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Chloe Marshall: Finished 2nd Place in Miss England
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But one thing is that average isn't necessarily good, and if I wanted to see an average American build, I'd go to a Walmart in Wisconsin or Texas.
Let's say her presence does teach thousands of little girls that being overweight is attractive. How is that any more destructive than teaching thousands of little girls that being underweight is attractive? It's the focus on body image that is the problem in the first place. Being focused on a body image has nothing to do with fitness. If you're obsessed with being thin, you'll do whatever you have to in order to get there - it's not about health, so why use healthy options? I mean, basically what you're saying if you think this girl negatively impacts impressionable minds is either a.) that seeing an overweight girl will suddenly encourage girls who didn't have eating disorders before to start stuffing their face or b.) that it will encourage girls to stop starving themselves. Is that really so negative? Or are we in a position where we think the best motivator to get people in shape is fear of being rejected?
What is the realistic worse case scenario here? Girls stop equating their size with their value? Oh no, heavens forbid!
And Mendrian, yes, the best motivator to get people to do just about anything is make them afraid of being rejected. I don't see why that is a question in your mind. EDIT: That doesn't mean it should be a bad thing. If attractiveness was pegged to physical health in our culture, then people would try to get healthy rather than skinny.
Hmm...I wonder what it would be like if all such indicators were obvious visually?
Are you saying it's a positive thing that the reason people get healthy is a paranoid fear of failure or not? I think that the desperate desire to be loved leads to obsession and eating disorders, but hell, what do I know? I think wanting to be healthy because it's, you know, healthy, is probably the best possible motivator. And if that were the case we wouldn't rate attractiveness with health. I've seen a lot of these BMI to Diabetes research things before, and while I concede there is certainly a correlation between weight and health, I don't think it's as strong as the media seems to purport.
"I need to be skinny or I'll never be pretty" is not a positive thing to build your image upon. "I like me enough that I want to feel good" is a much healthier motivator. So I ask again, are we afraid slightly overweight girls everywhere will stop hating themselves? Is that so unhealthy?
Even carrying extra pounds around the hips and thighs, you most likely look better than if you had the same size, but didn't exercise. In baggy clothes the figures look about the same, but in beachwear the difference is obvious. It's much like a well tailored dress or suit that hangs properly - even if you don't know what to look for, it looks much better. This is in addition to the skin tone, energy, and confidence.
Also, curves are sexy. Note that the women in beer commercials don't look like clothing models. Chloe Marshall, however, is fat. If she weighs 176 pounds, the only muscle tone in her body comes from moving a fork to her mouth. Toccara Jones on the other hand is curvy and sexy. Whoever said there were far more attractive plus sized models than CM is exactly right.
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This I agree with. While ostensibly pageants are about finding the most fuckable girl (as much of a travesty that is), in nearly every one I see what they define as fuckable is pretty bizarre, and the most unusual girls end up inexplicably winning.
This argument might hold some water if she had a BMI of 30 or more. Looking at her, I'm under no impression that she is at an unhealthy weight.
Maybe I'm not understanding what plus-sized is, but Toccara Jones isn't fat. Chloe Jones is, but still very attractive.
Possible yes, but it's neither a requirement for their entry into or a judging factor for the beauty pageant.
Which makes the whole 'promoting bad health' funny because beauty pageants have never promoted good health.
I said Toccara Jones is curvy and sexy. Chloe Marshall is fat though she does have a pretty face. Who's Chloe Jones?
Plus sized models range from "well, fat for a model, I guess" to "please leave your clothes on". Wiki tells me size 8+, so both TJ and CM fit into that category as do a whole lot of women with far more attractive figures than Chloe Marshall.
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I'm arguing from Utilitarianism, not Platonism. "Because it's healthy" is the "best" motivator in the sense that it is probably going to make the person feel the best about themselves, and they are doing it with true knowledge of why it is good, but "because I'll be lonely if I don't" is the "best" motivator in the sense that it is most likely to effect consistent results. (this assumes that the person is equating health with not being lonely rather than just being skinny)
The point I was making is that regardless of what the image of attractiveness is in our society, a person's fear of being rejected is going to be about the best motivator to get them to do anything. People have abused people, bullied, killed to keep from being rejected. It shouldn't be surprising that they are willing to go to great lengths to look good.
A little bit of this fear is entirely normal, and if it results in getting a bit of exercise and eating better, in trying to be a nicer person, or in improving oneself in some other way, than it can't be a bad thing. A lot of this fear becomes a compulsive psychological disorder, and that's bad no matter what direction it is translated into. However, I don't really think that beauty pageants push people towards compulsive behavior so much as they give them an idea of what to compulse over. (It's a word now. Deal with it) A person's personal life and their peers probably have a much higher impact on whether they develop a compulsion than the Miss Britain contest.
Of course, it doesn't really work for me because I find most of them so awful and unattractive. I must have trace amounts of tinfoil in my scalp or something.
Whoops, Chloe Marshall.
I would never have called Toccara Jones plus-sized(or compared her to Chloe's body at all), but I guess I'm not aware of how it's classified in terms of models, when the norm is like 7% body fat.
I think you're establishing a false dichotomy here between physical vs. mind. There are plenty of academicians who are brilliant and fit-and-active. Lifting weights for half an hour everyday doesn't take away from anyone's "life of the mind." On the contrary, research is showing again and again that regular physical activity improves one's mental functions by not only allowing them to perform better intellectually in short-term, but also by preventing brain decay in the long term.
First of all let me say that I find tanning stupid, and I think the fact that we attach an attractiveness value to it is horrifying.
Extreme sports however I'm fine with to a large extent (though not fully, and not with every one). Because when you compare eating like shit to extreme sports, you'll find that eating like shit does not have any benefits for the body. It's just outright bad for you, period. Whereas extreme sports are, well, sports, and while dangerous, they do have real benefits. Besides, there are certain things you can do to minimize the risk: wearing protective gear, checking your harness, doing it with other people, etc. When a person eats like shit though they're pretty much saying "I want to die early, and I want the journey to be as full of complications as possible."
I agree, but what about the people it truly motivates to lose their excess weight and become healthier? You're only focusing on the negative here and are not being honest to both sides of the debate.
According to this chart, that puts her . . . well, off the scale.
BMI is a poor tool as it is, doubly so when dealing with someone of her height.
That said, she might be a little on the heavy side but nothing shockingly so. And I say this as someone who is quite disturbed by the fattening of western society - and the pressure by some to embrace or accept it. People like her are hardly examples of the problem.
It's strange how body types work though. My girlfriend is a couple of inches shorter and only about 10 pounds lighter, maybe 15, but looks quite different - albeit she's very active and works out a lot so much of the mass is likely muscle. No one would descrive her as fat or overweight (and no, she doesn't read my posts, to the best of my knowledge :P )
I thought the only significant problematic factor was muscle mass. Do taller people have a disproportionate amount of muscle?
Does Yao Ming count as plus sized?
I would, just because I love schadenfreude.
Oh, I guess I assumed that 5'10'' wasn't so rare as to create a significant difference in body proportions...like Yao Ming would.
BMI is totally unreliable; for example, as a tall, lanky guy I was on the 'anorexic' side of the scale according to a brochure in Health class.
I weigh 135 lbs at 6'1"ish, so I find the notion that I'm anorexic ridiculous.
Well, you do seem like you'd be really skinny.
But then, I think there's been a shift away from underweight classifications. I think it used to be common to have a person classified as underweight, even if they had healthy eating habits, but that was before the statistics were fully taking the effects of smoking into account.
Chloe is very pretty. She is also overweight enough to qualify as "fat". She's not of average weight, and if she is, that's fucking depressing. I don't like the implications by some that we should embrace people of Chloe's girth as the new average. She's unhealthily overweight, and someone who is that large in the middle of her teens will, unless she changes her habits, likely be huge by the time she hits her mid-to-late twenties. It's not exactly a lifestyle we should be endorsing. I think the proper message is, "You're a nice girl and very pretty, but seriously, fix your diet and exercise regimen."
Just barely. She's a BMI 26.
The first picture does look to me like an unhealthy weight as opposed to a little chubby or a little fat.
This.
Hell, I have moobs.
Her weight becoming the norm would be somewhat disgusting, I agree.
I have no goddamn clue-it's like the sole area where my body fat stocks up.
Or, it could be part of the wackiness of puberty
Right. For now. You omitted the part where I mentioned that in ten years, barring lifestyle changes, she'll probably be Orca-fat. Metabolisms slow down with age.
I'm 165 at 5'10" and reasonably well-muscled. I'm pretty toned in the arms and legs, but I have a bit of a tummy. I'd say 155 would be an ideal weight for me right now.
That all seemed somehow relevant when I started typing.
What do you know about her lifestyle Jeffe?
I mean apart from the multitude of things you can apparently infer about it from simply looking at a picture of her on the internet.
I don't think it's a particularly good sign that she has that much fat at age 17. It takes a while to build up, and she's not even at college yet where you don't have parents feeding you at home. I think there's a better chance of her not improving her diet, or worsening it during college.
I'm admittedly making assumptions regarding her being a somewhat typical teenager. It's possible that she has a very atypical metabolism, or that her metabolism won't undergo the expected slowing as she ages, or that she's actually an alien from the planet Blimpo where our normal Earth-nutrition doesn't apply. But if she's an average person of that weight, and if she maintains whatever she's doing, she will be much larger down the road.
Which part of this do you disagree with?
There is a link between childhood obesity and adult obesity, yes. This does not necessarily mean that Chloe Marshall is destined to become an "orca" by a long shot.
EDIT: The assuming things part and the calling her a whale part, mostly :P
She claims to do "a lot of exercise." But she is still fat.
This means that there are some serious problems with her diet.
If she doesn't change this, like Jeffe says, in ten years she'll be in a much worse condition.
Other way around actually. Tall people tend to be built much thinner then a shorter person. BMI breaks for them down because it merely scales up shorter people.
In order to even hold a conversation on the subject, we have to make some assumptions. Mine are hardly unreasonable.
The last time I was overweight, cocaine and heroin were highly effective.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck