Delighted to report that I am not experiencing hunger pangs, that is definitely good news. Suddenly thought of a word that might explain this – Googled and, as usual, found an answer. The word is ketosis, and this is what it is: Research has shown that ketosis may have several health benefits. One of the biggest benefits of ketosis may be weight loss. The process can help you feel less hungry, which may lead to eating less food. It can help you lose belly fat (visceral fat) while maintaining a lean mass. Hmmm
Of course, nothing is altogether perfect and there may be side effects. “Common short-term side effects include fatigue, headache, brain fog and upset stomach, aka “keto flu.” Long-term health risks include kidney stones, osteoporosis and liver disease. Other risks are unknown, since no long-term studies exist”.
Miracle of all miracles, there I was reading, writing and thinking of the female body and what did I discover in the March 27, 2028 New Yorker magazine? Jia Tolentino’s article The Ozempic Era. I do so love its beginning: “The ideal female body of the past decade, born through the godless alliance of Instagram and the Kardashian family, was as juicy and uncanny as a silicone-injected peach. Young women all over the Internet copied the shape—a sculpted waist, an enormous ass, hips that spread generously underneath a high-cut bikini—and also the face atop it, a contoured hybrid of recognizably human mannequin and sexy feline. This prototype was as technologically mediated as the era that produced it; women attained the look by injecting artificial substances, removing natural ones, and altering photographic evidence.”
But this idealism suddenly began to change, says Tolentino, using the words and wisdom of Dana Omari.
Dana Omari, a registered dietitian and an Instagram influencer in Houston, has accumulated a quarter of a million followers by documenting the blepharoplasties, breast implants, and Brazilian butt lifts of the rich and famous. Recently, she noticed that the human weathervanes of the social-media beauty standard were spinning in a new direction. The Kardashians were shrinking. Having previously appropriated styles created by Black women, they were now leaning into a skinnier, whiter ideal. Kim dropped twenty-one pounds before the Met Gala, where she wore a dress made famous by Marilyn Monroe; Khloé, who has spoken in the past about struggling with her weight, posted fortieth-birthday photos in which she looked as slim and blond as a Barbie. All over Instagram, the wealthy and the professionally attractive were showing newly prominent clavicles and rib cages. Last spring, Omari shared with her followers the open secret behind such striking thinness: the Kardashians and others, she insisted, were likely taking semaglutide, the active ingredient in the medication Ozempic. “This is the ‘diabetic shot’ for weight loss everyone’s been talking about,” she wrote. “Really good sources have told me that Kim and Khloé allegedly started on their Ozempic journey last year.” Omari was about to start taking a version of the medication herself.”
The writing is absolutely admirable. “Kardashians were shrinking” “As slim and blonde as a Barbie.” Not only great writing but fabulous facts as well. Some of this factual information is rather shocking.
“More than forty per cent of Americans are obese, and eleven per cent have been given a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes. Both conditions involve metabolic dysfunction: Type 2 diabetes is characterized by resistance to insulin, a trait that tends to develop as a person gains fat; insulin resistance leads to high blood sugar, which increases the risk of stroke, heart disease, nerve damage, and more. Obesity is correlated with, among other things, higher rates of cancer, sleep apnea, and liver disease. For people living with these risks, the new medications may be a godsend.”
Forty percent of Americans are obese, my goodness! But the godsend of this miracle drug took a sudden turn.
“In the actual universe that we inhabit, the people who most need semaglutide often struggle to get it, and its arrival seems to have prompted less a public consideration of what it means to be fat than a renewed fixation on being thin.”
Talentino next launches upon a historical study of the ideal female body, fascinating and important to consider.
“In the Renaissance and for centuries afterward, the Platonic ideal of the female body in the West was defined by proportionality: Rubens’s expressive fleshiness, the gentle undulations of Botticelli’s Venus. Then the Industrial Revolution produced increasingly sedentary life styles and easier access to food, not to mention standardized dress sizes. The diet industry roared to life: thyroid extract was packed into pills and sold under names such as Corpulin and Frank J. Kellogg’s Safe Fat Reducer; there were “reducing salons” where women could have their flesh rolled and squeezed by machines. Women’s magazines enshrined the idea that high-class whiteness could be expressed through a thin body, and articulated a horror of fat and of cultures that valued it. An essay published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1897 refers to fatness as a “crime” and a “deformity,” and argues that a fat woman “will not be a social success unless she burnt-cork herself, don beads, and then go to that burning clime where women, like pigs, are valued at so much a pound.”
Talentino, using her own experience, speaks of continuing pressures placed upon women and some ‘pushing back’ attempts.
“People have been pushing back against fat stigma since at least the nineteen-sixties, when activists staged a “fat-in” at the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. But the desire to achieve thinness by any means necessary—amphetamines, grapefruit diets, SlimFast—remains an almost foundational tenet of female socialization.”
Talentino presents a balanced picture.
“In fact, both thinness and fatness can be the result of disordered eating, and both are dangerous at the extremes. In 1958, a physiologist named Ancel Keys initiated a long-term study in seven countries concerning the relationship between diet and cardiac health; later, analyzing the data, he found that very thin and very heavy people carried the greatest risks for heart disease.” Keys, however, focused on the very heavy, not the very light ones, using ugly words, calling obesity disgusting and repugnant.
Talentino continues in fine form discussing problems with the distribution of the drug, scammers profiting from the desperate and uninformed, the possible future, the amount of monies spent by drug companies in the advertisement of the product. It is a most balanced report. I am unable to provide the link but Google the author’s name and it will appear.
Bottom line: it is no panacea, which is a solution or remedy for all difficulties or diseases. No indeed, it is not a cure-all, heal-all, nostrum, elixir perfect solution nor a magic bullet.
Therefore, instead of contacting a scammer, or rushing in to see my incredible physician, I think I shall keep fasting for Ramadan. There are many benefits to be achieved as fasting is one of tf the five pillars. Observance is the Islamic Faith brings forth the promise of Jannah, the antithesis of premature death, discomfort and all side effects, known to man.
Traditional Muslim women clad in their abayas and hijabs have a distinct advantage over Western women. No one, except their husbands and family members, are permitted to examine their bodies – looking for belly fat, large rear ends or thickening waists.
Therefore, the photos of the day shall not be Alexis at her thinnest. But Alexis (Fatimah) while in Makkah and Medina, covered from head to toe. Occasionally I would wear my pajamas under the abaya. It felt rather decadent and daring. My pjs are most utilitarian, not at all sexy. Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever saw me in my pjs. And then my covered locks. There is/was no need to worry about the latest hair style. For a traditional Muslim woman, no one but husbands and family members get to see a woman’s hair. There is absolutely no need to coif . Coif, a verb, means to style or arrange (someone’s hair), typically in an elaborate way.
