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a1000shadesofhurt

a1000shadesofhurt

Tag Archives: Exercise

Doctors’ new prescription: ‘Don’t just exercise, do it outside’

11 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Uncategorized

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'park prescriptions', activities, environment, Exercise, exercise regime, health, health initiative, nature, obesity, outdoors, park, physically active, prescriptions, scenery, sedentary, stress, trail, wellness

Doctors’ new prescription: ‘Don’t just exercise, do it outside’

It’s become commonplace for San Francisco physician Daphne Miller to write prescriptions that look like this:

Drug: Exercise in Glen Canyon Park
Dose: 45 minutes of walking or running
Directions: Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday at 7am
Refills: Unlimited

She estimates she has now written hundreds of prescriptions for outdoor activity. “For some reason, it is much easier to keep up a movement or exercise regimen when it’s outdoors,” Miller says.

Perhaps it’s because of the varying scenery, the fact that monthly dues and expensive Spandex outfits aren’t required, or even because of what she calls “the camaraderie of the trail”.

Miller’s not alone. Faced with mounting obesity rates and a stubbornly sedentary population, physicians – especially pediatricians – are refining their exhortations that patients need to get more exercise.

Nationwide, they are dispensing thousands of prescriptions with specific instructions – not just going to a gym, but exercising in nature, at a park, along a trail. They’re literally telling their patients to take a hike.

“This is a lot more than getting people physically active. This is about getting them outdoors,” says Zarnaaz Bashir, director of health initiatives for the National Recreation and Park Association, a group that melds parks, recreation, the environment and now, health.

When terms like “park prescriptions” began popping up in 2008 or so, many experts viewed it as a niche idea.

“It was a quirky, fun play on words. I don’t think a lot of people thought there was going to be much substance,” says Kristin Wheeler, program director at the nonprofit parks advocacy group, Institute at the Golden Gate, in San Francisco. “Now, it’s been validated.”

The number of programs has risen steadily. Officials have identified at least 50 specific programs in the US, Wheeler says, but smaller ones may be under their radar, and new programs are popping up all the time.

The trend is spreading to other countries as well – including Australia, where a conference was recently held to discuss the health and medical benefits the country’s natural parks can offer.

In the UK, doctors are prescribing visits to Green Gyms, outdoor sessions run by a conservation group. The idea is to not only improve health and stamina through exercise and activities, such as planting trees, but also to benefit local green spaces.

A result of the green-prescriptions movement has been the unlikely teaming up of otherwise unrelated groups. The Appalachian Mountain Club, for example, forged a partnership in 2013 with MassGeneral Hospital for Children to prescribe regular outdoor physical activity for children.

“With so many proven benefits to getting active outdoors, AMC can help families take the first step in trying out new activities, finding places to explore, and making these outings fun for kids,” club CEO John Judge says.

An early proponent was Robert Zarr, a physician with Unity Health Care in Washington DC who quizzes patients about their interests, checks a searchable database for information on parks in or near their zip code, and then writes a script for specific activities. He told one obese teen to skip one of the two buses she takes to school and walk through a park instead. She ended up losing weight and feeling happier.

“We’ve really got this down,” he told attendees at a conference last year in Philadelphia. “I see this as no different from prescribing medicine for asthma or an ear infection.”

Across the continent in San Francisco, Miller says she has learned that formalizing her recommendation to get out in nature by writing it as a prescription is highly effective. “Well over 80% of patients try it, and many stick to it,” she says.

Mounting evidence shows benefits of being out and active in green spaces: less tension and stress, lower blood pressure, improved immune system responses, and milder ADHD symptoms in children. Japanese researchers have found that adherents to Shinrin-yoku – “forest bathing” – have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol than study subjects who walk the same distance in a lab.

Beyond that, simply spending more time outdoors – versus in front of the TV screen or computer monitor – equates to an overall increase in physical activity.

Proponents say the nature prescriptions shift the focus of medicine from illness to wellness, leading to the potential for widespread changes in medical care.

Diana Allen, chief of the US National Park Service’s “Healthy Parks, Healthy People” initiative, is seeing mergers of medical schools and parks programs. “That’s wild,” she said. “I think there are going to be some new fields of practice.”

She acknowledges possible opposition from traditional practitioners and drug companies – “this goes against the money machine.” And patients who simply want to pop pills for whatever ails them also may balk.

Other than the doubtless eye-rolling of some physicians who may view the programs as gimmicky, participants in the Philadelphia conference had more practical concerns. Were the parks they would send children to safe? Would weather be an issue? Would lack of transportation be a barrier?

While early adopters of the philosophy simply leapt in without much of plan – it made intuitive sense, after all – organizers now aim to standardize programs so other communities can basically plug and play.

In Philadelphia, more than two dozen partners, including The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, are developing Nature Rx, a comprehensive plan aimed at ensuring that when kids show up at a park to “fill” their prescriptions, the staff is ready to welcome them with specific activities.

Gail Farmer, director of education for the 340-acre Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education and one of the organizers, says park audits will start this spring and physicians will begin writing prescriptions come summer.

Adopting standards also will help researchers who are moving to the data-gathering stage. Is it really working? Do people follow the prescriptions? And does their health improve as a result?

Wheeler has just finished an economic benefits analysis for the parks of San Francisco, which put the figure at $1bn a year.

“A piece of it is what we’ve known for a long time. People prefer liveable, walkable communities,” she says. “The big new piece is health benefits.” Those, they pegged at $50m in avoided health care costs.

Exercise and disability: ‘Now things hurt for the right reasons’

17 Tuesday Sep 2013

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confidence, Exercise, multiple sclerosis, Self-esteem, symptoms

Exercise and disability: ‘Now things hurt for the right reasons’

It’s hardly surprising that Shana Pezaro started comfort eating. After 20 years of unexplained and debilitating symptoms, she had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Having built up her own stage-school business, she was now losing the ability to walk and was forced to sell up. Then her marriage fell apart.

“My husband had found my illness and disability very difficult to deal with, but we always thought I was going to get better,” says Pezaro. “Then, when I was finally diagnosed with MS in 2007 and we realised I wouldn’t, he just couldn’t handle it. I used to be a dancer, but my body had changed and he told me he just couldn’t find me attractive anymore. Within a year of my diagnosis, we’d split up.”

It was a relief, she says, when he finally left, but the experience nevertheless dealt a blow to her self-esteem, not helped by the fact she had started to put on weight.

“I went from 12st to 15st in the space of three years. The fatigue was so bad that I didn’t have the strength to cook. I was living on microwave meals and snacks. The steroids and other medications made me incredibly hungry. And of course as my legs got worse I was getting less and less exercise – I could barely walk. I was miserable.”

Weight gain is a serious issue for the disabled community. In a study of 30,000 people published this summer by the University of Texas School of Public Health, 42% of adults with a disability were reported as obese, compared with 29% of those without a disability. Gaining weight not only affects a person’s emotional wellbeing, but can also make mobility even harder and symptoms feel worse. Yet fatigue and pain can make sport participation seem daunting. And although things are improving following the success of the Paralympics, access remains a major barrier. Just 18% of people with a disability or long-term limiting illness participate in sport each week, around half the level of the general population, according to a survey by Sport England.

“You don’t have to eat a lot to put on weight if you’re not moving and your body isn’t burning calories,” says Vanessa Daobri, a gym instructor who specialises in working with people with disabilities. “Disabled people often suffer because they don’t know how to exercise. If the disability is a result of an injury or it’s been a slow onset, they may find it hard to accept that they can’t do a sport in the way they used to, so they feel there’s no point.”

Organisations such as Aspire and the English Federation of Disability Sport run inclusive gyms across the country. But not everyone is lucky enough to be near one, and regular gyms are still lagging behind, says Daobri. “Often the staff get the approach wrong – sometimes it’s just laziness, sometimes it’s ignorance. Health and safety is used as a crutch, too.” Another issue, she says, is that disabled people can feel frightened to be seen going to the gym in case their benefits are cut.

Daobri has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a disorder affecting collagen. In 2007 she grew from a size 12 to a size 24 in less than a year. She felt “stuck”, until she joined a wheelchair racing group and the coach asked her if she used the gym.

“I just laughed,” she says. ‘I thought gyms were not for me – they were for other people.” She was shown how to use gym equipment in new ways and quickly became “addicted” to exercise. Now, she has made a career out of helping disabled people find ways to get fit.

“Once someone opened the door for me I realised there was a whole world out there,” she says. “Whatever your disability, there’s a version of a sport for you – you just have to be a bit creative.”

After six months of post-divorce counselling, Pezaro decided she wanted to lose weight. “I got a brilliant new carer who got me eating healthily,” she says. “Then I found out there was an MS treatment centre near me that runs lots of different exercise classes.”

She signed up to a class she has come to describe affectionately as “sadistic PE”. “The instructor is ex-military but also a counsellor and herself has MS. So she completely understands us, but she doesn’t let us get away with anything. We adapt everything to our own personal needs. It’s not your average fitness class – it’s not unusual for people to collapse and have a leg spasm in the middle of their situps, or to suddenly fall off their exercise ball, but we just laugh about it.”

At first Pezaro was unable to do most of the exercises, but she persevered and since starting the class three years ago has lost nearly 4st.

“It’s not been easy,” she says. “It took me 30 months to lose 45 pounds. But I didn’t get demoralised. I knew that over the years it would add up. And the more I’ve exercised the better my fatigue is. I still can’t walk, but I now have less weight to lift when I’m using my frame, or getting on and off the toilet, so everything is easier.”

Pezaro’s confidence has been transformed and now she is enjoying dating again. But perhaps most the important gain has been to her sense of control.

“I really worked myself at last night’s class, and today every muscle in my body hurts,” she says. “But I’m so used to living with pain, it’s kind of nice to know that for once, things are hurting for a good reason.”

• For information and support on multiple sclerosis visit mssociety.org.uk. Aspire’s Instructability programme offers free fitness industry training to disabled people. Visit aspire.org.uk

Uncomfortable in our skin: the body-image report

10 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Body Image

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airbrush, anxiety, appearance, Body Image, Bullying, cosmetic surgery, Depression, Eating Disorders, Exercise, Self-esteem, Teens

Uncomfortable in our skin: the body-image report

Outside, on a warm morning in March, students at the University of the West of England are shading their faces with textbooks, legs rippling in the sun. Inside, in a cramped, bright room lined with ring binders labelled “Intimacy”, the women who make up the world’s only Centre for Appearance Research (Car) are talking quietly about perfection. I arrived here after following a trail of newspaper reports – on the effect of airbrushing in the media, on men’s growing anxiety about their weight – reports used variously by politicians and educators to highlight the way our world is collapsing. It’s here, with their biscuits and gentle, resigned chatter, that a team led by Professor Nichola Rumsey and Dr Diana Harcourt is compiling the research required to understand how we deal with changing attitudes to appearance, and along the way helping answer the question: why do we hate the way we look?

Two years ago I started writing a column for this magazine, illustrated by a photo of my face. At times it made me feel odd (I have never liked photos), at other times sad, often anxious. It made me more aware that I don’t like the way I look, but more, I don’t like the fact that I don’t like it. But it’s not just me. All Car’s research suggests that Britain’s body image is in crisis.

Body image is a subjective experience of appearance. It’s an accumulation of a lifetime’s associations, neuroses and desires, projected on to our upper arms, our thighs. At five, children begin to understand other people’s judgement of them. At seven they’re beginning to show body dissatisfaction. As adults 90% of British women feel body-image anxiety. And it doesn’t wane – many women in their 80s are still anxious about the way their bodies look which, Professor Rumsey explains, can even affect their treatment in hospital, when their health choices are influenced by aesthetics. Many young women say they are too self-aware to exercise; many say they drink to feel comfortable with the way they look; 50% of girls smoke to suppress their appetite – is it too strong to suggest that these things, these anxieties, are slowly killing them?

Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson (who has succeeded in pulling a number of L’Oréal ad campaigns for being unrealistic) is one of a growing group of people whose campaigning indicates that it’s something worth worrying about. Last year I attended every session of her government inquiry into body image, the results of which were published in a report this month. She cited research showing how current “airbrushing” culture leads to huge self-esteem problems – half of all 16- to 21-year-old women would consider cosmetic surgery and in the past 15 years eating disorders have doubled. Young people, she said, don’t perform actively in class when they’re not feeling confident about their appearance.

It is research backed up by a new documentary by Jennifer Siebel Newsom,Miss Representation, about the under-representation of women in positions of power – women who are high “self objectifiers” have low political power. They’re less likely to run in politics, and less likely to vote: if value lies in their imperfect bodies, they feel disempowered. The long-term effects, the piling on of pressures one by one, like a dangerous Jenga tower, means women’s – and increasingly men’s, 69% of whom “often” wish they looked like someone else – lives are being damaged, not by the way they look but by the way they feel about the way they look. It’s complicated.

Even researching such a thing is tricky. The truth feels slippery. “Why,” I asked the psychotherapist Susie Orbach (who, since publishing Fat is a Feminist Issue in 1978, has become a loud and public voice in the conversation about body image), “when I know that beauty is subjective, that nothing terrible would happen if I put on weight, when my desk is covered in annotated research on bodies, do I still feel bad about the way I look?”

“Because none of us lives in a vacuum,” she said. Simply acknowledging the pressure doesn’t eliminate it. “We don’t even know we hate our bodies because we take that for granted.” She sighed. “When I wrote FiFi there was a pretty bad situation,” she said, “but the women of my generation have given birth to… this.” To my generation – 60% of whom feel ashamed of how they look. But before anybody begins to deal with this, this crippling western-worldwide anxiety, it’s important to try and work out why. How did we get here?

At the Centre for Appearance Research, they discuss with me how invested people have become in their appearance. And how central it now is to the value they place on themselves. We’ve always compared ourselves to other people, but what has changed is the way we use images. There’s a famous study which looked at teenage girls in Fiji after television was introduced to the island for the first time in 1995. After three years with TV, the girls who watched it the most were 50% more likely to describe themselves as “too fat”; 29% scored highly on a test of eating-disorder risk. One girl said of the western women she watched on Beverly Hills 90210: “In order to be like them, I have to work on myself, exercising, and my eating habits should change.”

Today the web ensures that we are drowning in visuals: we’re no longer comparing ourselves to “local images” – our friends – instead we’re comparing ourselves to social-networked strangers, celebrities, and to Photoshopped images, of which we see around 5,000 a week. I always bristle a little when “airbrushing” or Photoshop is blamed for the rise of body-image anxiety. It seems too simple. While I was impressed by Jo Swinson’s campaign to ban airbrushing in advertising, I did cheer, a little, when I read Tina Fey’s thoughts: “Photoshop itself is not evil,” she wrote. “Just like Italian salad dressing is not inherently evil, until you rub it all over a desperate young actress and stick her on the cover of Maxim, pretending to pull her panties down. Give it up. Retouching is here to stay. Technology doesn’t move backward. No society has ever deindustrialised.”

The problem is not the Photoshopping itself – the problem is that Photoshopped images threaten to replace all others, and that in slicing off the rounded hip of an actress it reveals our difficult relationship with the female body. The problem is that, in their ubiquity, Photoshopped images have changed our standards of comparison. So that’s one reason. Images. I started to make a list.

The “size zero” debate that began a few years ago led to an angry dissection of the fashion industry’s preference for skinny models. In response, a circular argument was repeated, laying blame on fashion magazines (for printing the pictures), then model agencies (for hiring the models), then designers (for making samples that only fit the very thinnest of them). In this month’s Vogue, editor Alexandra Shulman launched the Health Initiative, a six-point pact between the editors of the 19 international editions, aimed at encouraging a healthier approach to body image within the industry. They promise to encourage designers to “consider the consequences of unrealistically small sample sizes of their clothing, which… encourages the use of extremely thin models”. Is this the industry taking responsibility for our broken body image, for its power? Acknowledging that they help sell not only clothes, but ideas of which bodies are acceptable?

“We’re not taking responsibility for it,” Shulman says firmly. “We’re saying we realise we’re in a powerful position and we can do something about it.”

We’re sitting in her bright white office, beside shelves displaying internationalVogue covers. She points at them one by one. “There’s Kate Moss in Versace. That [sample-sized] dress is tiny. You can see it’s pretty tight on her. Then there’s Scarlett Johansson in vintage Prada – you see, ‘real people’, actors as opposed to models, don’t fit sample-size clothes.”

Caryn Franklin, Erin O’Connor and Debra Bourne, whose All Walks Beyond the Catwalk initiative encourages diversity in fashion, talk to designers and students about creating more “inclusive” designs. “The fashion industry has changed in the past decade,” Franklin explains slowly, trying to put her finger on why our body image is in crisis. “The catwalk used to be a factory space. But digital changed everything – it’s now become a luxury positioning experience, a consumer space.”

It’s helpful for fashion buyers (the audience at catwalk shows) to see clothes on a shape that is as close to a clothes hanger as possible – hence the tall, bony models whose breasts will not bother the line of a shirt. But since catwalk imagery has gone mainstream, these model shapes have drifted into the public subconscious. “We’re helping the industry understand this,” adds Franklin. “This inconvenient truth.”

Shulman has been pushing for larger sample sizes since 2009, when she wrote a letter to major international designers complaining that their tiny designs were forcing editors to shoot them on models with “no breasts or hips”. Has she seen any change? “Hmm. There is still a bit of a… blindness. I think fashion is a bit out of step with this. They don’t realise that people would really like to see something different.” She’s right – Ben Barry (a PhD student at Cambridge University) surveyed 3,000 women, the vast majority of whom “significantly increase purchase intentions when they see a model that reflects their age, size and race”.

Shulman was invited to give evidence at Jo Swinson’s inquiry but turned her down. “I’m very anti-legislation, anti-government initiatives. I don’t think they need to get involved. God knows they’ve got enough to be thinking about without worrying about sample sizes. And it isn’t just about ‘common sense’.”

I’m learning this. I ask her about other myths – are there any commonly held beliefs about Vogue, the industry and body image? Her eyes fall on the magazine shelf. “Ah! I know one!” she says, leaning in. “We shot Adele for our October cover, and everyone said: ‘How typical of Vogue – they shoot Adele and only show a head shot.'” It’s true – bloggers were disgusted that they hid her size-16 body.

“But Adele would not let us pull the camera back,” Shulman explains. “As soon as any of her body was shown on the camera’s digital screen she’d say no. It was her desire to have a head shot, which I found very frustrating. I was desperate for a full-length picture.” That issue was one of the worst-selling inVogue’s history.

I remember Orbach explaining that none of us lives in a vacuum. “Vogue,” Shulman continues, “is one of very few [women’s interest] magazines that never publishes diets, never points out when someone’s put on weight. We don’t come from that unhelpful culture where you forensically examine the way a woman looks. That’s appalling. We don’t have to put our hands up about that.”

Are today’s diets – the way we are encouraged to eat cognitively – to blame for our anxiety? An eating-disorder specialist at the inquiry confirmed that the “Atkins diet generates many cases for my work”, but the problem is not eating disorders but disordered eating. Disordered eating includes competitive dieting and eating in secret – it can lead to both eating disorders and obesity, but more commonly just adds to the eater’s anxiety.

Rates of depression in women and girls doubled between 2000 and 2010; the more women self-objectify, the more likely they are to be depressed. Could the mainstream media’s warm embrace of disordered eating have contributed to that rise? Grazia reports that Beyoncé lost 60lb of “baby weight” by eating only lettuce. Cosmopolitan wrote about Kate Middleton’s “Dukan diet”, which begins with seven days of pure protein, and later two “celebration meals” a week. If women don’t look like Beyoncé or Kate Middleton, their flat stomachs a testament to their stamina then, it seems, they are not working hard enough.

One celebrity whose body is frequently scrutinised (and scorned) by the tabloid media is The Only Way is Essex‘s reality star Lauren Goodger. “Never heard of Spanx, Lauren? Miss Goodger shows off muffin top in very unflattering dress,” read one Mail Online headline. There are 546. “Oops, maybe you should’ve tried the next size up. Lauren Goodger’s tiny dress feels the strain.” “Haven’t you learned your lesson? Lauren Goodger steps out in ANOTHER pair of unflattering leggings.” Rather than the corrosive dripping-tap effect of reading these once a day over the last two years, read together these 546 headlines feel like quiet waterboarding.

I meet Goodger at Max Clifford’s office. She is weeks into a “drastic diet plan”. Many women feel judged on their appearance in some way, but what does it feel like to have those verdicts read by 99 million people a month? “It is quite… draining,” she says. “I can’t look at comments. I can’t buy the mags any more. I used to love them, but I was happy then. Then my weight became a story, not just for the show but for the press. Yeah, I’m definitely aware of the online scrutiny. My body becomes my work.” She thinks for a bit. “But just because someone’s not a size 10 it doesn’t mean she’s a bad person.”

Last year Goodger had a nose job because, she said, she’d hated seeing her profile on TV. Most of her female Towie cast members have had cosmetic surgery – mainly breast implants, a bum lift, Botox, lip fillers. “Where does it come from, the idea that natural is not beautiful, that we all need the model look?” Goodger asks herself. In response to Jo Swinson’s inquiry, the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (Baaps) has called for a ban on adverts for cosmetic surgery, highlighting promotions that play on vulnerabilities, such as “divorce feelgood” packages of breast augmentation and liposuction, and surgical procedures sold via online discount sites such as Groupon.

“Do you think there should be psychological screening for those seeking surgery?” I ask Goodger tentatively. “It’s a subject that’s hard to talk about,” she says. “Especially because I’m… within it.”

We talk about the idea of “naughty” food, about the different expectations for men and women, about the celebrities who say they’re “big and happy” then suddenly lose weight. There’s a pause.

“My little sister was anorexic at 11,” she says suddenly. “It started with someone at school calling her Miss Piggy. I mean, I didn’t even know about dieting until I was 18. Things have changed so much. She gets the mags, she wants the bags, the Prada shoes. It’s crazy. She’s a baby! She wears lashes, make-up. But you do what everyone else is doing – you compare yourself. She’s fine now, a year and a half later. But she’ll message me going: ‘Have you lost weight? You look really good’ and I’ll think: God, don’t say that.”

Goodger and I were both born in the 80s. In our lifetime (one that has seen the internet enter our homes, along with hundreds more television channels), expectations of beauty have changed enormously. What must it be like growing up today, when cosmetic surgery is advertised on public transport, when “baby-weight loss” diets are rife?

I gather together a group of under-20-year-olds at Livity, Brixton’s “youth engagement agency”, to talk about body image. It’s not a concept that needs explaining to them. Apart from Stephen (who says: “The fact that I don’t have an opinion on body image probably says something itself. Boys have it easier, definitely”), they have much to say.

First, some fictions they are keen to shatter. The pressure, the girls agree, is not, in fact, to be skinny – instead it’s to look sexy. “Hot.” “Everyone wants to look like Kim Kardashian, even though we know she’s a boring person – we don’t want to have her personality, just her body,” says Claudia. “Not Kate Moss’s. Curves, not bones.”

This is the first time sex has been discussed – until now, everybody has talked about thinness and control, rather than changing your body to attract a boy. But as Bridget points out, you can starve yourself bony: “The sexy body is much more unattainable.” “I think our generation is really savvy about the media,” says Amber as they move quickly on to the subject of airbrushed ads. “So you know an image has been manipulated, but I suppose… you don’t know what that’s doing to you.”

I wonder about the fact that these young people are so literate in the issues of body image (as opposed to simply “bodies”) that their thoughts on the subject are so close to the surface. “We’re forced to think about it!” says Bridget. “It’s on every channel, every night. Programmes like Supersize vs Superskinny, orHow to Look Good Naked, or freaky ones like Half Ton Mum, or A Year to Save My Life.” Everyone shouts out names – programmes about overhauling your body with diets, clothes or surgery. “They have mixed messages,” says Amber. “On one hand they’re saying ‘love your body’, then on the other ‘fat’s bad, the worst thing you could do is be obese’. The message ‘be healthy and do exercise’ is a bit different from ‘be happy in your skin’, isn’t it?” The rhetoric of empowerment, here, actually disempowers.

Do we hate our bodies because of reality makeover TV? Susie Orbach describes how they often provide “dysmorphic and distressed women” the opportunity to “compete over their body distress and win the prize of radical restructuring”. The earliest technologies of body enhancement utilised techniques used on Second World War burn victims. “To hear [winning reality show contestants] tell it,” Orbach says, “they’ve been through their own individual wars, too… Their compulsion to change their bodies is a result of a different kind of assault on women, and increasingly men, which is sufficiently damaging to have persuaded them that the bodies they live in are urgently in need of transformation.”

Both the cosmetic surgery and the cosmeceutical industries (anti-ageing products) are growing, fast. It’s these industries, “along with the fashion houses, the diet companies, the food conglomerates [which own the diet companies], the exercise and fitness industry, and the pharmaceutical and cosmetic surgery industries”, that Orbach is now combating, because, she says, “they combine, perhaps inadvertently, to create a climate in which girls and women come to feel that their bodies are not OK”.

Orbach debated with representatives from the diet industry in parliament to applause from the public gallery – outside women protested with placards saying: “Riot, don’t diet.” Discussing Weight Watchers’ recent £15m TV ad, she suggested it was affordable to them only because their members are locked into lifelong “straitjackets” of unrealistic weight-loss expectations. When I speak to her later, she goes further. “I do think we should be prosecuting the diet industry for false advertising,” she says firmly. If dieting worked, she argues, you’d only have to do it once. There is evidence that diets may in fact contribute to fat storage and that, in giving a sense that food is “dangerous”, create conditions for rebellion, which eventually makes people fatter than they were to start with.

When I began my research, all roads led back to Orbach. She’s been crucial in hammering home the dangers of body-image anxiety, yet figures show that we are feeling worse about our bodies than ever. “You have to make the argument that this isn’t trivial, then you have to make the argument that this is a substantial issue, then you have to combat the industries. I’m exhausted by it,” she says, throwing her head back. “But what other options do we have?”

She’s working on a psychoanalytic research project on the transmission of body image from mothers to daughters, and she’s pushing for interventions by midwives, trained to show new mothers how their own body-image dissatisfaction will affect their babies. “New mums are caught up in problems with their own bodies when they’re bringing a new body into the world. We need a counterpoint to the nonsense that you should have a pre-pregnancy body six weeks after having a baby, or ever. What’s the erasure about? That’s where it should start.” She takes a breath. “And teachers – it’s all very well them taking classes about body image, but if they don’t raise their own awareness about their own distress, then they’re just passing it on.”

Back at the Centre for Appearance Research, we make our way down the narrow university corridors for lunch. In this surprise heat, the café is full of academics fanning themselves with menus, the odd bare-legged man. I am feeling a bit hopeless. All the statistics about sadness; all the people, like me, who aren’t able to enjoy their own health, privilege, relative youth, because of this niggle. This feeling that we don’t look right.

Jo Swinson’s report detailed various recommendations being put to government, regulators, voluntary organisations and the private sector. In light of Orbach’s evidence, they call for a review of the “inaccurate” body mass index as the standard way of determining whether somebody is overweight, and for better support for new mothers. They ask advertisers to reflect “consumer desire for authenticity and diversity”, and for tougher regulation of the cosmetic surgery industry. But all the people I interviewed balanced their delight at the inquiry with a healthy wodge of cynicism at how much change these recommendations would effect.

And I wonder what we can do – us lot, the people with the faces we don’t like, with the cankles, the muffin tops, the limp, lifeless hair. It’s in the personal, day-to-day things, I think. Like consuming media critically. The media is a construction – this is no secret. Magazines, film, TV, newspapers – they all rely on advertising. So reminding ourselves that the body types we see represented are the body types that generate purchases. Asking ourselves: “Am I being sold something here?” It’s not a terrible thing, being sold to, it’s just a… thing. Unpicking the media we consume, and talking about it, will help us feel better eventually. Cognitive dissonance programmes in schools have been effective – encouraging young people to speak out against the unrealistic ideals of beauty they see. In talking about it we reduce the internalisation of beauty ideals, and feel less awful about our implied failings.

I tell Car’s Dr Phillippa Diedrichs about something Amber mentioned – about femininity and dieting.

“Eating becomes a means of communication,” Diedrichs says after lunch. “In our food choices we’re demonstrating our femininity.” But it goes further than that. “We’re socialised to be negative about our bodies,” she says, and a slideshow of moments flashes through my head. Women standing in the ladies’ loos complaining about their boobs. Or comparing their limbs to their colleagues’ unfavourably. She introduces me to the idea of “fat talk”, everyday conversation that reinforces the “thin ideal” and contributes to our dissatisfaction. Like: “You look great – have you lost weight?” Or, on being offered a bun: “Ooh, I really shouldn’t.” “After three minutes of fat talk,” says Diedrichs, “there’s evidence that our body dissatisfaction increases significantly.” Naming this – fat talk – makes much sense to me.

After a day at Car, my body-image anxiety hasn’t disappeared, but I can at least see a way to control it. We hate how we look because of our new, complicated visual culture, because of a fashion industry that has not adapted, a media that forensically analyses women’s bodies and saturates our culture with body-change stories. Because of the rise of cognitive eating, the increasing abilities and accessibility of cosmetic surgery. Because to be feminine, today, means to hate your body.

I leave their building feeling quite different from when I arrived. I have the same legs, the same face, the same teeth, but something in my mind has changed.

Would you dare to wear Lycra outside? Half of women put off exercise in public

23 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Body Image

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Tags

Exercise, Self-esteem

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/would-you-dare-to-wear-lycra-outside-half-of-women-put-off-exercise-in-public-7669143.html

It is good news for the celebrity fitness DVD industry, if no one else. More than half of the women in Britain are too embarrassed about their bodies to exercise in public, a survey suggests.

Nine out of 10 women over 30 have low self-esteem and poor body image, which forces many of them to exercise indoors or go running in the dark. The findings, by the mental health charity, Mind, are particularly unfortunate because outdoor exercise is known to be far more effective at improving mood and mental wellbeing than an indoor workout.

“We all know walking, cycling, even gardening are good for our mental health,” said Beth Murphy, the head of information at Mind. “However, for many of us, exercising outdoors can be incredibly daunting, especially if you are already feeling low and your self-confidence is at rock bottom.

“At these times you can feel like the only person in the world experiencing this, but our research highlights that far from being alone, 90 per cent of women are in exactly the same boat. It is time we start talking about how exercise makes us feel. We urge women to take the first step, invite a friend on a nature date and begin to support each other in taking care of our mental wellbeing.”

More than half of the 1,450 women surveyed said they exercised very early in the morning or late at night, solely to avoid being seen by others. Nearly two-thirds said they exercised in a location where they were unlikely to bump into anyone they knew, and a similar proportion said they wore baggy clothing to conceal their figures.

Gym classes are also a no-go area, it seems. Two-thirds of women said they did not think they would be able to keep up in an exercise group, that they would look silly, or that the women there would be “cliquey” and unwelcoming.

Sixty per cent were nervous about exhibiting themselves while sweaty, and were worried about their “wobbly bits”, passing wind or going red. Only 6 per cent thought they would be likely to make new friends.

Mind’s researchers found that women were acutely aware of the importance of keeping fit and active lifestyles, and therapists were increasingly prescribing outdoor exercise as a way to fight stress and depression.

But the charity said that, rather than exercising, women reported that they were more likely to spend time eating comfort food (71 per cent), listening to sad music (32 per cent), spending time social networking (57 per cent), going to bed (66 per cent) or finding a way to be alone (71 per cent).

Mind, which offers advice and support people with mental health problems, has launched a “Feel Better Outside, Feel Better Inside” campaign to encourage women to start talking about outdoor exercise, and to encourage friends to exercise outdoors together.

Case study: ‘I always felt so self-conscious and anxious’

Tracy Bell, 38, lives in Bedford and has suffered from occasional bouts of depression for 10 years

My GP prescribed me gym membership as therapy. I went to the sessions because I felt I had to, but I hated every minute and stopped as soon as I could.

I went time after time because it was my prescription, but I felt so self-conscious and anxious. The exercise environment is just so cliquey – I would never have made any friends.

Everyone there was completely different to me. They were thinner, fitter and better at exercise. To make things better, I would time my trips really carefully. I would make sure I went mid-morning, so I missed the morning rush and then the lunchtime rush, too – just to make sure I would be seen by as few people as possible.

I’ve been asked if I talked to my friends about how I felt, but there’s no way I could. They are so much thinner and more sporty than me.

A lot of my friends who live near me are a little bit younger and I just know they wouldn’t understand. I don’t know how to put it – I guess I feel like I must be the only one who feels like this.

GPs devise new treatment to beat depression. It’s called gardening

25 Sunday Mar 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Depression

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anxiety, Depression; Gardening, Exercise, stroke

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/gps-devise-new-treatment-to-beat-depression-its-called-gardening-7584583.html

Doctors are to swap pills for the potting shed under plans to prescribe gardening on the NHS as a way to help patients beat depression.

Time spent planting, pruning and propagating can be more powerful than a dose of expensive drugs, according to Sir Richard Thompson, president of the Royal College of Physicians.

He claims the Government’s health reforms will give GPs more choice in how to treat patients, and allow them the freedom to embrace the physical and mental health benefits of horticulture.

“Drug therapy can be really expensive, but gardening costs little and anyone can do it,” said Sir Richard, who is a patron of Thrive, a national charity that provides gardening therapy.

The idea is the latest in a long line of offbeat ideas aimed at improving the nation’s health, from dance lessons that can combat obesity to sending depressed people on camping trips. Under the coalition’s health reforms, clinical groups led by GPs will commission services and Sir Richard, who spoke out in favour of the changes, believes patients could benefit more from gardening classes than extra medication.

“I have, for some time, thought doctors should prescribe a course of gardening for people who come to them with depression or stroke,” Sir Richard said. “The new commissioning structures about to be introduced might allow more innovative treatment approaches to be put in place, including the opportunity to try gardening rather than prescribe expensive drugs.”

Too often, appointments are rushed and doctors are unable to spend time talking to their patients. “There are definite benefits to longer consultations – I would much rather a doctor had time to listen to patients and, instead of prescribing anti-depressants, prescribe a course of gardening.”

Half an hour spent working in the garden can burn off some 200 calories, according to a study published last year. Sir Richard added: “I always wonder why people go to the gym when there is a ‘green gym’ outdoors for us all – and, what’s more, it’s free. Gardening burns off calories; makes joints supple and is fantastic exercise. It is a physical activity that has been shown to be helpful in the treatment of anxiety, depression and dementia.”

Ian Rickman, who suffered a stroke at the age of 40 which left him paralysed down one side, has since been helped by Thrive.

He said: “At first, I burst into tears a lot. I couldn’t see a way I would ever be able to live my life again, to walk out into a garden, let alone work in a garden. Therapy through gardening is a powerful tool – it helped me come to terms with my stroke, and it helped me learn how to live again.”

The idea of gardening as a therapy is gaining high-profile backing from other quarters. The TV presenter Alan Titchmarsh has hailed horticulture for being “great as a therapy” that can “make a real difference to disabled people’s lives”. And the Health minister Paul Burstow added: “There is plenty of evidence to show the benefits of exercise on people’s health and well-being. I’m sure gardening brings those benefits.”

Just the job: How you can enjoy the health benefits of gardening this weekend:

Seedy business Sow vegetable seeds such as carrots, turnips, radishes, rocket and lettuce outside, and try some herbs in pots or trays.

First cut Take advantage of the warm weather to fire up the mower for the first time. It will help create a denser carpet for the summer.

Dead ends Finish pruning any roses, and remove dead leaves and old stalks from perennials. Cut back ivy.

Carry the can Consider buying a water butt: it may be a long dry year.

Water works Clear ponds and reinstall pumps and lights.

Heatwave Enjoy the sun!

How joggers can help the housebound

15 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Older Adults

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Tags

elderly, Exercise, Housebound, stroke

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/mar/04/good-gym-exercise-community-work

Every Thursday evening, whatever the weather, Harriet Cawley runs two-and-a-half miles from Shoreditch, east London, to the home of her coach, Michael Mulcahy. Cawley regularly undertakes half-marathons but this is no ordinary training session. Mulcahy is a house-bound widower who enjoys receiving a London Evening Standard from Cawley and having a chat for half-an-hour. After which, Cawley runs home again.

Cawley is a member of the Good Gym, a not-for-profit organisation that encourages people to combine their exercise regime with a spot of social care, matching busy workers with elderly “coaches”, who receive a daily paper or other modest delivery and, in turn, provide an incentive for their weekly visitors to keep on running. Set up two-and-a-half years ago, the Good Gym is this year expanding across all Olympic boroughs, part-funded by the Olympic Park Legacy Company.

The Good Gym was the brainchild of Ivo Gormley, 29, who discovered that combining a weekly run with a visit to a housebound friend of the family was just the motivation he needed to keep him exercising; it helped that his elderly friend was a former boxer who could offer training tips. As Gormley did his prescribed situps, he thought about how best to link up a series of very modern disconnects: how few people have the time or energy to volunteer and yet use gyms to burn off excess energy; and how little dialogue there is between working people and the elderly, particularly in densely populated urban communities.

“Gyms are this ridiculous invention,” says Gormley. “People have got too much energy and go to these weird places where they get purged of it by machines. I thought we could channel the energy from people’s exercise into something more productive.”

Through working with the NHS, charities and local community centres, including The Sundial Centre in Bethnal Green and Toynbee Hall, the Good Gym matches runners with an individual coach – a housebound elderly person who would like a regular visitor. They are encouraged to take a newspaper or a modest gift to the value of £1.

There are also monthly group runs around east London, to perform useful activities along the way. So far Good Gym members have distributed flyers for a local hospice, tidied up community gardens and hauled compost on to a school roof. Two runners are now being sought for a somewhat unusual task: taking donkeys from Stepney City Farm for a trot. (The donkeys need the exercise to keep their hooves down; donkey handling training will be provided.)

Cawley, 38, a costume stylist, heard about the Good Gym through Twitter. “It seemed such a brilliant idea,” she says. It took four months for her to be checked by the Criminal Records Bureau (the Good Gym now uses a company to speed up this process and claims it takes just a couple of weeks), then she was assigned Mulcahy to run to, based on the distance she requested.

Having a break in her running works well from a training point of view: she does a speed run to Mulcahy’s house, rests there, then a does a more gentle, warm-down jog on the way home. Cawley is from Stockport and has no grandparents in London, so enjoys chatting to her elderly coach – “someone I would never have met,” she says. While the Good Gym advises runners to stay for about 10 minutes, Cawley sometimes chats to Mulcahy for an hour. Although he has family, and regular visits from professional carers, Cawley thinks he enjoys a visit from someone who does not worry like relatives and is not there out of professional duty. She didn’t really know what he made of “this random person turning up and chatting to him” until she told him she was going away on holiday. “He said: ‘I’ll really miss you.'”

Terry Duncan, 67, a retired printer from Stepney, uses an electric wheelchair after a stroke. He is regularly visited by Sally, another Good Gym member. “It’s lovely. I look forward to her coming,” he says. He played football when he was younger, but is not sure how much use he is as a coach. “I don’t coach her,” he says. What about a mid-run cup of tea? “She normally has a glass of water. She’s a bit hot and sweaty but sits down and has a chat. We’ve become good friends.”

Duncan has recommended the Good Gym to several immobile neighbours, but says they are “a bit dubious about strangers coming into their house”. Despite these fears, the Good Gym is expanding, with interest in Edinburgh and a Good Gym run in Chicago. Most significant this year will be its Olympics expansion. As organisers hope the Games will leave a more enduring legacy in east London, Gormley wants his enterprise to become a social norm for the young professionals moving into the new housing around the Olympic Park. “It’s an amazing opportunity to shape the culture of a new area,” he says. “And link it to the existing community.”

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