there is extensive research on the loss of a spouse, predominantly focusing on the experiences of widows, much less attention is paid to bereaved partners not married to their significant other, whether or not the partners are of the same sex. This first-of-its-kind work explores both socially sanctioned and disenfranchised grief, highlighting similarities and differences. Combining a discussion of various theories of grief with personal narratives of grieving men and women drawn from numerous interviews, and detailed case study analysis, Carolyn Ambler Walter has produced a penetrating examination of the bereavement experiences of partners in varying types of relationships. She views narratives of widows, widowers, and bereaved domestic gay and lesbian partners from a postmodern perspective that breaks away from the traditional belief that the living must detach themselves from the dead in order to move on with their lives. Instead, building on the works of postmodern grief theorists such as Klass, Silverman, and Nickman, Walter views ongoing bonds with the dead as a resource for enriching functionality in the present, and as a key to looking to the future.

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Coping with Loss

Coping with Loss

Synopsis

This book integrates groundbreaking new research, theory, and clinical insights to present a comprehensive picture of how different goups of bereaved people cope with their losses.

Excerpt

This book is based on the Bereavement Coping Project, a long-term study of several hundred people who lost a loved one. The Bereavement Coping Project began as just another research study. It soon became an avenue for spending time with some of the most inspiring and interesting people we have ever met. Chief among these were the hospice people--the nurses, social workers, counselors, and volunteers--who have dedicated their lives to improving the last days of severely ill people and assisting families through grief. We consulted with these dedicated professionals and volunteers extensively in designing this study. The hospice staff then recruited family members into the study for us and gave us continual feedback through its end. We simply could not have done this study without them, and the information we gained would have been much less rich if not for the many questions and concerns hospice people suggested we address. We are deeply grateful to Maureen Medders, Carol Gray, Kitsy Schoen, Gayle Bigelow, Maxine Montgomery, Linda Appleton, Nancy Sabonya, Ruth Schlecta, Donna Bell, Barbara Noggle, Bonnie Kick, tBarbara Weissman, Susan Poor, and all the other hospice people who allowed us to spend some time with them and the people they serve. Special thanks to Margaret Gainer for the many, many hours and great love she put into this project.

We are also deeply grateful to the family members who participated in this study. Many people were reluctant to participate, but did so in hope that the information they provided could be helpful to future bereaved people. Our goal in writing this book was to fulfill that hope--to serve as a conduit for their experiences and insights--so that bereaved people and those who serve bereaved people could be informed by these experiences and insights. We have . . .

Young People's Experiences of Loss and Bereavement: Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach

Synopsis

"This intellectually stimulating book demonstrates the authors are well-read and possess elegant synthesizing skills.... I found the authors to be wise and insightful and their presentation of ideas complex and balanced." 

Omega: Journal of Death and Dying

"What it does extremely well, and, indeed, uniquely is provide a wide and deep exploration of the extensive, often bewildering and conflicting, literature about the experiences of young people, loss and bereavement, drawing from it useful conclusions as well as identifying gaps in the research, and pointing to possible ways forward." 

BereavementCare

What is the significance of death in contemporary society?

How do young people come to terms with loss and bereavement?

Evidence shows that bereavement is an issue that touches the lives of the majority of young people, and yet it is often left to the province of specialists. This timely book provides the first in-depth, interdisciplinary overview of our knowledge and theorizing of bereavement and young people including the voices of young people, as well as major statistical studies of cohorts of young people followed over many years.

Taking a broad sweep across a great range of relevant literatures, this book breaks new ground in spanning theoretical issues and empirical research to examine critically what we know about this important - but often neglected - issue. It also features in-depth original case studies of young people who have experienced bereavement and uses these as a basis for exploring how loss and bereavement impact upon young people's lives.

Young People's Experiences of Loss and Bereavement provides essential reading on issues of loss, change and bereavement for students, researchers and professionals across a wide range of health and social care disciplines, especially those involving family and youth work.

Excerpt

Bereavement is a stage of life evoking even more anxiety than adolescence …

(Walter 1999: 141)

Death and bereavement are issues that contemporary western societies struggle to deal with. Since the period of the Enlightenment, the decline of religion and the march of scientific progress have given rise to a culture which leaves people generally searching to know how to make any sense of death and bereavement, and how to cope with the emotional chaos that may result (Walter 1999). Contemporary western lifestyles increasingly emphasize individual rational choice and self-control, while encounters with death and bereavement may arguably pose challenges to such secularized personal lifestyle projects.

Young people similarly may be seen as threatening to the rational order and self-control of modern civilized society. While the particular anxieties aroused by youth may differ from those aroused by bereavement, from a more general perspective, anthropologists have long pointed out that the boundaries between different social categories or social settings may be fraught with ambiguity and tension. The status of youth, and the status of bereavement, may both be experienced as periods of such marginality, with all the attendant possibilities for uncertainty and disruption.

Both these statuses may also be understood not just as marginal and disruptive, but also as transitional, with youth constituting a time of transition between childhood and adulthood, and bereavement a time of psychosocial transition between one set of significant relationships and another. While the theme of transition does not inevitably connote loss, it does necessarily imply change, and whether or not it is experienced as a loss, change in itself may arouse fears of the unknown and the potentially chaotic. The juxtaposition of bereavement and young people may thus suggest a double jeopardy, invoking deep anxiety, whether among professionals, academics and researchers, or people in their everyday lives, as we consider the transitions and potential disruptions of young people who are experiencing the impact of bereavement.

This book focuses on two particular disparate sets of issues: those concerning the category and experiences of ‘young people’ on the one hand, and . . .

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The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature

Synopsis

The pantheon of renowned melancholics-from Shakespeare's Hamlet to Walter Benjamin-includes no women, an absence that in Juliana Schiesari's view points less to a dearth of unhappy women in patriarchal culture than to the lack of significance accorded to women's grief. Through penetrating readings of texts from Aristotle to Kristeva, she illuminates the complex history of the symbolics of loss in Renaissance literature.

Excerpt

This book is about the cultural status of an affect. The affect in question is variably called depression, melancholia, or even mourning. How such different namings come about is an issue of cultural politics, and the role of gender in these designations is not innocent. What I try to show, in the following pages, is the insistence of what could be called a politics of lack in a certain cultural representation of loss known as melancholia. By a politics of lack, I mean the attribution of value to some subjects who lack but not to others who appear equally "lacking." To anyone with a feminist perspective, it is no surprise that this politics of lack operates along gender lines: as I show in my readings of various texts, women's lack (ironically) never turns out to be quite lacking enough, while the sense of lack foregrounded in such great men as Petrarch, Ficino, and Tasso or the character of Hamlet paradoxically works to their credit as the sign of inspired genius. This gender dissymmetry is not simply an effect of my interpretation; it is the historical legacy of these canonical figures.

Unlike many contemporary feminist critics, I do not restrict myself to texts written by women; nor is my aim the deconstructive one of discovering the repressed femininity supposedly to be found in the most misogynist of male texts. Rather, I seek to situate the texts of male melancholia along with their received cultural values in relation to other texts, notably lesser-known ones by women, that question the ways lack . . .

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Loss: The Politics of Mourning

Synopsis

"If catastrophe is not representable according to the narrative explanations which would 'make sense' of history, then making sense of ourselves anda charting the future are not impossible. But we are, as it were, marked for life, and that mark is insuperable, irrecoverable. It becomes the condition by which life is risked, by which the question of whether one can move, and with whom, and in what way is framed and incited by the irreversibility of loss itself."--Judith Butler, from the "Afterword

""Loss is a wonderful volume: powerful and important, deeply moving and intellectually challenging at the same time, ethical and not moralistic. It is one of those rare collections that work as a multifaceted whole to map new areas for inquiry and pose new questions. I found myself educated and provoked by the experience of participating in an ongoing dialogue."--Amy Kaplan, author of "The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture

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