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Samantha Irby Has Some Diet Advice for You: Stay Fat

Mother Jones

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Photo of Samantha Irby by Eva Blue

On this week’s episode of the Mother Jones food politics podcast, Bite (you should really subscribe!), we’re talking about fat shaming—and we hear from two amazing writers who try not to internalize all the messages about the importance of being skinny. First up, writer Lindy West, author of the book Shrill and many pieces about body image, including one for the Stranger called “Hello, I Am Fat.” Next, we talk to Samantha Irby, writer of the blog Bitches Gotta Eat and author of the new collection of essays We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Listen to the episode and read a short excerpt from Irby’s book below.

The following is an excerpt from Samantha Irby’s essay “Fuck It, Bitch. Stay Fat.”

Fuck it, bitch. Stay fat.

I mean, isn’t this what we really want to do anyway? Because we already know how one loses weight: eat less and exercise more. Or get surgery. Why are we still playing around with the Oreo diet or the whole-milk-and-unpasteurized-cheese diet or the diet where you still get to eat a pound of pasta?! Either you’re ready to eat vegetables and get on a treadmill, or you are not. And I’m ready. I just lost five pounds and here’s how: for two weeks I quit drinking booze and soda and I stopped eating dessert. I didn’t exercise—someone please tell me how you fit heart-rate-raising exercise into a schedule that includes working a real job and trying to get a good night’s sleep?—but I tried to set reasonable goals like “Don’t order one meat on top of another meat at lunch.”

Cover art provided by Penguin Random House

Dieting is crazy and turns most of us jerks into insufferable babies. Either (1) you’re a crabby asshole on the verge of tears all day long because you’re desperate for a handful of Cheetos, or (2) you’re perched atop a high horse made of fewer than twelve hundred daily calories, glaring down your nose at me and pointing out how much saturated fat is in my unsweetened iced tea. Man, don’t you hate a fat-skinny bitch more than anything else on the planet? You know who I mean—your friend who used to eat mayonnaise straight from the jar but who recently lost twenty pounds doing Whole30 because she was going through a midlife crisis and is now suddenly an expert on health and nutrition, totally qualified to rip the corn dog out of your greasy little clutches. HOLY SHIT, SHUT UP, GIRL. Can’t we all just decide that if you’re over the age of twenty-eight you don’t have to worry about being skinny anymore? Thin is a young woman’s game, and I’m perfectly happy to chill on the bench this quarter with a chili dog. And if I happen to burn a few calories while texting, then great.

Now, let’s not be crazy. Should you work out? Of course you should. But you don’t need some magazine intern cluck­ing at you from behind the computer screen about taking a jog around the block every once in a while. It doesn’t even have to be hard—just go to Curves a few times a week and trade a couple of meals a day for some Special K or a salad (but not the meat-and-cheese kind). And drink water. To make your belly feel full and distract you from how much you would die for a Dove bar. Also running to the bathroom all the time has to qualify as minimal cardiovascular exercise.

The hard part isn’t the knowing what to do, it’s the doing. I just had a yogurt. It had 150 calories in it and 2 grams of fat. I wrote it down in a little notebook full of lies that I keep in my backpack to motivate myself to try to eat better. In theory, that notebook is supposed to hold me accountable for all my food choices so that I can get on a path to better eating. In reality, I willfully ignore its existence every time someone brings a pizza to the office or the nights my friends coax me out to the bar or the entire week I spent in LA pretending I didn’t just vow to end my love affair with cheese. I know what I’m supposed to do; I just need someone to tell me how. Every single day until I die.

Seriously, though, every woman in America is probably an expert on health and exercise based solely upon her subscrip­tion to SELF magazine. Do you really need another article about how important it is to eat a big breakfast full of healthy fats and whole grains to curb afternoon snacking? NO, YOU DO NOT. You need bitches to write about how comfortable maternity jeans are for women who aren’t really pregnant. And sexy ways to remove a bra that has four hooks. I’m always amused when they encourage you to eat “instead” foods, like eating an apple when you really want to rub a bacon cheese­burger all over your boobs is a fair substitute. Why not instead list which ice creams have the least calories, by the pint? Oh, sure, you can tell a woman just to run five miles and take up crafting after she gets dumped by some asshole and her friends won’t call her back because they’re tired of listening to her dissect every single aspect of their relationship (“Do you think we’d still be together if I hadn’t hated on that Flight of the Conchords show in 2009?”), but she’d much prefer knowing whether an entire pint of Talenti has fewer calories than one of Häagen-Dazs. That’s an “instead” a girl could really go for.

The above is an excerpt from WE ARE NEVER MEETING IN REAL LIFE by Samantha Irby. Copyright (c) 2017 by Samantha Irby. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Samantha Irby Has Some Diet Advice for You: Stay Fat

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Weekly Poll Update: The Race Has Tightened Slightly, But Clinton Is Still Comfortably Ahead

Mother Jones

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Let’s get our final weekly polling update out of the way early. Here’s Pollster:

Clinton is 6.1 percentage points ahead of Trump, down a point from last week. In the generic House polling, Pollster has Democrats ahead by 3.4 points, also down a point from last week. Sam Wang’s meta-margin has Hillary Clinton leading Trump by 2.6 percentage points, down a point and a half from last week:

Wang’s current prediction is that Clinton has a 99 percent chance of winning and will rack up 312 electoral votes. He still has the Senate tied, 50-50, with the probability of Democratic control at 76 percent. On the House side, he has Democrats up by about 3 percent, which is not enough for them to win back control.

Overall, it continues to look like Hillary Clinton will win by 4-5 points, with my personal 95 percent confidence range at 3-6 points. The Senate will either be tied 50-50 or Democrats will win 51-49. Either way, they’ll control the Senate. The House will remain in Republican hands. Whether those hands are Paul Ryan’s or someone else’s remains to be seen.

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Weekly Poll Update: The Race Has Tightened Slightly, But Clinton Is Still Comfortably Ahead

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Donald Trump "Parts Ways" With Campaign Manager

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post describes some of Donald Trump’s recent problems:

Trump has been under heavy fire in recent weeks for a string of damaging controversies, from his clumsy response to the mass shooting in Orlando, to his highly personal attacks against a federal judge overseeing two lawsuits against him, to his campaign’s failure to disperse pledged donations meant for veterans’ charities.

That has given serious pause to allies and donors who worry that Trump is unable and unwilling to curb brash persona and bombastic style — which he will need to appeal to independent voters in a tough general election bid against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

So what is Trump going to do about this?

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has parted ways with his embattled campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, amid ongoing scrutiny over several missteps as the real estate mogul has sought to pivot to the general election.

Atta boy, Donald! When you screw up, fire someone. None of this can be your fault, after all. Or, who knows—maybe Lewandowski can recognize a sinking ship when he sees one and decided that this was a good time to jump. Either way, it looks like Paul Manafort is now officially the evil genius calling the shots for the Trump campaign.

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Donald Trump "Parts Ways" With Campaign Manager

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Saints’ Latest Offers 2 Takes on the Same 11 Songs

Mother Jones

The Saints
King of the Sun/King of the Midnight Sun
Fire

Chris Bailey, one of the greatest—and most underrated—singers in rock and roll, has fronted Australia’s Saints since the ’70s, when the band cut the snarling punk classic “(I’m) Stranded.” Bailey and a revolving support crew have explored a variety of styles over the years, with his gritty, expressive vocals the only constant. (Imagine Eric Burdon of The Animals with a little less blues.) Following a profile-raising cover by Bruce Springsteen earlier this year on his High Hopes album, the latest Saints outing is an interesting experiment, offering two different takes on the same 11 songs. King of the Sun, the nicer version, features big pop arrangements that employ horns, pianos and the like; King of the Midnight Sun presents a scuzzier, garage-appropriate alternative closer to the Saints’ original style. Either way, Bailey is a compelling leading man who never sounds an unconvincing note.

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Saints’ Latest Offers 2 Takes on the Same 11 Songs

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