The 3-Season Diet by John Douillard

Author:John Douillard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307421784
Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Understanding body types can also help take some cultural pressure off those people who happen to have a constitution that is naturally somewhat bigger and heavier than others. Looking at fashion magazines we could argue that in the United States, for instance, the most desirable body types for men and women these days are the waiflike winter types and athletic summer types, to the exclusion of bigger, heavier spring types. That’s quite an irony since, especially among women, the most widely admired and desirable body type throughout the ages has been the spring type: big boned and voluptuous, with large breasts and hips, a wide face, thick hair, and big, wide-set eyes. These women radiate a maternal warmth and a calm, sweet demeanor that most people find irresistibly appealing. We see them in the paintings of Renaissance artists such as Titian and Rubens, whose women often seem gargantuan by modern standards, and more recently in the late paintings of Renoir and the sculptures of Gaston Lachaise, but the images themselves reach back to the goddess figurines that proliferated in Old Europe and the Middle East as much as 10,000 years ago. The women of the Renaissance may seem overly heavy to us, but excess body fat at a time when food shortages were commonplace might have been be considered something of an insurance policy, not to mention a sign of wealth. And in India, where the seasonal system of body types was first codified, the big, voluptuous spring type was the undisputed preference conveyed in all the ancient texts.

When William Sheldon expanded his research into somatotypes in the 1950s to include women, he determined that women “are so much more endomorphic [springlike] than men that at all ages they are heavier in proportion to stature.” The acceptable weight for most women in the 1940s and ’50s was still somewhat higher than it is today. The average Miss America weighed close to 140 pounds; voluptuous was in, and paragons of sexiness included the likes of Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren, and Marilyn Monroe. But in postwar America, a different trend began to take hold. The growing fashion industry, with the help of Madison Avenue’s admen, was conspiring to convince women—and men—that women ought to aspire to the unrealistically slim and boyish figure of a fashion model, regardless of the fact that they are constitutionally heavier than men. Under normal circumstances, women have 22 percent body fat, compared to 14 percent for men, but now they were suddenly expected to have a body fat level closer to the male ideal— about 15 to 17 percent.

The burgeoning media in general, and television in particular, helped to universalize this unrealistic image of women based on fashion designers’ idea of the perfect figure (or perhaps the figure that made their clothes look perfect). As a nation, it seems, we stopped listening to our own inner sense of what our bodies should be and heeded instead a body image imposed on us by fashion, the media,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.