I was put on a diet when I was 10. My mother said that women with smal — Diet

"In their world, there is a size zero, and it’s a status symbol. The chronic dieters have been as it since they were eight and nine years old."

"Because of their remote location, the Fiji islands did not access to television until 1995, when a single station was introduced. It broadcasts programs from the United States, Great Britain, and Australia. Until that time, Fiji had no reported cases of eating disorders, and a study conducted by anthropologist Anne Becker showed that most Fijian girls and women, no matter how large, were comfortable with their bodies. In 1998, just three years after the station began broadcasting, 11 percent of girls reported vomiting to control weight, and 62 percent of girls surveyed reported dieting during the previous months."

"While diets high in protein and low in carbohydrates were shown to be beneficial for reproductive function, they had detrimental effects for health in mid-late life and also led to a shortened lifespan."

"To eat modestly doesnt kill a man, but to covet will murder you. To eat a little is to live splendidly."

"Many medical professionals, too, were trapped in what I’d call the “anorexic paradigm.” They hadn’t yet understood that eating problems take many different forms and inhabit bodies of many different sizes and shapes. Binge eating-a chronic problem among many African American women-is no less a disordered relation to food than habitual purging, and large women who don’t or won’t diet are not necessarily comfortable with their bodies."

"The earliest documented examples of micronutrients’ influencing immunity date from the nineteenth century. Such work indicated previously unappreciated links with immunity and made a strong case that infections did not cause observed disorders and pathologies but were secondary to deficiency in micronutrients. Supported by clinical and epidemiological studies, which show a substantial negative correlation of nutritional deficiencies with immunocompetence and the reverse correlation with the risk of infection and related pathologies, is the idea that nutrition is an important determinant of immunity is now generally well accepted (Fig. 1). Nevertheless, the impact of dietary elements in immune system–related processes is still often dismissed, even when substantial amounts of data correlate diet with immune system–related related disorders."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"