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There are many people who specifically appreciate women who are at least plump. In fact, it is estimated that at least 10% of American men appreciate women with full figures - but I have been told by an American that a third of the men there are bbw admirers! I believe that the attitude of society & the media towards fat women will improve as our self esteem increases. How can a fat woman gain self esteem? My journey started with BBW magazine, from the US. Unfortunately the Australian BBW magazine (which was excellent, I have seen back copies) is long gone. I started buying the US version of BBW magazine in 1993, but a few months later it disappeared from my newsagent, so I subscribed. I have also subscribed to Radiance magazine, & Dimensions magazine, both from the US. (I believe the last issue of Radiance magazine was published in December 2000, but there are still plenty of interesting links from the Radiance magazine web site, see link above.) (September 2001 seems to have been the last printed issue of Dimensions magazine, but the web site (see link above) appears to be current.) Mode magazine, also from the US, used models on the lower end of the fat scale - but unfortunately Mode magazine seems to no longer be in existence. Closer to home was New Zealand Bella magazine - which was the southern hemisphere’s only lifestyle quarterly magazine with a fashion focus on plus sizes. I hope that soon there will again be an Australian magazine for bbw - a glossy colour fashion magazine, with size acceptance & appreciation letters, articles, fiction & personals - but with models & fashions in size 18 (US size 14) & up. After all, size 18 (US size 14), or even size 16 (US size 12) is where most fashion & lingerie manufacturers stop in Australia - this I hope, will change in future. 17 September 2006: Did you see the 'U-Bra' on the television current affairs shows in August? It only costs $29.95! What sucks is that it only comes in sizes 10, 12, & 14! Not only that, but after being told "For the bigger busted woman we also have the 'O-Bra' which is available in sizes 32A to 44G and in nude, black, chocolate and pink colour (currently in stock)", I found out that the 'O-Bras' "start at $79.95"! Isn't being fat expensive?! 19 September 2006: To be fair, this is the reply I've received from Arianne on Edward ((07) 3220 0095): "The 'O-Bra' is a fully structured bra catering for the fuller bust/figure. They have been heat moulded & plenty of technology has been used vs the 'U-Bra' without much structure at all. You will understand the 'O'Bra's once they are on the body." November 2006: My favourite bra is the newish "Barely There" by Berlei, which goes up to size 22E & comes in nude, white, black, & pink! It's actually padded, & gives a wonderful cleavage! It's RRP is only $49.95! |
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Have you discovered the size acceptance movement online? On the internet we can visit bbw friendly websites, read about & see pictures of bbw who are happy with their appearance, & share information, & support & encourage one another. There are a lot of clubs, dances & other social events for bbw & those who appreciate them in the US & Canada. I'd like there to be similar events where I live in Queensland, Australia - & all over Australia too. The trouble is, even though, as in the US, more than half of our female population is over size 16 (US size 12) - the vast majority of those women seem to be hating & feeling ashamed of their bodies. Appreciating our bodies is perceived as a radical idea here, it seems. There now is a Queensland Size Acceptance Association, with forty-six members so far. You may contact the owner of this list at: Qldsize-acceptance-owner@yahoogroups.com Take a look at these other size acceptance Yahoo groups, most of them Australian: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aussiebbwappreciation/, which has 903 members; http://au.groups.yahoo.com/group/BBW_Admirers_in_Perth/, which is new, & so far has 13 members; http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bbwsandsswsinoz/, which has 39 members; http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bbwsandtheiradmirersinaus/, which has 2,273 members; http://groups.yahoo.com/group/donttellmewhatsizeimustb/, which has 2,443 members; http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qldbbwfunandfriendship/, which has 185 members; http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Perth_BBW/, just new on May 8, 2007; http://groups.yahoo.com/group/realwomenhavecurves/, which has 269 members; &
Some Australian men who appreciate women who aren't slender seem to be "backward in coming forward". Perhaps their admiration has been met with disbelief by women who they have fancied in the past? If you're an Australian reading this, please sign my guestbook or email me & let me know how you feel about what I've written here. No matter where you are in the world, I'd like to hear from you. Check out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/curvyclippings/ for (mainly American?) news items of interest to the plus size community. Newsflash: (quoting from: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/stories/2007/2104024.htm#transcript) "...exercise is the best treatment. The question is why does exercise work in obesity? Because it burns calories? That's ridiculous. Twenty minutes of jogging is one chocolate chip cookie, I mean you can't do it. One Big Mac requires three hours of vigorous exercise to work that off, that's not the reason that exercise is important, exercise is important for three reasons exclusive of the fact that it burns calories. The first is it increases skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity, in other words it makes your muscle more insulin sensitive, therefore your pancreas can make less, therefore your levels can drop, therefore there's less insulin in your blood to shunt sugar to fat. That's probably the main reason that exercise is important and I'm totally for it. The second reason that exercise is important is because it's the single best treatment to get your cortisol down. Cortisol is your stress hormone, it's the hormone that goes up when you are mega-stressed, it's the hormone that basically causes visceral fat deposition which is the bad fat and it has been tied to the metabolic syndrome. So by getting your cortisol down you're actually reducing the amount of fat deposited and it also reduces food intake. People think that somehow exercise increases food intake, it does not, it reduces food intake. And then the third reason that exercise is important, which is somewhat not well known, but I'm trying to evaluate this at the present time, is that it actually helps detoxify the sugar fructose. Fructose actually is a hepato-toxin; now fructose is fruit sugar but we were never designed to take in so much fructose. Our consumption of fructose has gone from less than half a pound per year in 1970 to 56 pounds per year in 2003..." Newsflash: (quoting from: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/11/20/2095578.htm) "New mums need more sleep to lose weight - study...Researchers saying women who want to lose the extra weight gained in pregnancy should try to get more sleep...."We've known for some time that sleep deprivation is associated with weight gain and obesity in the general population," Dr Erica Gunderson said. "But this study shows that getting enough sleep - even just two hours more - may be as important as a healthy diet and exercise for new mothers to return to their pre-pregnancy weight." Newsflash: (quoting from: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/09/03/2022267.htm) "Patients who are obese or smoke will be refused some major surgical procedures at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Adelaide...Head of surgery Professor Guy Maddern says the aim is to stop post-surgical complications..."It's often those who have developed awkward folds in their skin that are leading to problems for them so it's really about trying to deal with that problem so they don't get into problems later on. "If they can't show a commitment to getting down to a safe weight and give up their smoking, we are putting them at greater risk than if they do.""
Newsflash: (quoting from: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12048?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=dn12048) "Obesity pill increases suicidal thoughts....Zimulti, ... Known generically as rimonabant, the drug is already sold in 18 countries under the name Acomplia...."We remain concerned about rimonabant's adverse event profile, specifically adverse psychiatric reactions," an FDA staff summary said...Karl Heinz Koch, an analyst from investment bank Vontobel, noted that other weight-loss drugs – Roche AG's Xenical and Abbott Laboratories' Meridia – were approved even though higher rates of depression are noted on their labels."
Newsflash: (quoting from: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200606/s1674253.htm) "...In the International Journal Of Obesity, the researchers say evidence pointing to declining physical activity and food marketing is more circumstantial than scientific... ...They nominate other valid contributors as the decline in hours of sleep, the increasing use of antidepressants and chemical hormone disrupters..." Newsflash: (quoting from: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9002&feedId=online-news_rss20) "...The first common genetic variant that substantially increases a person’s risk of obesity has been identified, researchers claim... ...Scientists predict that genes may contribute anywhere from 30% to 70% of the risk of obesity..." Newsflash: (quoting from: http://www.news-medical.net/?id=15686) "...human adenoviruses may cause human obesity... ...The Ad-37 virus has been implicated in animal obesity... ...In view of the finding,' wash your hands' as well as exercise and eat healthy, might be sound advice in future." Newsflash: (quoting from: http://www.news-medical.net/?id=14630) "...A regional health authority in the UK will refuse to treat overweight people needing hip and knee replacements on the National Health Service..... .....Patients with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more, the clinical definition of obese, will not be eligible for the joint replacement operations, even if they are suffering intense pain..." Newsflash: (quoting from: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,16967101-13762,00.html) "...Infection by certain pathogens triggers rapid increases in fatty tissue in animals, Nikhil Dhurnadha told the annual meeting of NAASO, the Obesity Society, in the Canadian city of Vancouver. At the same time, the discovery that many more obese people than normal-weight people have been exposed to a certain virus suggests a link between obesity and viral infection..... ....."Obesity is multifactoral," Mr Dhurandhar told scientists at the conference. He said there is proof that at least 10 different pathogens cause obesity in animals. They include canine distemper virus, RAV7 and MAM1 avian viruses, the Borna virus in rats - which is also linked with depression in humans, types of scrapie, three adeno viruses including AD5, AD36 and AD37 which cause fat gain in several species, and chlamydia pneumonae bacteria..." Newsflash: (quoting from: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=53814) "...Sleep deprivation would affect glucose tolerance and leptin levels and increase the appetite for unhealthy foods. She noted that sleep restriction would have greater impact on obese individuals, who have higher leptin levels to begin with, and on older adults..." : (quoting from: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7687) "Faulty gene linked to obesity and diabetes ...“Our study shows that insulin resistance might be a cause and not just a consequence of obesity,”... (quoting from: http://www.mercola.com/2002/feb/23/vitamin_d.htm) "Vitamin D deficiency has been linked with obesity. (18, 19) Vitamin D has recently been shown to lower leptin secretion. (20) Leptin is a hormone produced by fat cells and is involved in weight regulation. It is thought that the hormone signals the brain when fat cells are "full," but exactly how the hormone controls weight is not entirely clear. Additionally, obesity by itself probably further worsens vitamin D deficiency due to the decreased bioavailability of vitamin D(3) from skin and dietary sources, because of its being deposited in body fat. (36)" (Vitamin D can be made in your body after exposure to direct sunlight.)
14 May 2008: For over a week I've been walking each morning. I've worked up to 40 minutes a day, and I notice I already have a neckline tan. I've been walking at a steady pace, but today I did several brief stints of fast walking too, which is supposed to trick the body into increasing fat loss, for its survival. I'm about 4 or 5 sizes larger than slender at the moment. I'll update here during the coming weeks. As some of you know, I was riding an exercise bike for 40 minutes a day for a couple of years. It took that long to go down a size in clothing! I started a job which lowered the number of times a week I could fit exercise into my day, & eventually I took a few months off from exercising, only to discover that my beautiful new clothes were no longer fitting! So although it took a lot of exercise to show an appreciable effect, without it it seems I just get fatter. Another experiment I tried a couple of years ago was to abstain from all treats for six months. While everyone around me was eating dessert, drinking fruit juice or soft drink - I wasn't. The result? A slight loosening of the underwear elastic, but possibly due to the age of it, rather than my deprivation! I think though that I didn't actually gain any weight during this time. [I haven't always been fat, although as a child & teenager, I thought I was! In my teens & early 20s, I was, at about 5'6", 10 stone (140 lbs), & an Australian size 14 (US size 10). Later, I was a size 12 for perhaps a couple of years, (I only ate fruit - & so was hungry - all morning, had salad (no dressing), a potato, & toast for lunch, & toasted muesli with milk for dinner at night!) before I put on 5 stone (70lbs, 32 kg) with my first pregnancy! I lost weight quickly after my baby was born, but a year or so later I started getting fatter, even though I wasn't eating any more, nor exercising any less. Both my children didn't sleep through the night for about two & a half years (each), so sleep deprivation may have played a part in fat gain - plus for over five years I was rarely outside in the sunlight getting vitamin D, because I was busy inside with very demanding babies, & was keeping them out of the sunlight, thinking I was doing the right thing by their skin, only to discover in later years how important it is to get some sunlight on our skin every day, except in the hottest several hours of the day during hot weather.]
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Abundance Australia created: 14 January 1999 Updated: Sunday, July 06, 2008 08:48 AM |
A
bbw is a big beautiful woman, which is more
well-known in the US than in Australia. In almost seven & a half years I have had
over 100,300 hits to this page. I average 35 hits a day. The
majority of those hits are as a result of Google, followed by Yahoo,
& other, search engine results.
6July 2008: I've been walking for 40
minutes a day for almost eight weeks now. My clothes are
looser. Perhaps I've gone down half a size, but not a full size
yet.
