Jane Fonda Fabulous at 73 but opens up about her struggle with body image
The Problem is not in you Body but in Your Head *dancers tip
“Sexy” 10 year old model raises eyebrows and concerns
Myths behind Water
Kelly Osborne/Christina Aguilera Weight War of Words
Thandie Newton’s inspirational Speech on Otherness and The Self A Must See Video!!!
Otherness
Unbroken
Monthly Archives: August 2011
Jessica Alba is Worried about Losing Baby Weight
Mommyrexia, the idea of staying thin while carrying your baby is now all the rage, well not only are women (especially women in the public eye) worried about being thin while pregnant, there is such pressure to “bounce back” after giving birth it that some women will go to extremes to be restored. While carrying her first child actress Jessica Alba raised eyebrows when she expressed her concern about losing her money making, sex symbol figure. Now carrying her second child she has once again expressed concerns about losing the post baby weightand is once again drawing heat for it. Where it sounds a bit shallow (given that you are carrying life which should be the most important thing) Her words are very extreme, but she has already admitted to having body issues, and struggling with eating disorders, and she makes her living with her figure-in Hollywood.
I think that Alba is very brave to publicly express the sentiments of many expectant mothers. They may not say it for fear of being judged as shallow and selfish, they have these feelings and harbor guilt for them when it’s probably a very common and natural feeling. It does not mean that they do not love their children or understand and make some sort of piece with their changed bodies, but don’t they have a right to feel whatever they feel about their bodies. I have dancer friends who have giving birth and were forever physically changed, and now struggle with feeling at home and in harmony with their new altered self, they love their children but their new bodies are something they have to come to terms with. Her is what Alba had to say:
Hosted by Huffington Post
A very slender and pre-baby bump Alba graces the cover of this month’s Lucky, who she told, “I have a hard time with portion control, so I have 1,200 calorie meals delivered. But I also work out, so basically I’m starving. It sucks. I drink a lot of water.”
And Alba is no fan of the gym either, she told the magazine that she just hates working out:
“In the gym, I have like five things to distract me: TV, iPod, magazines. Working partners are good, too, so you can chat and not just drown in your own misery.”
Alba, who had her first child Honor with husband Cash Warren in 2008, has been open about body issues in the past, in 2010 she told GQ that since giving birth to her daughter, her breasts were saggy, she has cellulite and her hips were bigger, telling them she felt “every actress” is now better looking than her.
While Alba dropped the weight she gained after her first pregnancy quickly, it’s surprising and worrisome to hear her speaking about starving herself.
The actress has also spoken about her battle with anorexia. She told Entertainment Weekly that to prepare for her role as the ass-kicking Max Guevara on the Fox sci-fi series “Dark Angel,” she adopted an intense exercise program and at one point whittled herself down to 100 lbs. And in 2005 she told Glamour, “A lot of girls have eating disorders, and I did too. I got obsessed with it. When I went from a girl’s body to a woman’s body with natural fat in places, I freaked out. It makes you feel weird, like you’re not ready for that body.”
Here is a clip of Michelle from our Mothers and Daughters roundtable talking about how her pregnancy changed her body and her body image.
Miss Mexico Axed For 6 pound Weight Gain
And now for the Ridiculous…
6 pounds, seriously? And you WONDER why women have issues?
Hosted by FitPerez
Ugh.
Cynthia De La Vega, the model who was crowned Miss Mexico at the Nuestra Belleza Mundo pageant has been stripped of her title for gaining weight – a whopping six pounds.
Organizers of the pageant claimed that she had a “lack of dedication and discipline,” but the 19-year-old insists it was strictly because of her weight gain. She describes how she felt when she found out she was no longer Miss Mexico:
“I was very sad and very deceived. I cried and cried and cried.”
Her coach allegedly gave her a specific diet plan via email, which consisted of “the same food during the same month.”
read more at FitPerez
10-Year-Old Model Thylane Blondeau’s Mother Resonds to Controversy
I am glad that she is protective of her daughter, and no I don’t think that Little Thylane should know about the “Buzz” which I might add is less negative but more concerned, and questioning. I guess she is talking about the Tumblr page that someone set up dedicated to the mini model. This “bad person” might well have been a fan, and assembled the girls work as an homage, which ended up as the spark for this controversy, and now the mother is feeling that she and her daughter are being unduly attacked. I get it but the reality is she let the child take all those photos, and perhaps one shoot at a time things seemed benign but when brought together it looks a certain way. And if this was a “bad person” with not so earnest intentions, well that is exactly what the uproar is about. This is an example of how you just can’t have things both ways. I hope that Thylane is all right and not feeling like she did anything “wrong” she is after all a child.
Jane Fonda looks great at 73 but suffered with Body Image issues all of her life!
I posted this pic of legend Jane Fonda yesterday, she was “The Body” of her day and possible still is for the septuagenarians. Fonda opened up to Harper’s Bazaar about her struggle with body image and eating disorders for most of her life. Read what she has to say:
Hosted by ONTD
Body image, the 1950s, and Henry Fonda: “I was raised in the ’50s,” she explains. “I was taught by my father that how I looked was all that mattered, frankly. He was a good man, and I was mad for him, but he sent messages to me that fathers should not send: Unless you look perfect, you’re not going to be loved.”
She was a fanatic for exercise, and she battled bulimia for decades: “I wasn’t very happy from, I would say, puberty to 50? It took me a long time. It was in my 40s, and if you suffer from bulimia, the older you get, the worse it gets. It takes longer to recover from a bout. I had a career, I was winning awards, I was supporting nonprofits, I had a family.” One day she just stopped. “I had to make a choice: I live or I die.” She refocused, trying to “fill that empty space with something.” Then came the workouts. “Gloria Steinem said empowerment begins in the muscles.”
Vanities: “I’m vain. My arms are thin, but I’m vain about loose flesh. And so I’m careful that what I wear will show off my best parts, which are my waist and my butt.” That said, “I have people in my life who will say, ‘Honey, you’re trying too hard.’ I like being saucy, but I’m 73 and a half. I’m still trying to find my way between matronly and coltishness. Colt, not cult: C-O-L-T.”
Read more at ONTD: http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/61750654.html#ixzz1UX0Ukcd3
This is what 73 and 1/2 looks like!
OK!!! Jane Fonda was a Sex symbol in the ’70’s and if you ask me she is still in the game. In the ’80’s she was the workout queen complete with striped french cut leotards legwarmers and shiny tights! Where she has admitted to having some work done (a face lift, maybe two) this is about her body and that is all natural. What I think is so amazing about her is that she is proof that lifestyle is the key to longevity as well as looks!!! She is strong, fit, and vital. Work it out!
I am hearing Body Hero????? What do you think?
(Sit down before you read) Wanna know how much Rhianna spends on her Hair?
This is hard to fathom given that the Stock Market just crashed again, we are taking about raising the debt ceiling and it seems like the whole world is asking “Brother can you spare a dime?” Well it looks like some folks aren’t hurting. If Rhianna is spending this much imagine what Beyonce, or Lady Gaga are coughing up weekly? Maybe they should get together and bring down the country’s deficit!! (I’m only half kidding), Oh what price beauty….
Hosted by My Daily
You can’t fail to have noticed that Rihanna loves shaking things up in the hairstyle department – and now reports have emerged that her ever-changing barnet is costing her a bank-busting £14,000 a week.
According to the Daily Mail, the singer has been employing the services of hairstylist-to-the-stars, Ursula Stephen – at a cost of up to £2,000 a day.
A source told the paper: “Rihanna likes to pioneer new styles but it’s costing her a fortune.
“She makes several public appearances a week, and the cost soon stacks up.
“Ursula is a close confidante and they are together all the time.”
How Young is Too Young? 1978 Brooke Shields article after Pretty Baby
I thought this might be interesting to look at after the 10 year old Tylane Loubry Blondeau Vogue Paris controversy, I think that it might illustrate how with time things change as do our perceptions…
I found it on People Magazine’s archives
‘People like to hear that Brooke’s childhood is taken away from her,’ says Mom. ‘It isn’t’
“Brooke is a gift from God.”
—Teri Shields
Midway through her wrenchingly beautiful film, Pretty Baby, Brooke Shields is auctioned off in a New Orleans bordello. She plays a child prostitute with a disconcertingly angelic air: Her Toulouse-Lautrec pout is sensual, ethereal, mesmerizing. Yet her body—later seen naked—is a child’s, thin and gawky. “I can feel the steam,” she whispers to her successful bidder, mimicking coquettishness, “coming through my dress.”
On May 31 Brooke will be 13 years old. Tall for her age at 5’4″ (her father is 67″), Brooke is blessed with the most stunning new child’s face in movies since Elizabeth Taylor. The skin is flawless; eyes deep blue; lashes black; hair silken. The direct gaze is full of ambivalent sexuality. Now her scandalizing role in the R-rated film has plunged the former child model into an international furor. Pretty Baby has been banned outright in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Saskatchewan. No less a moral arbiter than Rona Barrett solemnly advised her TV audience that the movie is “child pornography.” Others have attacked its French director Louis (Lacombe, Lucien) Malle as a combination of Humbert Humbert and Roman Polanski.
He gets off lightly compared to Brooke’s divorced manager mother, Teri Shields, 44. “The press has referred to me as a stage mother, a frustrated actress living through Brooke and even a one-woman film-wrecking crew,” Teri admits. On the set Brooke is sweet; Teri is salty but clearly a favorite with the crew. She can also be meddlesome and was briefly banned from the set of Pretty Baby. “They can say what they want about me,” Teri explains. “But Brooke can’t fight back. That’s why I’m here. I’m not a stage mother. I’m Brooke’s mother. The most important thing is that I love Brooke, and it’s fun to make her happy.”
Brooke seems to have kept her perspective over the Pretty Baby uproar. “It’s only a role,” she explains. “I’m not going to grow up and be a prostitute. If I were in a Walt Disney movie people would never ask me if the part would affect my life. That’s so dumb.” For all their shock value, Brooke’s “nude” scenes were shot with her wearing a body stocking, with one exception. When Violet (the role Brooke plays) chastely poses naked for the photographer Bellocq (Keith Carradine), Malle closed the set to everyone but himself and cinematographer Sven Nykvist. “I knew it would be tasteful,” says Teri. “Anybody who calls it child pornography has not seen the damn thing. Rona Barrett is a fool. I don’t mind Brooke being called a sex symbol. But nymphet and Lolita rub me the wrong way.” Malle, who picked her over 300 auditioners, admiringly calls Brooke “a natural. She carried the entire picture on her shoulders.”
“Sexy” 10 year old Model raises the question of How Young is Too Young?
There are times when I think that my sensitivity towards the commercialization and sexualization in the media boarders on paranoia, am I reading into things? Am I seeing things that aren’t there? Am I creating them to prove a point? It is possible. Sometimes things just are what they are and as times change, so do our perceptions and relationships to those things. That having been stated when I came across this article on the Huffington Post I had reason to take pause. I watched the videos, even went to took a gander at the other photos and was still left with an icky feeling, of something isn’t quite right here. Let me explain.
This is 10 year old french model Thylane Loubry Blondeau, she is the daughter of soccer player Patrick Blondeau and reporter-turned-fashion designer, so she has one degree of separation from the industry by birth. ok. A truly gorgeous little girl– Little Girl she is 10 years old. This is Tyhlane modeling in Vogue Paris (a spread featuring other young girls)
These and other images have caused a stir and raised the question as to is this an appropriate image for a 10 year old, even is if is for Art or Fashion sake? I get the concept of little girls playing dress up but there is something in the eyes and body positioning, the come hither look of these photos that, I have to admit is a bit disturbing. It is throwing me back to the controversy of a 13 year old Brooke Shields in the film Pretty Baby where she played a child prostitute. (*I am not saying that Little Thylane is a Prostitute I am saying that the seductive nature of the photos calls that to mind) There was great backlash to that film, to Shields and her mother/manager. Granted it was a character in a film and so it had relevant context but it was still shocking to the masses, especially the nudity and bathtub scene.
What I am glad for is that a spread like this has raised a question, and in today’s day and age that says something. At least we have to think about it whether or not this is firstly, appropriate (in any context) and secondly, if it gives the correct information to both children and adults for that matter. When we as a world society are battling things the sexual exploitation of children from being the targets of pedophiles, being sold into prostitution (seemingly extreme examples but relevant but valid to the topic) or the reality that today children are more sexually aware and sexually active earlier or are being confronted with their sexuality earlier than ever before, and being the objects of adult desires, and even making sexual advances towards adults (yes, that does happen let’s be honest) we have to wonder if images like this don’t in some way contribute, or inflame those issues. The question of how young is too young to put/present a child in sexualized context becomes necessary to discuss? And perhaps more importantly why are adults capitalizing on the sexualization of young children?
It also makes me think that culturally we can be so hypocritical, on one had we say, “Protect the children” on the other we take photos, create television shows, and movies where children are seen as sexual objects, oftentimes emulating behaviors that of adults (whether with characters of their own age or with adults) and basically provide them a hand book on sex, seduction and despicable behavior look at some of the scripted television shows that have “tweens” as their demographic- Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girl the too hot for American TV defunct English adaptation of Skins, even the original Beverly Hills 90210 had teen characters jumping in and out of bed with one another. I cannot begin to list the numerous reality series that show young people (barely legal) engaged in questionable behavior-(sex, alcohol, physical violence) all marketed at young adults. What message are we as adults sending to our children when we put this visual diet of images before them? I don’t have the answer, any answers I think I have lead me to more questions, but I do have a feeling and it’s not a good one. I think these photos are beautiful, I think the child is beautiful, but I have never been a fan of, or understood the appeal of making a child look like an adult and certainly not in a sexual context. What do you think?
The Myths behind water
In my post “6 ways I feel good about myself“, my 6th point was about drinking lots of water. Well according to this article from The Guardian, drinking “lots of water” for your health and image is not the way to go! There are apparently many myths about water that it unveils:
Hosted By: The Guardian
Written By: Emine Saner
Many of us have been led to believe that the more we drink, the healthier we will be. At the weekend, in his column for the Sunday Times, Dominic Lawson outed his sister Nigella as an “aquaholic”, drinking several litres a day. Several newspapers followed this up this week by interviewing women who drank excessive amounts of water thinking they were doing themselves good – one, Joanne Jarvis, interviewed by the Daily Mail, was hospitalised after drinking 11 litres over four hours.
When did we become so fearful of dehydration? Schoolchildren are encouraged to take bottles of water into classrooms and sip them throughout the day. Peer into most meeting rooms in the country and you will see bottles of water planted on the table in front of executives, as if they fear that the slightest dehydration will impair them in some way. At the gym, people replenish water as fast as they sweat it out.
A few years ago, Stanley Goldfarb, professor of medicine and a kidney specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, noticed a strange phenomenon. “People were dragging around big bottles of water with them and drinking all the time and I thought: ‘What are they doing?'”
He says on the phone from his office in Philadelphia: “Since we have a perfectly good system to alert us if we need water, why would you need to subvert that by drinking in a prophylactic way?” He reviewed the scientific literature on the health benefits of drinking a lot of water, identifying the four recurrent themes that were put about by those who advocated it.
Read the rest of this article to get some great information, about consuming water, that we all could use in our everyday lives: Continue
MR