Food for thought [2]

In my post on Miami Vice and our shift in perceptions on human size the other day, annwfyn left a comment I thought interesting. It was this one: I think it's not that everyone has got fatter. I think it is that we have gone to extremes. I mean, look at the female Gladiators in the original series, for example. The women were all in awesome physical condition, but they had muscle, toning, and in general were amazonian rather than skeletal. When the show was rebooted a few years ago, I don't think a single female gladiator topped 9 stone.

I do agree that fat has gotten fatter, but I also think skinny has gotten skinnier.

An interesting point, and one which resonated with me as I was reading my sister's copy of Girl! magazine the other evening. I tend to read women's magazines in a know-your-enemy sort of way, but I often find the insight they give me to the workings of the feminine mind is confusing to say the least. If you read men's magazines, you can quickly build up an idea of what men are concerned with: pictures of girls without much on, and loud music, fast cars, and doing stuff which looks dangerous - in other words, activities which serve to draw attention to yourself in the hope of attracting said girls without much on.
Women's media, however, tends to focus on things like emotions and relationship and other bizarre, alien concepts and reading about them tends to leave me with that fuzzy patch in my vision which says a migraine is coming on.

Anyway, this particular issue of Girl! had an article about diets in it. That doesn't narrow it down much I know, as they all do, but this one was about extreme, beserk diets. It opened up by pointing out that extreme diets were something you should only do under the supervision of a doctor and under no circumstances should you try them at home, and then went on to explain in some detail about how you might try them at home should you feel so inclined. What's more it was illustrated with pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna, which just goes to show how beserk the diets on show really are.

Some were comparitively normal - the Dukan Diet, for example, which appears to be a rebranding of the Atkins and no more dangerous than that one. But others...my golly. There's the Tracey Anderson Method, which appears to involve a dramatic reduction in calorific intake and two hours of aerobics every day. Extreme but, yeah, I can see how that might work. And then there's the HCG diet.
The HCG diet has two steps. First is taking HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin), a hormone which allegedly appears in pregnant women to keep them all fit and healthy whilst they're up the spout. You should be aware that there's not a great deal of evidence this is so and HCG isn't licenced by any of the major food and drug authorities, but a man in a white coat once said so so it must be true. The second half of the HCG diet is that you're only allowed to eat 400 calories a day for weeks at a time.

400.

I swear, if I'd only eaten 400 calories this morning I'd've chewed off one of my fingers right now.

Fans of the HCG claim that it's the unlicenced, untested drug you take which drives the weight loss and not the eating a fifth as much food as you ought to bit, but then again fans of the HCG include - yes, you guessed it - Madonna and Gwyneth and when they talk all I can ever hear is this.

But, yes, as the original comment noted, extremes are becoming more common and normalised. So today's discussion is why that might be.

You go first.