Distorção da Realidade

Boas.

Esta entrada vai ser maioritariamente em inglês por razões de direitos de cópia.

Quero que vocês vejam como as mulheres sofrem internamente com o massacre e aditadura da imagem. É o meu contributo para os seres que mais adoro neste mundo, pois as pessoas mais importantes da minha vida são mulheres. :)

KIM BRITTINGHAM - READ MY HIPS

How it all began"When I was a teenager, my mother took a picture of me standing in front of our house.
I stood unsmiling beside a flowering bush. I knew I was bigger and uglier than most girls, but maybe the camera would strike a deceptive angle and make me look pretty. When the picture came back from the developer, I was mortified.

I was going to make sure no one ever saw this awful image of me. I stole it from its paper envelope and scurried away to my room. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the semi-gloss print in my hands. I had no idea I was so misshapen! I knew I was pear-shaped; all the women in our family were. But genetics had hung themselves on my frame with an unnecessary flourish of cruelty. My hips ballooned out from my body, in freakish contrast to my trim waist. I was an extreme, like those apes with shockingly bulbous red bottoms.

I began to cry. My God, I thought. I’m deformed!

Clearly, I’d have to cover this up. Never again would I wear a shirt or sweater under 32” long -- or at least not until I fixed this problem. I’d wear tunics and dumpy cardigans, and men’s flannel shirts three sizes too big, just because they covered my hips. I took the photo to my desk and with a fine-tipped black marker, oh-so-carefully, I shaved several inches off my hips, applying the ink in parentheses-like strokes until I’d blacked out the swells of excess flesh. I sat up straight and regarded the image of myself with a “normal” body, and felt overcome by a surge of shimmering hope. I decided to go on a diet. The dieting years a.k.a. the climb to 310My mother and I joined Weight Watchers together. We took turns weighing our food on a little white scale. We monitored our food exchanges with vigilance and logged them on charts stuck to the refrigerator. My dad complained about the cases of diet soda we sucked down at record speed. For the first time, I tried cottage cheese. It was almost as thick as ice cream, but not nearly as good. I asked for the Jane Fonda Workout Album for Christmas.
Inevitably there came a day at the mall when I was alone with pocket money, and the aroma of crisp french fries glistening with oil and freshly dumped from their wire basket proved too much to resist. That day, I “blew my diet”.

Oh, but it had been so long since I’d eaten anything delicious! I couldn’t stop at the fries. I was like a starving orphan set free at the Fancy Foods Show. I ate Chips Ahoy cookies soaked in whole milk; hulking tablespoons of peanut butter whipped into soup bowls full of chocolate ice cream; Nutella on Wonder Bread. I ate like there would be no tomorrow, because tomorrow I’d be back on my diet. And surely, with all the weight I had to lose, it might be years before I’d ever enjoy these treats again. Eventually my mother tired of buying and cooking “diet foods.” She didn’t want to pay the weekly fee at Weight Watchers anymore. Jane Fonda’s voice started getting on my nerves. The exercises bored me to tears -- literally. I gained back what I lost -- plus ten pounds more.
In time, I gave it another go, this time with Nutri-System -- and then later with Jenny Craig, and Richard Simmons’ Deal-a-Meal. There were diets of my own making, like the Just Eat Pasta with Fat-Free Creamy Italian Salad Dressing All The Time Diet. There was the diet recommended by a crackpot nutritionist giving free consultations from the back of a health food store. He told me to eat nothing but meat and dairy. Without carbohydrates, he said, my body would devour its own fat. I lost weight so fast people thought I was sick.
What I really lostThere were many moments of triumph on the scale -- at home, at the weight loss center, on the big pay-scale in the drug store. And there were just as many moments of frustration, desperation and deprivation as I un-did all the dieting I’d done. 145 to 128; 128 to 155...one day I’d peak at 310.
Once upon a time, food was fuel for my body and a pleasure to my senses. But it became so much more. Now it’s supercharged with meaning and burdened with responsibilities it never signed up for.
Food is a merciless torturer. It’s a mirage in the Sahara. It’s a temptress who crumbles to dust at first touch.
Food whispers absurd promises, flashes neon pink and blue like Vegas, hums with the solemnity of religion.
It’s the husk of a dead therapist, taxidermized and set upright behind glass. It winks like a loose school girl. It’s a dolt who solves nothing. Uncovering my pastEarlier this year, I was asked to appear on The Today Show, and the producer requested that I provide pictures of myself at different stages in my life. As I was digging through a box of old photos, I came upon the photo of myself with the inked-out hips. Obviously I couldn’t see the true shape of my body beneath the black marks, but I stopped to study my 15-year-old upper arms, cheekbones and chin. Hm, that’s strange. I thought this was a Fat Picture. I carried the photo to my kitchen table, hovered with a damp cloth and finally rubbed away the crescents of black ink that recontoured my hips. It came off easily; the picture was like new.

I couldn’t believe what I saw.

Underneath the ink, there was almost…nothing. But I remembered this picture. I remembered hunching over it alone in my bedroom, making delicate corrective strokes on an embarrassingly disproportionate girl.
What happened to the hips, those big goiter-like hips I fantasized about cutting off with our electric Thanksgiving turkey knife? Where were they? I remembered seeing them there! I know I did, I looked ridiculous! They were so awful, I’d been willing to do anything to get rid of them. I was determined to diet those hips off my body before I got stuck with them for life! There was nothing wrong with the girl in the picture.

How I wish someone could have told her."

E ASSIM EU O DIGO: NÃO HÁ NADA DE ERRADO COM VOCÊS.