If a lot more women woke up one morning with a healthy self-image, have you any idea how many weight-watching companies would be broke by nightfall? And membership at get-slim health clubs would drop — drastically.
On the upside, ice cream and cake sellers would see the kind of economic upswing that just might get the federal government out of hock from the sales tax. After all, what women spend on trying to be skinny could bankroll a small country.
Yes, a number of them are sweating and straining for the right reason. They’re perhaps carrying more weight than is good for their hearts. No argument there. However, point is more than a few women carrying a fair amount of heft courtesy of nature’s bounty, don’t like looking in the mirror because the message is everywhere — magazines, movies, you name it — if you don’t have to run around in the shower to get wet, you are not desirable.
American media, the most powerful propaganda machine on the planet, barrages you with enough bombast to make you internalize the idea that “I inherently am less than.” From there you go to, “If I lose enough weight, I won’t be less than anymore. Okay, I can’t reduce these damn big bones, but I can shed some of what’s on them.”
Problem is, and it doesn’t take a health expert to figure this out, if you’ve got big bones, you probably need to keep a proportionate amount of meat on them. And an appropriate amount of (he said the forbidden word) fat.
The sexiest aspect of any woman is her personality, which gets handicapped when she’s sitting across the table from her dinner date worrying about her self-image. Film goddess Sophia Loren said it best, not an exact quote, but along the lines of, “The woman most comfortable with herself is the most attractive woman in the room,” the woman who’s best at ease with who she is. Considering the attention homegirl historically has attracted, one hazards the guess that Loren reasonably knows whereof she speaks.
What a wonderful thing it would be if more women said, ”To hell with dieting.” It would, along with freeing them from the conflicting constraints of battling their waist lines, stimulate the economy like nobody’s business. If gals, from reed thin to thickalicous, suddenly started eating the way they wanted to, supermarket shelves, the snack sections’d be first to go — would empty overnight.
So, women’s self-image is — say it with me — important, and not only to women. Trust me, anything impacting women impacts men and everyone else everywhere around the world.
Here’s hoping a lot more women get happier with self. We’ll all be better off for it.
Dwight Hobbes welcomes reader responses to P.O. Box 50357, Mpls., 55403.
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