MY FUCKING GREAT GRANDFATHER LITERALLY FLED LEBANON DUE TO A FUCKING FAMINE AND MY GRANDMOTHER AND DAD AND I ARE ALL FAT AS FUCKING HELL.

combine that with the fact that gen x was the last generation allowed to play outside, pretty much, and the fact that everybody nowdays is working service jobs that exhaust them without working their muscles, and there is basically no way on earth you’re going to get a fit and healthy population without changing the basic structure of our society.

don’t fall for the hype. don’t focus on weight. it’s actually far more dangerous to be underweight than overweight. even with what is clinically defined as ‘morbid obesity’ it’s possible to be healthy as a horse, if your bone structure and metabolism are set up for it and you’ve got lots of muscle to support it.

on top of that, the charts for ideal weight are at least a generation out of date. they were compiled based on a population that didn’t regularly get enough dairy and fresh produce, at a time when girls didn’t do athletics in school. young women in the 1960′s were measurably smaller than young women today. their bones were thinner, they had less muscle mass, their shoulders were more sloped, they had a smaller lung capacity – society discouraged them from being physically active past the age of ten or twelve, and they finished their physical development in a sedentary setting.

boys were plenty active, but just like the girls, they were eating just about nothing but red meat and starch and some mushy greens with the vitamins boiled out. the thing where the poor get fat because sugar and fat are cheap wasn’t really happening yet, especially in rural areas; a farm kid’s diet was beef and wheat in the north, pork and corn in the south. “eat your vegetables” was such a hard sell because everything else was expensive and bland and overcooked. you’ve seen the godawful cookbook excerpts from that time. mushy green beans and fried spam on a bed of mashed potatoes, seasoned with nothing but a pinch of white pepper.

sorry, that was kind of a tangent. i guess my point is, even the people who ate well by the standards of the time were malnourished compared to the standard of today. your lunch of a matcha cucumber smoothie and a cobb salad with one ounce of ham, one ounce of turkey, and 15 kinds of fresh vegetable, would give them the explosive shits because they’ve never had that much fiber in one place before. there’s more vitamins and antioxidants in your black bean fajita dinner than they saw in a week.

so first of all, the idea of trying to be the same size and shape they were is absurd.

and second, if malnourishment in one generation primes the next two for protective fat retention, the combination of that and the incredible wealth of nutrition we have available to us today is obviously going to make us HYUGE.

When I was 125, not a single doctor was ever worried. I was constantly cold, stressed, and exhausted. I was literally always eating, and still could not gain anything. I was hungry all the time, but at the same time I would have given anything to just go to bed and sleep for days, because being chronically underweight does screwy things to your entire system

Now, a couple years into being an actual reasonable weight for my height, I’ve had a doctor, on our first visit, include ‘healthy eating and weight loss’ tips in my visit notes without even asking if I was happy at my weight. I am still mad about this. But also, I have so much more energy, I sleep better, I can actually regulate my own damn temperature, and I just over-all feel better

Venus meets the pleiades

While the past month has shown us the myriad ways in which Donald Trump is racist, let’s not forget that our contemptible president is also a raving misogynist. This is not news: we’ve known about Trump’s rampant hate of women from his days bullying Rosie O’Donnell, to his harassment of the women in his beauty pageants, to his sexist and gross campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016. And let’s not forget the double-digit accusations of sexual misconduct, rape, and sexual assault.

So it’s no surprise that Trump’s malignant misogyny extends to his treatment of women leaders. A new report by reporter Carl Bernstein details hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign leaders which Trump was woefully unprepared for. And following Trump’s well-known pattern, he oscillated between praising and sucking up to dictators like Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, while hurling verbal abuse at America’s allies.

Trump saved his bullying and vitriol for female world leaders, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former UK Prime Minister Theresa May. Bernstein wrote:

“But his most vicious attacks, said the sources, were aimed at women heads of state. In conversations with both May and Merkel, the President demeaned and denigrated them in diatribes described as “near-sadistic” by one of the sources and confirmed by others. “Some of the things he said to Angela Merkel are just unbelievable: he called her ‘stupid,’ and accused her of being in the pocket of the Russians … He’s toughest [in the phone calls] with those he looks at as weaklings and weakest with the ones he ought to be tough with.”

German officials described Trump’s calls with Merkel as “very aggressive”, so much so that they were kept quiet by Merkel’s staff. Trump’s words were so abusive that his phone calls were only heard by a limited group: “It’s just a small circle of people who are involved and the reason, the main reason, is that they are indeed problematic.”

That Trump would call Angela Merkel, who is the de facto leader of the free world and holds a doctorate in quantum chemistry “stupid,” would be laughable if it weren’t so depressing. But it is textbook Trump to accuse his enemies of the exact behavior he himself is engaged in. Sources say that Merkel remained cool under pressure, and that “the Chancellor indeed stayed calm, and that’s what she does on the phone.”

But Merkel wasn’t the only recipient of Trump’s vitriol. Former UK Prime Minister Theresa May was subject to “humiliating and bullying” words from Trump, who called her “a fool” and “spineless” regarding issues such as Brexit and NATO. According to an unnamed source, “He’d get agitated about something with Theresa May, then he’d get nasty with her on the phone call … It’s the same interaction in every setting — coronavirus or Brexit — with just no filter applied.”

Unlike Merkel, May was said to be “flustered and nervous” in her conversations with Trump, as a source added, “He clearly intimidated her and meant to.”

Baby sea pupper tries to roll over, says a thing