I hate the media's and the medical community's mixed message on weight. First, the medical community's weight standards, which they refuse to revise anyway except downward, suggest a weight that is unattainable by many people and studies are showing isn't actually healthy. A bmi of less than 25 actually puts you at greater health risk. Some padding is actually a good thing. If it weren't people wouldn't have evolved the ability to make padding. If would be much easier for the body to just expel the excess calories, so there must be an evolutionary reason for keeping them.

The news media repeats the medical communities dire predictions about the "obesity epidemic". Warning people that if they don't achieve the unhealthy and often unachievable goals that not only will they die an early death, but it will be their fault. They will cause their own demise, cause the suffering of loved ones, and be a general burden on society as a whole. What a cheerful message to tell people, considering that the United States Health Department's demented guidelines list two-thirds of Americans overweight. This message refuses to be swayed by evidence, as the thin obsessed elite press to make sure everyone fits into their model of "attractive". The goal is a perfect world with perfect conformity.

While the emaciation-obsession of the entertainment industry is more well known, it is growing in its destructiveness. Every year, the parade of starvation in the entertainment media increases in severity and prominence. Women in entertainment are regularly below even the government's unrealistic guidelines for a healthy weight. American Idol judges tell woman the government would consider of normal weight that they are too fat to compete. With the backing of the medical community and the news media, the entertainment industry has become emboldened and belligerent in it's attitude to the slightest drop of fat.

And then these same assholes sit and scratch their heads at the alarming rate of eating disorders. ED suffers must be mentally ill or narcissistic they reason. It can't be the simple fact that when people can't realistically achieve the weight desired by the media and the medical community, they turn to less healthy methods, because for many they are the only way to achieve the only acceptable physique. The pro-ed sites have to look no further for the "thinspiration" images they display on their webspaces than the entertainment industry. The problem couldn't be the images of severely underweight stars labeled by the mainstream as "sexy" and "ideal", it must be the anorexics and bulimics fault for looking at them as "sexy" and "ideal". It can't be that until the eating disorder becomes critical they receive endless complements and encouragement for their weight loss from friends, loved ones, and even their doctors. It can't be that they are actually listening to the media and the medical community. Instead they are treated as evil, selfish, and mentally ill. The pro-ana communities are seen as cause not symptom. When the eating disorder is revealed, the vulnerable are treated with contempt and ridiculed by the very people who had been complementing and encouraging their unnatural weight loss.