Up to 10 million teens develop disorders in this area. And worries about it can start much younger than that.
Adults are worried about it, too. And companies make big profits on our neuroses.
We’ve become a culture obsessed with it to a degree unprecedented in history. But solutions to it remain elusive.
Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, we’ll look at why, with all our focus on weight in today’s culture, many of us are getting fatter and fatter while millions of others are wasting away to nothing.
What in the world is going on with our weight?
There are so many factors at play here, aren’t there? A skinny-as-a-rail 13-year-old looks in the mirror and sees a whale. The advertising agencies air-brush models to within an inch of their lives and dramatically alter how we see beauty. Plastic surgeons give whoever has the moeny to pay whatever body they want. Doctors and drug companies push their solutions in packages of pills that make them richer and the rest of us sicker.
Research shows that 42% of first to third grade girls want to be thinner. And 81% of 10-year-olds are afraid of being fat. Our neurosis is being manipulated to make money. And not just that – our food industry has been seriously corrupted by a totally skewed profit motive that makes us realize that our corporations and political systems are exhibiting strong psychopathic tendencies.
The work of Norberto Keppe can help us to understand what’s going on here, and shows us how to develop new business and residence structures designed to take the power out of the hands of the banks and corporations, and put the resources, money and power into our hands. These ground-breaking structures and ideas are outlined in Keppe’s revolutionary book, Liberation of the People: The Pathology of Power. This book highlights his great idealism, but also his astute social critique, and his solutions. It’s great stuff. Write me at rich@richjonesvoice.com if you’d like a copy of this book.
We’ll look at our topic today – the Fattening and Thinning of America – in a very expansive way. My dear friend, Susan Berkley from New York City, joins me to talk with Claudia Pacheco, psychoanalyst and vice-president of Keppe’s International Society of Analytical Trilogy.