How watching Hoaders can help heal rather than just disgust

     A friend of mine said regarding my last post that she hates to watch Hoarders because it disturbs her and this was my response:
     It is probably the tapping (EFT, see the free info at http://www.eftuniverse.com/) I do that helps to heal in me what is disturbing in the (Hoarders) program.  When I see some adults whose parents are obviously acting out their on mental health problems and behaving or speaking in an unloving manner to their children who are just trying to help them...just trying to love them and be loved -- that disturbs me because that's the way both my parents treat/treated me most of the time.  The tapping helps to reprogram my brain regarding that "tape" or trauma and helps to heal me a little.
     When I saw an episode where a hoarder mother's childhood sexual abuse trauma was triggered by the clean up process I tapped because I am a survivor of that kind of abuse and doing my milder/smaller clean ups trigger a milder form of the same.  The same mother spent a lot of time on the 2-day program assisted clean up doing the boys rooms but refused to do the girls' even when the therapist on the scene tried to get the mom to so so and had the older girl ask herself.  Tapping to that helped to heal me from the many times my parents did kind things for my abusive brother just because he was the male child and neither of my parents ever though I, as a girl, deserved those kindnesses, privileges, assistance.

The Media -- Project, Perpetuate and Create --Weight Bias

The Media -- Project, Perpetuate and Create --Weight Bias

in Form and Content

The media including all advertising, entertainment and news, provide the primary channel in which notions of what is so-called normal body size, what are the usual behaviors of and health effects of being fat, indeed -- about what causes a person to be fat and how those people should be treated. 

As McCluhan coined, “The medium is the message,” in this case the physical, or rather non-physical act of using media itself increases the likelihood of weight gain.  We saw this whimsically depicted in the blockbuster Disney children’s film,  Wall-E where all the humans  waiting in a space ship for Earth to become capable of supporting life again, regardless of race, were very cute, very fat and used personal electronic media “pimped out” hover-lounges rather than their shrunken chubby legs as their only means of transportation.   Not only does watching television encourage us to be less active (if we would otherwise be doing physically active things), the constant commercials for junk food are created to trigger cravings and further distort our natural sense of hunger.

Media usage studies show that children spend a whopping 7 hours a day using some form of media and that the media rival peer influence and can supersede parental, church, and school influence on myriad indices including notions of weight.  So the media bear the lions’ share of responsibility of weight bias in form and content, especially in a nation where few medical schools even have an “obesities studies” elective option.  It’s sad that the majority of medical doctors themselves usually rely on their inaccurate cultural, rather than medical, knowledge of what makes their fat patients big and how health and weight really are connected and not.   

Some medical doctors whose research does not support popular weight bias say they find it difficult to get their research published in medical journals because of the weight bias of the editors. Often the authors of the medical studies, and certainly the journalists who use those studies for their headline weight biased studies, are basing their information on flawed weight biases rather than accurate science.

Examples of medical bias include doctors, nurses, nutritionists and other health professionals making derogatory comments and jokes about fat people, viewing us as lazy, lacking self control, non-compliant, unintelligent, weak-willed and dishonest[i].  A useful mini-documentary on weight bias in the health care system is at http://www.yaleruddcenter.org/what_we_do.aspx?id=254

Next Week:  Weight Bias is Racist; Fat is a Womanist Media Issue

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[i] Friedman, p. 5