Bring On The Cheesecake
Bring On The CheesecakeI AM…beautiful. As you are beautiful, as he is beautiful, as all of us, even our enemies, are beautiful. And yet, most of us spend a good portion of our everyday lives looking in the mirror, critiquing ourselves, pointing out problem areas, and generally going “ugh”. We compare ourselves to Kate Moss, Ricky Martin, Nicole Kidman, Brad Pitt, and Brittney Spears, all of whom in our eyes exemplify the ultimate in beauty, sensuality, and … airbrushing. Yes, airbrushing, that oh-so-handy technique employed by magazines worldwide to make the attractive look perfect. Perfect? You call Kate Moss perfect? Every time I see her picture, I just want to force-feed her a huge piece of cheesecake!But her look of three-square-meals-a-year has become en vogue as women and men all over the country starve themselves in order to conform to what they perceive as society’s concept of beauty. Our appearance, this thing we call beauty, where does it come from? Can it be photographed and plastered on a 50-foot billboard or circulated on a million magazine covers? Consider for a moment that it might be something more personal. Something a little more than skin-deep. So “hit me baby, one more time,” fasten your seatbelts, and hold on to your cheesecake as I take you for a ride through society’s conceptions and misconceptions of beauty.
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard some healthy, attractive individual proclaim that they would do anything just to lose 15 pounds. Hello, we live in America. The land of plenty. The land of opportunity. The land of a $33 billion diet industry. People all over the world are starving and yet here we are spending ridiculous amounts of money so people can tell us not to eat. And then we get into the fad diets. Between the Cabbage Soup Diet, the Atkins Low-Carb Diet, the Grapefruit/Fruit Juice Diet, the Metabolism Diet, and the Russian Airforce Diet (it actually exists), it seems that all Americans ever do is diet. In fact, at any one time, half of all teenage girls in America are dieting. Now I prefer a different set of diet rules. I like the one that says if you eat something and no one sees you eat it, it has no calories. And then there are the rules that if you drink a diet soda with a candy bar, the calories in the candy bar are cancelled out by the diet soda. Oh, and did you know that food used for medicinal purposes NEVER count, such as hot chocolate, toast, ginger ale, and my personal favorite, Sara Lee Cheesecake. Ah, cheesecake: my #1 recommended cure for… anything! Never underestimate the healing powers of cheesecake.
Speaking of people in dire need of cheesecake, People Magazine recently
did a cover story entitled “Wasting Away” which chronicled eating disorders among female college students. It opened by talking about an incident in 1996 in which sandwich bags disappeared...
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