Today in my regular Monday article about health and lifestyle in Antigua, I’ll continue to focus on the issue of women and obesity, which studies said is 400 percent more likely to affect Caribbean women than men. More importantly, as tragedy in my own family has made so glaringly clear to me, the link between obesity, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, and a host of other lifestyle related diseases, leaves women far more at risk than men here.
But one wonders if the message is getting past the doors of the doctor’s office. In response to my last article “Are Antiguan Women Losing the Fight for Their Lives against Obesity?” one respondent questioned whether “mental and emotional diseases like anorexia nervosa and bulimia” are actually worse than obesity. While I’d like to answer that question by saying that they are different issues, the truth seems a little more complex.
Unwholesome attitudes that pass for health consciousness have certainly been linked to eating disorders in journal articles such as ” Hiding the Anorectic: A Rhetorical Analysis of Popular Discourse concerning Anorexia“. On the other hand respected researchers such as Dr Gretchen Kerr of the University of Toronto argue that a more grounded health consciousness based on the desire to live an active lifestyle or the desire to be free of specific health concerns have actually been shown to be a powerful protection against eating disorders.
Concerning body image, what’s certain is that Caribbean women can teach women around the world a thing or two about carrying themselves with grace and sensuality at any weight. And this is as it should be for every woman. There is never any reason for a woman not to feel confident and beautiful. I’m sure that every woman will recognize how much easier it is to be motivated to respect and take care of her body when she recognizes that she is not waiting to be beautiful once she has lost some seemingly unobtainable amount of weight, but that she is already a beautiful woman who is simply moving towards weight loss goals for health reasons. If only Caribbean women could bottle that confident self-image and export it.
However, despite the unquestionable positivity of feeling confident and beautiful, the health repercussions of carrying too much weight can’t be ignored and something has to change. I asked some women I often see exercising on the beach about what they feel is preventing their sisters on the island from living more healthy and active lifestyles that would help them reduce this dangerous amount of overweight. One woman I often see fast-walking with her daughter told me “women are just busy with work and kids and all kinds of things. It’s not like with men, who feel they can just pick up and go exercise”.
Another woman I often see who is from the Caribbean but who now stays here only six months out of every year lamented how she had tried unsuccessfully to encourage her friends to come walking on the beach to get their pressure down. She couldn’t understand why they never took her up on it. She wondered if maybe “women here don’t appreciate the natural beauty of the place”. “You have to leave and go to a place where you don’t have these beaches and then come back before you think to go walking on the beach”.
Finally I got a couple of perspectives from men I see exercising alone on the beach without wives or girlfriends. Speaking of the women in their lives, both of these men said in effect that women here wait until their weight becomes a health problem.
My personal observation seems to indicate that there is some truth in what all of these people say. Women here appear to be far more constrained in how and when they exercise. Perhaps because of time, personal safety issues, or even preference, women here seem to most often exercise in the morning before work or in the evening after work. And when they do exercise they exercise either in a group with other women or with their male partners.
On the other hand, in my observation, greater numbers of men seem far more likely to get exercise all throughout the course of the day just by walking to where they are going or by going alone to exercise at the beach or wherever else as fits into their own schedule.
While lack of adequate exercise may not be the only factor involved in the epidemic of obesity among women here, it very likely is an important one. Real concerns of personal safety, and real constraints due to the many responsibilities that women have or even constraints due to women’s preference to exercise in groups, are all factors that must be considered in coming up with practical and workable solutions.
In my next article I’ll speak with some local experts to find out what solutions are gaining great success with women here.
Twitter
Facebook
Why is the writer deliberately confusing health and beauty? Seems to me that we know where the writer stands in response to the question that is the headline. Beauty is about pleasing aesthetics. So just the same way a person with a physical handicap can be considered beautiful, or a person who defies “conventional” definition can be beautiful, an obese woman can be beautiful. And remember that obese is not just Gabby Sidibe size, but someone who has more weight than the American standards set. And by the way, I saw Gabby on the cover of Ebony, and she was fat; even her fingers looked swollen, but she was radiating beauty, her face looked gorgeous, and her personality, as conveyed in the interview, was fabulous. Now, might she have health issues because she tips the scale at more than 300 pounds? Sure. Is she beautiful just the same? Hell yes. And, for my two cents, as an Antiguan woman, we’re not missing from the am and pm workouts because we’re fat and lazy. We have children to get set for school in the mornings and jobs to go to where we are expected to open up. At night, we have dinner to make, homework to oversee and kids to put to bed. Maybe if the me stepped up we could step out together.
That last sentence should read maybe if the men stepped up we could step out together.
Good Point Smoke Screen I agree fully…