Excellent Grauniad article.
Women who fixate on their weight, unless we’re dealing with eating disorders, are not intelligent. Intelligence is not bestowed at birth, assessed through childhood and fixed until death. It is an aggregate of what you’ve got and what you do with it.
If you chuck it all away counting calories and wondering what size a Gap 2 really is in English, then that does not sit oddly atop your intelligence, like a monkey on a camel. The act of concentrating on trivia locks your mind like a bandsaw in one direction. It precludes the kind of inquiry that might make you extend yourself. It simply makes you less intelligent.
I know that might sound a bit harsh but I like the no-nonsense approach of what the writer has to say. Clearly when we are doing something stupid we are not being ‘intelligent’.
casa azahar 
I must be brave to be the first on comment on *this* one! Or not intelligent…
I will probably always have to watch what I eat, but then my obsession is more diabetes related than appearance related, as I don’t give a toss what I look like. 🙂
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If you focus too much on any one thing then other things are going to slide. However, I would say that most people who watch their weight suffer from mild variants on the basic eating disorders…..or perhaps totally new ones.
The relationship people have to food can often be unhealthy, if only because it functions on an addiction basis and there’s so much utter crap available…most of which is made to make it more addictive. Add social pressure and you might find that it’s less the stupid people as it is the insecure or the weak willed.
Or even just the unhappy.
I don’t know though, I’m just a smelly hippy.
I do however have experience with incredibly smart women who have issues with their weight. I keep trying to promote the idea that they don’t really need to worry about it. They insist they’re just ‘doing it for themselves’. This is always debatable, but then, like I say, they are intelligent…so they should know.
Rambling. x
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For me the key word in that quote is “fixate” and I also think, as AC has pointed out, that focusing too much on any one thing is neither healthy nor intelligent.
Meanwhile, having to constantly watch one’s diet and weight due to a health problem like diabetes is intelligent, though perhaps there is a fine line between being careful and becoming obsessed.
Anyhow, as I am about to embark on post-holiday lifestyle changes in order to both lose weight and get healthier, I am hoping to do this ‘intelligently’ and not become an obsessive bore about it. 😉
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I agree with you all – it may not be intelligent to obsess about what you eat just because you’re worry about your weight/appearance, but then its equally unintelligent not to care what you eat, because that way can lie heart disease, diabetes etc etc.
Eating a healthy diet and getting plenty of exercise is not ‘fixating’.
Balance seems to be the key, as in most things (particularly walking along narrow branches at a great height, then its especially critical).
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As I said before I simply made Balance and Harmony my new years resolutions.
Either incredibly easy or incredibly difficult depending on how you look at things.
We’ll see how it goes I expect.
Anyway, in a vaguely related area, I spent about half an hour today working on my balance by trying to stay upright in really intense gale force wind down on the beach.
Really wakes you up.
Wonderful.
I’ll save the narrow branches for later.
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Bums are supposed to look big. They are a sign of fecundity. The modern fixation of the stick-insects we see in the media has perverted a natural and wonderful part of life into some sort of modern disease.
Ewww – I have an ounce too much on my behind!
I guess it is too true; women dress, and diet, for other women. Not for men.
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It’s quite handy to have a stuffed behind. Hurt less when you’re seated at an uncorfortable place for instance.
Wide hips are not always a sign of fertility. Over wide hips can be a sign of the opposite actually.
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“I guess it is too true; women dress, and diet, for other women. Not for men.”
Well, and only for other obsessive like-minded women.
One of my students is a lovely and quite slender 20-year-old woman. Last week her stick-insect 50-ish mother took her to the endocrinologist to see if there was some medical reason her daughter gains and loses weight quite rapidly all the time. Duh!
That’s the sort of shit I really hate. Perfectly healthy and pleasant-looking people being told they have a problem because they don’t fit into some warped concept of ‘acceptable beauty’. 😡
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