Archive for July 24th, 2008

Temple basketball is number 20 in ESPN’s ranking of most prestigious basketball programs since 1984-1985. Had we pulled off a couple Final Four appearances, we’d be even higher. I knew we had a well-known program, but I didn’t think it was quite as consistent as it is, especially over the last few years. But even with the small downturn the program has taken, we’ve only had one losing season. Not too bad.

Having spent a little time traveling over the past few weeks, including spending time in some very urban areas and some verrry suburban, borderline rural areas, I can safely say that all the talk about obesity is warranted. Now understand, based on what I saw, it’s not just Us, but it definitely is Us. So when I see pieces like this out of Madison, Wisconsin, I kinda cringe.

The disparity is most pronounced among women — almost twice as many African-American women are obese compared to white women in the state. And that disparity is what makes black women believe they are being held to a white standard of beauty and body type. Which is nothing new, said Beverly Burns of Madison, who was recently treating her visiting granddaughters to ice cream at the East Towne Mall food court. Burns recalls that as a young girl her mother was forced to stand with her back against the wall in the school gymnasium, and told that the space between her body and the wall meant that she was too fat. Burns is still indignant.

It’s weird. Having always preferred that svelte body type, I’m like, ‘I coulda been told you that.’ But I’m also keenly aware that obesity as a health issue and obesity as a body type issue have a dangerous confluence. I know quite a few women who think of calls by the medical industry for women in general, Black women in particular, to lose weight, as being motivated by some insidious plot to make them dislike their bodies. But there’s a difference between being physically fit and being trim. There’s also a difference between being curvy and being fat.

Now, here’s where I side with the people who look skeptically on these types of studies: the basis for declaring someone obese is the Body Mass Index, which, while mostly accurate, can yield some strange results because of the way it’s calculated. For instance, when I work out a lot, I tend to get heavier because I grow muscle. My BMI then goes up, moving me into the overweight range. Not that I’m all musclebound, but it’s obvious that the growth ain’t fat. At the same time, I know that in the overwhelming majority of the cases, the correlation between BMI and body fat is pretty much right. So then it comes back to health.

Not being a woman, I can’t pretend to know what it’s like to think that your body type is not “right.” Dudes pretty much get a pass. Not entirely, but we get a lot more leeway than the ladies. At the same time, some of these sisters need to recognize that even though they may have curves, a lotta that weight is not being carried in their breasts and hips. It that might be where they notice the weight lost first, but I’m tryin’a tell you — from scientific observation, of course — sometimes people think they got ‘S’ curves when they really got ‘O’ curves.

Self-delusion is just as bad as media inculcation.