bj, in my heart i know you’re right (we went for years without a tv and years thereafter with very restricted viewing) but i love my silly shows. (what am i saying, “slap”–”project runway”, “top chef” and “what not to wear” are not silly!) i feel very diminished having just typed that. oh well. at least the blog keeps me away from the tube.

And yeah, I know there are some tiny women out there who are that way naturally, and who are still very strong. My friend Lizzie (whom you all know from commenting here) is thin as a greyhound, but she and I learned martial arts together, and she’s a strong, tough one.

This rant is really about the kind of thing Deborah just saw with her 7-year-old. I hope the message we adults can give our kids is it’s better to be fit and strong and to feel healthy than to be as scary and skeletal as some of the young stars out there.

I think deisgners have to make size zero now because they’ve “upped” all the other sizes. When I was in highschool, I wore size eight. Now I wear size 4. I am NOT thinner now than I was at 17. I hold up size eight pants i had in college to my size four pants now, and they’re the same size.

So, the petite friends I have who used to be sized two or four now HAVE to wear size zero.

What I want to know is what one friend I had, who in highschool had to have her mom take in all the size twos and looked everywhere for size zeros so she didn’t have to wear little girl clothes — is doing now. Size negative three? This friend was by no means anorexic. She was an athlete, ate like a horse, was very strong and active and healthy and had a very curvy body — it was just TINY.

Lady T, what restraint you showed in not pinching that girl until she wailed for mercy. I’m glad her father was properly embarrassed. Sheesh.

Deborah,it is sad that even younger girls are getting this twisted “food is evil” message(second grade? Oh my,oh my!)and glad that you had a positive way of dealing with it. Reminds me of an interesting experience I had at my former bookstore job:

A very well dressed little girl came up to me in the store(she even had a hair ribbon,I think)and said to me”Excuse me.”

“Yes,can I help you?”

“My mom says that baby fat looks good on babies but not so much when you’re older.”

She said this in such a sweetly honest way that I wasn’t upset over it. Her dad,however,got major league embarrassed and made her apologize to me. Ten to one,there was quite a fight when they went home to talk to Mommy!

d. do you think the food/weight obsession is a just part of our national self-absorbtion? or a reflection of the incredible power of corporate america and its hand maiden, the us media, to get us to worry, worry, worry, eat, eat, eat, buy, buy, buy?

like patrick’s nephew i was a kid with quite the mouth on me (no, really). i was also x-ray thin before there were eating disorders (nothing like twenty years to “cure” that naturally thin condition) but pretty darn scrappy. when i would, and still do, enter the world of fantasy, it was, and is, jackie joyner who i want to be in my next life, not a vogue model. i am now in “training” for a kick-a** trip to crested butte, colo. so excited to try out the ski legs.

rb is right, there is nothing quite as satisfying, empowering, what have you, as physical wellness and well-being. whether protecting patrick from the evil forces of the whole damn universe (and god knows he needs the protectin’), digging a garden or just riding a bike to the park–it just feels so wonderful to be strong, on purpose.