Heroic size evokes power and presence in some professions; in others the wisp rules the runway. What looks slim and elegant in one context looks asexual in others. Plumpness fetches marriage proposals in some cultures; in others, not so much. The "Rubenesque" figure is the ideal in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.
Sharon LaFraniere reported in the International Herald Tribune (July 3, 2007):
In this patriarchal society many Mauritanian women do everything possible to add flesh. Do not think in Western terms of watching the scale to add pounds. This is a 'look' mothers of marriageable daughters seek. For decades, the Mauritanian version of a crash diet was a crash-feeding program, designed to create girls rounded enough to display family wealth and epitomize the Mauritanian ideal. Girls were forced to drink gallons of fat-rich camel's or cow's milk daily, aiming for silvery stretch marks on their upper arms. The practice was known as gavage, after he French technique of force-feeding geese to obtain foie gras.
A Mauritanian man blames men's preferences partly on the brightly colored, head-to-toe mulafas that hide all but the most voluptuous female curves. 'A slender woman,' he said, 'just looks like a stick wrapped up.'
A mother of five living in a small village carries nearly 90 kilograms, or 198 pounds, on her 1.5 meter, or 5-foot frame. Her weight makes her husband 'very happy, of course,' she said. But her daughters had to go on a crash diet. 'I took them to the cows and made them over drink and I overfed them, just a little bit, just so they could look like real Mauritanian girls. Forty days was enough to get them in the shape I wanted.'
Researchers have found a strong inverse correlation between a woman's weight and her social and economic status (the higher the status, the lower the weight) in virtually all developed countries. When fast food is cheap and poor women are plump, then it is "in" to be thin.
The slim ideal is maintained by the high in status through diet and exercise. It is also encouraged by social mobility-slim women are more likely to "marry up," or to marry men with higher social and economic status than their family of origin. Studies in the United States, Germany, and Britain find that upwardly mobile women are much slimmer than their counterparts who marry men of the same social class or lower.
Slim may be the ideal, even though it is not the rule. Mississippi is the plumpest state in the United States, with 32.6 percent of the population overweight. Rounding out the top five plumpest states are West Virginia, Alabama,
Louisiana and South Carolina. Colorado remains the nation's fittest state.
In a study of eating disorders in the United States, researchers found that it is growing among both men and women, and that binge-eating disorder is even more common than the better known anorexia nervosa and bulimia. The nationwide survey of more than 2,900 men and women found that 0.6 percent of the group has anorexia, 1 percent has bulimia and 2.8 percent has a binge-eating disorder.
Lifetime rates of the disorders, the researchers found, are higher in younger groups, suggesting that the problem is increasingly common. The study also reported that eating disorders are about twice as common among women as men.
When we think about those at risk for anorexia or bulimia, we visualize some impressionable adolescent girls, desperate for the razor-thin bodies seen in movies and magazines. But in recent years, psychologists across the country have noticed a rise in eating disorders among women in their 30s, 40s and 50s.
At the extreme ends of the human weight spectrum are those who are nearly held captive by excess flesh or fragile skeletal frames. The safety of these patients and the accuracy of their weighment often becomes a matter of life and death.
