I heard out about this episode on Every Women Has an Eating Disorder (where she gives a great breakdown of what the show covers). It has some pretty funny moments–I love sarcastic humor. HAES (health at every size) advocates, Paul Campos and Glenn Gaesser, were interviewed, and I had no idea, but they are both slim men. I think a lot of the time people misconstrue the size/fat acceptance, HAES etc., movement as just fat people trying to make excuses for being fat. But this shows that there are indeed, skinny folks involved in this as well. This shouldn’t be surprising to me, for I am one. Being relatively skinny myself, I often find it uncomfortable to talk about this issue from fear that people will not take me seriously or just say, Oh, but you’re skinny anyway, so what do you care? Or that I don’t know what I’m talking about or can’t possibly understand because I’ve never been fat.

You can watch the episode on YouTube (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Beware if you have sensitive ears, there’s a lot of swearing–gratuitous use of the-F-word. Oh, and there’s bit of nudity at the end, which is the part that puzzles me the most.

This is how the episode ends: Black and white headshot of a skinny guy. They ask, Is this a model? (Then zoom out to full-body shot.) No, it’s a cotton farmer from the Depression era and he’s skinny because he’s starving. Ok, so that’s a great point. Then they cut to the last scene of Penn and Teller lounging and being fed by, get this, two really skinny, naked chicks. This time it’s to make a comparison between lust and food (I guess) and how obesity science needs to catch up with sexual science (eating and fornicating are natural instincts). Ok, fine. But why show two skinny chicks (gratuitous nudity aside–that’s not the point of this) as lustful objects immediately after comparing skinny models with starvation? It’s like they are saying, Yes, obesity is bullshit, but really, who wants to look at a fat chick anyway?

Still, this episode was a step in the right direction. Too bad it wasn’t aired on a national network where it could get more viewers–but then they wouldn’t be able to swear. Swearing doesn’t bother me (even though I think it often makes the speaker look stupid), but it’s too bad that it was used in this context, because I know a lot of people who will shut out any kind of message if it is delivered in this manner, and this is a message a lot of people need to hear.