Gaining excess weight, trying to lose weight, and the “fat = bad” stereotypes are primarily facilitated by our relationship with food. Everyone has their own and depends on family history and habits. However, the difficult history of our country in the twentieth century also had an impact on the eating disorders of our compatriots. The author of a new book on weight loss and dieting explains why you need to understand your personal and world history before you start losing weight.
Fat and thin in Europe and America
Until the end of the 19th century, roundness and fullness were considered signs of physical and mental health, while thinness, on the contrary, was associated with poor health, bad character, imbalance and susceptibility to various diseases.
Being overweight made women considered sexy and men considered wealthy simply because it was a sign that they could afford to eat well. Fat meant status. When the agro-economy gave way to an industrial economy, body image also changed - fatness abruptly went out of fashion.
Workers, who had hitherto teetered on the brink of exhaustion and death from starvation or infectious diseases, could now afford to buy enough food. In other words, once proletarians could afford to get fat, fat could no longer be a sign of high social status. In order for the aristocracy to differentiate itself from the working class, it became fashionable to be thin.
Having received political equality with men, a woman physically strives to resemble a man - thinness, short hair, a boyish figure - a typical portrait of a suffragette of the 20s. In 1926, Coco Chanel invents the “little black dress” - a straight, almost asexual silhouette that only a thin woman could afford.
Until the end of the 20s. America is experiencing a wave of economic prosperity - and the more luxuriant the economy blooms, the more relevant the thinness becomes. In 1929, the economic collapse began, the Great Depression began, and “fat” times gave way to “lean” ones. Thinness again becomes a sign of the lower class, and in the 30-50s, in particular in connection with the Second World War, when the threat of hunger became real, the image of full-blooded female beauty firmly occupied its former place.
Mechanisms of muscle growth
Muscle tissue loves intense physical activity combined with a large diet. That is, the energy received from food in full equivalent should not be wasted, you need to eat more than you spend, but here food plays the main role. It is important not to go too far and not accumulate fat as in the first option, but to eat the right foods - slow carbohydrates, proteins, maintain their proportions, and so on. This is also clear evidence that fat does not pass into muscles; it is impossible to turn the lateral layer into muscle tissue.
Which is better to be in Russia - fat or thin?
It is curious that the first wave of “fashionable thinness” affects Russia very little, and almost exclusively in large cities. Where prosperity is still symbolized by a table laden with food, the “thin” ideal simply will not survive. Russian peasant and merchant beauties after the First World War - let's remember the textbook Kustodiev - are still full-blooded and full-breasted. They find it funny and scary to see visiting St. Petersburg and Moscow “political” people who seem to them exhausted both physically and mentally.
And then the October Revolution happens. Ideological values are completely changing, and from the point of view of traditional values, being thin is still not good, it means sickness and no one will marry a girl, but being fat, that is, well-fed, becomes politically unreliable.
Remember, “jazz is music for fat people”?
"Mr. Twister, former minister"?
"Three fat men"?
“Who lives cheerfully, freely in Rus' - the fat-bellied Kupchina, said the Gubin brothers, Ivan and Mitrodor”?
The fat one is the one who stole the proletarian’s hard-earned food and eats it at home. I am deeply convinced that the traditional Russian attitude towards obesity, those unconscious ideas that govern this attitude, are much more complex and conflicting than in America and Europe.
But the “thin” ideal simply cannot take root and become as popular - in the twentieth century, Russia was struck by several waves of famine: after the Civil War in the 20s, then during collectivization in the 30s and, finally, after the Great Patriotic War in 1946 –1947
Who finds it easier to pump up: a skinny guy or a fat guy?
First, you need to understand the very mechanisms of the so-called “pumping” and understand what exactly is meant by this. Well, most likely for you it’s to get your shape in order, that is, for a fat person to lose all
, or better yet, fat and tighten muscles, tone, and for thin people, gain muscle mass, preferably, the better the quality, the better, without fat.
As a result, we have a pattern in our heads that in order to pump up a fat person
, he seems to need to lose weight, dry out, lose weight, and the skinny one needs to gain weight, mass, grow, and so on.
It’s like the goal is the same, but the paths are different. Accordingly, the degree of difficulty will differ. I’ll get ahead of myself and say that in terms of whether it’s easier for a fat person or a skinny person to lift
, there is no correct answer; or rather, the answer is very relative and the position can be interpreted from different angles. After all, it’s a little incomparable to lose weight, pump up and gain weight.
Many factors can influence the final goal, mainly genetic predisposition. But we will try to compare the incomparable and roughly estimate the chances of success of a fat guy and a thin one. First, let's look at the mechanisms that our wards will need to follow.
Why is it so difficult for Russian women to lose weight?
Why do we, residents of the 21st century with eating disorders, need to know all this?
It is important to be aware of the extent to which the information about the body and food that we receive in early childhood and from the unconscious, which influences us throughout our lives, is contradictory and conflicting. It is especially conflicting for us, who were born and raised on the territory of the Russian state. Being a thin child is bad; thinness is associated with disease and death from hunger, the specter of which never receded. Being a fat child is also bad - fat = bad, teased in kindergarten and school, teased by parents and siblings.
At the same time, it is necessary to eat a lot and greedily: in almost every family there is a female figure, a mother, grandmother or aunt, who, like that stove from the fairy tale “Geese and Swans,” keeps saying: “Eat my rye pie, I’ll tell you.” Rye pie is completely tasteless compared to white wheat pie, so this fairy tale is about humility and submission. If you want to survive and save your brother, eat like a darling. It’s only at your father’s that you’ll be treated to wheat pies and cream, but in the big world, girl, you’ll have to get used to simpler food.
It is interesting that in European folklore there is no similar fairy tale, in which a symbol of humility is the willingness to eat tasteless food - sour wild apples, rye pie and simple jelly. The European fairy-tale heroine, accepting obedience from authority figures, performs hard, boring and complex work - she sorts through grain, separating millet from wheat, like Cinderella, or fluffs the ice feather beds of Mother Snowstorm with her hands, but she does not have to eat anything tasteless, choking and swallowing. Despite the fact that the values seem to be the same - modesty and hard work, in our culture the actions that symbolize them for some reason always represent violence against the body. There's no point in showing off - you're not a lady.
As a result, we all carry with us an extremely contradictory inheritance, full of conflicting messages: “Food is a huge value, it should not be thrown away, food is a holiday, food is love, you need to eat a lot, but not get fat, you can’t be thin either... »
Imagine how painfully difficult it is for a child, for whom one of the most powerful desires is to be good, to please and please adults, to navigate this chaos. How did you feel about food in your family?
How fat accumulates
How much “bad mass”—fat—you have in your body depends on your diet, physical activity, and hereditary genes, which all add up to what you look like. If the caloric content of the diet dominates over the daily energy consumed, weight will be gained. Simply put, fat can also be called excess accumulated anergy that you needed to spend, but you didn’t.
More on the topic:
How to pump up a fat person?
Problems of thin people
- Thin people, studies show, have a harder time withstanding heat than fat people. At high air temperatures, fat stops transmitting excess heat and begins to protect the body. The thermal conductivity of adipose tissue is lower than that of other tissues in the body, so in extreme heat they begin to work like an “Uzbek robe.”
- It is much more difficult for skinny people to gain weight than for fat people to lose extra pounds.
- Thin people are less likely to survive difficult times. Remember the saying: “While the fat man dries, the thin man dies”? It’s the same with great cold weather: subcutaneous fat plays the role of insulation. Therefore, in the event of extreme cold, the fat ones will survive.
- Thin people have a more difficult time when visiting: everyone is always trying to feed them. This kind of increased attention will confuse anyone.
- It’s impossible to believe, but thin people often find it difficult to choose clothes for themselves. “In a cotton down jacket and skinnies, you look like a stork in a swamp,” they joke sadly.
- Thin people sometimes have problems moving in elevators. The device refuses to perceive their weight as an individual person. Therefore, if you enter the elevator and see two five-liter bottles of water, know: these are attempts by the bad to take advantage of the benefits of technology.
- Sometimes thinness is perceived as a disease. In this case, people may begin to avoid the person whom nature has deprived of weight, or prohibit him from approaching himself or the child.
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Beauty culture you can't please
Our culture is hypocritical. You can see thin and very thin models on the covers of magazines, but a couple of decades ago, in the 90s, other girls were not hired as models - and even those were forced to lose more and more weight. Any actress whose weight is within the upper limit of normal may be called “fat.” Society seems to demand that all women be thin.
But if you are really thin - if you have been underweight all your life, like me - society will not forgive you even this, because any deviation from the abstract, ever-changing norm of beauty is perceived by the people around you, if not as a crime, then as a mistake, in which the woman herself is to blame.
At the same time, beauty standards are changing. The standard of female beauty of the mid-20th century, Marilyn Monroe in the 90s would have already been considered fat, because then in popular culture and in the modeling business, tall, skinny women with very peculiar body proportions were considered the standard: with an elongated figure and long legs.
Nowadays, in the modeling and acting community, women with more typical proportions and an average normal body mass index are coming back into fashion.
As an example, compare the actresses who play the same characters in the original X-Men trilogy and in the series of new films: the thin and tall Rebecca Romijn, who played Mystique in the original trilogy in the 90s, and one of the modern standards beauty Jennifer Lawrence with more typical proportions and body mass index, who plays Mystique now.
The difference between the actress playing Jean Gray in the same films is approximately equally noticeable: Famke Janssen and Sophie Jonas (Turner) - the first is a classic model of the 90s, and the second is a girl with a more or less ordinary appearance.
Beauty norms, which influence who most people find attractive, change as easily and radically as clothing fashions, and just as much reflect the social and cultural changes taking place in society.
Are skinny people criticized too?
When I write about the problems of fat people, I often hear the following statements: “But thin people are also criticized and humiliated.”
And every time it causes me some internal resistance. On the one hand, I very much understand and sympathize: in a patriarchal society, there is something potentially wrong with any woman. Too fat - fat, pig, kill yourself against the wall. Too thin - two nipples, you probably have worms, kill yourself against the wall. Too normatively beautiful - probably stupid and limited, and also accessible and has “sucked up” all her achievements, kill yourself against the wall.
A woman, in principle, cannot satisfy social demands, no matter what she is, and no matter how diligently she jumps out of her skin. If only because these requirements are contradictory and mutually exclusive, and it is not at all beneficial for society that we comply with them. He benefits from our feelings of guilt.
Read also:
Motherhood: sacrifice or joy? Opinion of psychologist Elena Shpundra
On the other hand, I see some depreciation in this. I do not argue that thin women can also get three pounds of hardship, and in general it is stupid and unethical to compare the depth of suffering of different groups and pit them against each other. The problem is that the criticism that thin people are subjected to and the criticism that fat people are subjected to are completely different phenomena, lying on different levels. In my opinion, complaints against thin people often remain at the individual level (for example, an envious friend, mother-in-law or some “well-wisher” makes a poisonous comment), while the problems of people with “excess weight” are structural problems and real discrimination.
Freepik
Tatyana Navka and Eva Polna, 45 years old
Figure skater and star of ice musicals Tatyana Navka has not changed over the past five years. But “ex-guest from the future” Eva Polna lost weight over the same five years and became noticeably younger.
Eva assures that there are no “secret ingredients” in her elixir of youth - only proper nutrition and exercise. Tatyana also follows the principles of a healthy lifestyle, but not to lose weight, but to stay in shape.
A healthy diet and physical activity take seven years off the age of both celebrities, don’t you agree?
Maria Mironova and Natasha Koroleva, 46 years old
In the fall of 2022, actress Maria Mironova gave birth to her second child. Pregnancy had no effect on Mironova’s weight or youth - the actress is still slim and beautiful. Only a couple of wrinkles remind us that Maria is in her fifties.
And the singer Natasha Koroleva embodies the image of a Russian beauty - stocky and fine, “blood and milk” - epithets that most accurately describe this type.
Creative diversity helps the Queen maintain her “childish” youth and mischief. If she suddenly loses weight, her youthful appearance will go along with the kilos. Or do you think differently?
Fat is sometimes good for you
Many people mistakenly believe that excess fat that accumulates in the body is harmful and has no benefit. Weightlifters recognize this belief as erroneous. In these types of games, players eat as much as possible and work hard to become heavy and fat. This gives them more strength to lift heavy loads compared to thin people.
Fats that accumulate in different areas of the body have their own benefits and can be used in different ways. Weightlifters need abdominal fat to give them an advantage over their opponents. This makes their stomach stronger and helps them to easily bear any weight.
Some health experts claim that the human body has an intramuscular space that fills with fat when a person gains weight. The body's muscles end up attaching to the bones at different angles. This is much more beneficial than a different arrangement of the bone and muscle structure.
