Anyajuliet's Blog

In closing, I hope everyone enjoyed my blog. I filled it with plenty of things to consider about weight, the media spotlight and its scrutiny, body issues, and a celebrity obsessed culture. This blog has matured over the last few months as not just a rant and rave about our culture but a place where we can come and explore more about the ins and outs of the media world. The following is a link to the Media Awareness Network.

http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/women_and_girls/women_girls.cfm

It is incredibly interesting and covers a vast array of items that I have also covered in this blog. It is filled with great content, research, games and much more. As we continue down the journey of life I will leave you with a few of my most favorite quotes from amazing woman that have endured and inspired many of us.
The practice of putting women on pedestals began to die out when it was discovered that they could give orders better from there..Betty Grable.

I am a woman in process. I’m just trying like everybody else. I try to take every conflict, every experience, and learn from it. Life is never dull. Oprah Winfrey

Find out who you are and do it on purpose.
– Dolly Parton
I am not afraid…I was born to do this.
– Joan of Arc
I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.
– Eleanor Roosevelt

Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only what you are expecting to give — which is everything. What you will receive in return varies. But it really has no connection with what you give. You give because you love and cannot help giving.
– Katharine Hepburn

Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.
– Ingrid Bergman
The greater your capacity to love, the greater your capacity to feel the pain.
– Jennifer Aniston
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
– Eleanor Roosevelt

Why do women put such pressure on themselves to lose weight on January 1st? I mean you have 364 other perfectly good and calendar worthy days to choose from, like July 19th, March 6th, maybe October 11th for example. Trust me the list goes on, there are others.
So what’s the big obsession about this specific day? If you didn’t hear this resolution talk year in and year out through every single media that exists, would you even think about it? Or would life just go on as usual.
Recently I started watching The Biggest Loser. I watched the struggles of some of the men and woman losing weight and realized it’s much about portion and permanent solutions then quick fixes. The show tries to redirect people away from the bad triggers of thinking about food and toward good things that can lead to successful journeys. I think this kind of redirection is what we need when we see all this New Year’s Resolution stuff and think about weight. Now I’m not saying …. Resolutions are a bad thing, I’m just saying that setting a goal of when to start a diet along with 10 million other people probably won’t produce any real results.
The following article by WebMD offers some great resolutions for woman in the persuit of achieving real weight loss goals throughout the year.

http://women.webmd.com/features/health-resolutions-for-women

1. Eat, but don’t pig out.
2. Jump outside the box.
3. Guard against the bone thief.
4. Take health exams.
5. Move Center Stage.

Is there a trend in bad Disney stars? Or is it just a trend among young female performers? Or perhaps they are just much more interesting and more publicized and that’s why the spotlight is so bright. What happens when the spotlight gets to hot? Do these stars burnout or meltdown?
Recently Miley Cyrus was photographed smoking out of a bong with what was said to be Saliva. This substance is still legal in some states and known to cause hallucinations and recreations of euphoria in some cases delusional episodes.
What all three girls do have in common is divorce among parents. If that’s not bad enough… everyone is looking in, scrutinizing and having their say of things. I wish there was some button in cyberspace that just let them zap themselves “unavailable” like on instant messenger or Facebook chat. There has to be a better way to protect these young women in one of the most brutal and celebrity obsessed cultures in the entire world. Haven’t we learned anything watching Britney melt before our very eyes , shave hear head and lose control. Was Lindsey’s consecutive DWI’s, drug possessions and knockout cold photos not enough? Why can’t we protect our young woman and let them just be. It’s obvious to me that we enjoy people’s scandal and suffering. I wish the expression “All news is good news”, never existed.

In grand Oprah fashion she did what she does best. Put on a huge and elaborate show with guests like the Irwin family, Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Bon Jovi. That’s not all though…she did it all with 300 American viewers in above all places, AUSTRALIA! Yup the Queen of Talk took her audience members piloted by none other than John Travolta down under. The studio (or lack there of) audience enjoyed sightseeing, hobnobbing with celebs, and a trip of a lifetime!
Her announcement came with just another show.

As she adressed the audience at her Chicago studios she said:
“This is really my last chance to do something really big.
“And if you want to do something big, you would want to take along your ultimate viewers.”
“I started to think about where would I most want to go.
“Maybe I should take all of you with me to the other side of the world…We’re going to Australia! We are going to Australia! You and you and you and you, are going to Australia!”
Winfrey announced to the shrieking crowd in the beginning of her season. She marks the ending of her transformational show and the last 25 years of her career. In 2011 she will be starting her own network.
If anyone is an amazing influence on young girls and woman through her ever savy media powers, it is Ms. Oprah Winfrey. Remarkable, intense, knowledgeable, candid, eye-popping, jaw-dropping and hardly stopping. This woman seems to be able to do it all. I personally can’t wait to see how she shapes her network and what it eventually evolves into for women of all walks of life!

She is a television and movie actress, a model-spokeswoman, a champion for many causes, a beautiful face and of course a tabloid fixture. She can’t seem to shake the paparazzo’s gleaming eye, the scrutiny about her love life and the ever lingering single (and broken) “Girl Next Door” title.
Jen Aniston has been a staple in Hollywood as long as I can remember. Everything has to do with her huge “Friends” casting and of course… should I dare say it? Brad Pitt.

We saw the fairy tale romance and courtship, the engagement, the beautiful wedding and then the car wreck that in sued… Brangelina? But are we ever going to get over Brad and let Jen just live her own life? Can we stop dissecting her love life and just wish her the best? Well if you ask any of the recent tabloids that would be a big NO! According to Star magazine, “Nearly six years after their split, the 41-year-old is having a hard time replicating the intense feelings she felt for Brad — and has animosity toward Angelina Jolie because she feels everything Brad and Angelina have should have been hers.” And everywhere else we see pictures of John Mayer and now even dinner with a prince (he’s married folks).

So why such curiosity with all things Jen? Well I have a theory. Recently named (by me) the “Girl Next Door” happiness clause. It states that we as a culture want the “Girl Next Door” to be happy. It’s as simple as that!
From Judy Garland to Jennifer Love Hewitt (and now Ms Jen Aniston) they seem to have captured our hearts and our minds. We see them on magazines, newspapers, television and even Twitter!! They are everywhere.

According to Uncyclopedia.com, “The Girl Next Door is widely regarded as the ideal partner to any red-blooded man. She is frequently mentioned in the media, usually as a feminine archetype against which celebrities and fictional characters alike are judged. Famous women who are lucky enough to meet her standards are then forever thought of as ‘typical girl-next-door types”.
So will this media obsession with Jen ever stop, I wonder? Well don’t hold your breath till this “Girl Next Door” fad (that’s lasted at least a decade and a half) is over. Jen doesn’t seem to be going anywhere … and girl are we glad!

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/jennifer-aniston-the-actress-next-door-408858.html

She may not have thought of herself as a controversial model but Ann Ward, America’s Next Top Model Winner, sure is. If anyone remembers Ann standing in her tiny jeans and tee shirt at the beginning of the show, she was categorized as one of the tallest and thinnest of all the models in the show’s history. There was even a comment by Tyra Banks, the show’s host and creator, about how tiny her waist was. At first glance many people were up and arms about such a minuscule girl even being on the show, never mind winning. How could they let her on? How will this look for women struggling with anorexia and bulimia? What about what we are trying to teach our young women?

Well before we throw in the towel or in this case perhaps a designer bathing suit, let’s just think for one minute about what we are saying and who this girl really is.

Ann told USMagazine.com the following, “It was really emotional for me because I’ve been through a lot. I wasn’t expecting to win. It totally caught me off guard”. According to many viewers (myself included) this girl was seen eating fried foods, junk food as well as plenty of healthy foods. The key word here being, you guessed it, food.

If anything we should feel the oddity that may have made a girl like this feel self-conscious her whole life. Imagine being taller than your very own elementary school teachers? So what does it say about us as Americans? Are we too quick to judge? Have we gotten behind Tyra’s table and started our own critics? The last time I checked, I wasn’t Twiggy nor Jay Manuel. Have we gotten so health conscious and disorder crazed that we can’t see the bigger picture or in this case the smaller one?

This girl is naturally thin and as much as I rant and rave about beautiful curvy women in today’s main stream media I and the rest of America have to accept the fact that there are truly tiny and thin beautiful woman out there, that aren’t fake nor have disorders. This is a great example of a woman with genes that are just made up of a smaller hereditary fabric. No pun intended.

http://tv.yahoo.com/blog/controversial-teen-with-tiny-waist-wins-americas-next-top-model–1875

The first time I attended college it was 2000. I was young, I was rather impressionable and yes, I was part of a sorority. I won’t mention which one, but I have included a few well known sororities in this piece. All we need to know is that this particular sorority was rather popular and one of the best on my first college campus. Being part of it was like being part of a family. Just like any family it had the good, the bad and the ugly. Although none of the sisters would ever fess up to how ugly it was at times. What did you see when you looked at us? A fun loving sisterhood of cool party girls that did well at school and had what seemed like…everything. What didn’t you see when you looked at us? A bunch of ruthless girls that got very competitive with everything! The movie Mean Girls was years away from production but the topics it hit on were exact! Boys, clothes, cars, school and even how skinny we were.


Some girls would go through anything to look beautiful from crazy diets like in Mean Girls to extreme workouts to full blown disorders. If I was to guess how many of my perfect sisters had some sort of constant issues with body image I would say at least 90 percent! 90! And I’m willing to bet on that, although I never did an official survey. What I can tell you was that many of these young girls were constantly watching shows and looking at images in magazines as inspiration. We looked at how Britney and Christina wore their clothes, how thin Ally McBeal and starlet’s like Portia DeRossi were and how our rival sororities show off. Everything was about being thin.

I look back at it 9 years later and can’t believe how much I’ve grown and changed but why do I still see that these images are still everywhere. All of this reminds me of one of my sisters who had such a terrible eating disorder because of how far she took her competitiveness she had to eventually drop out of school and had to get help because of it. Why is this still a large problem on college campuses? Why are girls still up to this? According to Los Angles times, “An eating disorder is not about the food. It is about anxiety, says Elaine Petrosky, a treatment manager who works with Holmes at the institute. “It’s about how to manage stress, low self-esteem, depression.”
According to the article, “At college, the student is away from her comfort zone, experiencing new levels of stress and without family support right there. In addition, there is peer pressure to meet the ideal thin body image. There are the comparisons, the competitiveness.”
Competition! Exactly that’s what we were good at as sorority girls. Movies like Mean Girls portrayed rivalries of young high school girls but shows like “The Girls Next Door” made being girls who lived in a house together even more popular. In recent years, girls that I have known that have gone to school even say they compare themselves to these perfect sorority type of images. They want to be perfect. Once one sister loses weight she passes the torch in a way for the next girl to do the same.

According to a recent blog/article by Peggy Rowland, “Northwestern University student Ashley Marie Rolnik chose the topic for her senior honors thesis. She believes that female undergraduates who join sororities are more likely to use self-objectification: judge their own bodies with an outsider’s perspective.” She went on to say “Rolnik argues that over time, the women who join sororities display higher levels of body shame.” I just wish that these girls would really concentrate on the real reasons they are there, for support and love of each other. The worst part of this whole issue? One of our national philanthropies that we raised and donated money was actually for Anorexia Nervosa. I wish at the time I was there for the right reasons, and I feel terrible we never made a bigger deal of helping our sister so she could have stayed in school….instead of pretending to be perfect!

http://www.latimes.com/health/hc-eating-disorders-on-campus-20101125,0,3942560.story

http://blisstree.com/feel/sororities-and-eating-disorders/

When we think about Portia De Rossi, you may think Alee Mc Beal, Better off Ted, Arrested Development or even Ellen DeGeneres. There is, however, another unfortunate aspect that you may come to find. Anorexia. Which she admits last month, about a previous time in her life, almost killed her.
Last month Portia, wife of Ellen DeGeneres, came on Ellen’s show and Oprah’s, to talk about her new book “Unbearable Lightness”. In her book Portia admits that she was nearly 82lbs at one time and that it almost killed her. At one point Portia talks about eating chewing gum. She said that she had been so starved that she had started to lose such control when putting one piece of gum into her mouth. After she realized she had consumed 60 calories worth of gum, she got out of her car frantic. She started to sprint back and forth from one side of the parking lot to the other at the Beverly Center in LA. At this time she was also on Allie Mc Beal, the thought of her running like a crazy woman didn’t even affect her and she was in heels at the time.

De Rossi goes on to say that “After the diet, I’d do the job, I’d binge, and then I’d have a few days to get the weight off before I did the next job,” says Portia. “But as the jobs got booked back-to-back, I had to get the weight off faster, so I used laxatives, I used diuretics, and then when that didn’t work, I was forced to purge…to throw up.” This is according to the Oprah Show.
Portia has since said that Ellen and her brother helped save her. She has gone on to say that Ellen has taught her that it shouldn’t matter what other people think about her weight. It’s about her. I praise Portia for opening up, writing such a sad yet inspiring novel about her perseverance.

http://blogs.abc.net.au/thebuzz/2010/11/love-saved-portia.html

http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2010/11/07/portia_de_rossi_how_ellen_degeneres_lo

Look at the following picture of these two women. What do you see?

Two blonds? Two beautiful blonds? One girl is in a pink dress, another in a black one. One has shorter hair and the other a bit longer and wavier. Both appear about the same height and look fantastic. What’s the difference you ask? The one on the right is actually considered a “plus size model”. These two women were the contestants and the last finalists of America’s Next Top Model 10. If you have been living under a rock or just not a fan of the show, you may now notice the small differences between the women. Anya, the girl in the black dress, has thinner arms and a smaller waste. Whitney, in the pink, is a little bit bigger, arms a little thicker and waste not as tiny as Anya’s. After 10 cycles (seasons) of America’s Next Top Model, Whitney is the first plus size model to win the title.

She received an Elite modeling contract and deal with Cover girl. Yup, the first one out of 10 long seasons!

Although this is a great accomplishment and boundary pusher for the show and for all women, (whatever the size) she really wasn’t all that large. Whitney is 5’10, and a size 10. According to full and Fabulous.com the average woman is 5’4, weighs 140 lbs and is size 14. Still not the average woman, Whitney sure has started to break some pretty important and must we say, tough boundaries in the fashion world. One small step for womankind …for now.

http://www.fullandfabulous.org/articles_view.asp?articleid=17064

If anyone should be eating more these days it should be Marie Claire’s blogger Maura Kelly. I say this for two reasons; this would keep her mouth busy and this would keep her hands busy. In recent days after a new show called Mike and Molly premiered, Maura decided to make her opinions known.
She said: “I think I’d be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other … because I’d be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything. To be brutally honest, even in real life, I find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room — just like I’d find it distressing if I saw a very drunk person stumbling across a bar or a heroine addict slumping in a chair.”

http://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/dating-blog/overweight-couples-on-television

What was she thinking? Not only is this presumably an educated writer who has a job as a blogger for a MAJOR magazine, but she obviously lost her mind for a moment comparing obese people to heroin addicts! In my opinion, this is outrageous and outlandish! Now in the following days this news spread like wild fire! As you may be aware there was a huge and overgrown backlash of sympathy for these characters as well as an outcry of finger pointing and name calling at Marie’s Moron, oops I mean Marie’s Maura. Then there was an explanation.

Maura said the following update on her blog. “To that point (and on a more personal level), a few commenters and one of my friends mentioned that my extreme reaction might have grown out of my own body issues, my history as an anorexic, and my life-long obsession with being thin.”
I personally would like to believe this, although it comes a little too late. However, if this is true it is understandable. I don’t know if this was just a horrible and terrible display of Potty Mouth disease or if it was the only way Marie Claire and Maura could stand looking at themselves in the mirror. Didn’t Marie’s editor mentioned in that blog, have anything to say after reading it? Isn’t an editors job…well to EDIT? I know Maura has an editor because here is what she first said,”The other day, my editor asked me, “Do you really think people feel uncomfortable when they see overweight people making out on television?” That’s where she came up with the idea. So I tend to wonder still…and I hate to do this but was the explanation just a bad and sad excuse? I hope NOT!