Tag: Stop

Categories
Health

Can We Please Stop Talking About Weight Loss During a Pandemic?


“Due to coronavirus, my summer body will be postponed until 2021.” Usually this kind of garbage only hits my feed when Jameela Jamil is ranting about #teatox. I’ve worked hard to unfollow any content that’s generally annoying or makes me feel like shit. But since the government issued its guidelines to shelter in place, there’s been a particularly insidious undertone to the posts popping up that I just can’t shake.

Despite the fact we’re going through an unprecedented health crisis, the prevailing message on social media right now is that we’re somehow supposed to be “making the most” of our time spent indoors. Write that novel! Organize your closet! Bake bread! Get quarantine fit!

Now, I don’t blame anyone for taking up a new hobby in order to distract themselves. You can only have so many conversations with your cat until you begin to feel completely deranged. But that last one—the idea that we should be using all this “extra time” to lose weight, or at least not gain any—moves beyond feeling productive and gives into a societal fear I thought we were moving past: Getting “fat.”

The collective fat panic I’ve seen as I scroll through social media is, frankly, appalling. “So will the producers of 600-Pound Life just find me or…” reads one meme that’s surfaced more times than I can count. A photo of Barbie next to a heavier “Carbie” (get it? She ate too much during quarantine? LOL!) has more than 120,000 likes on @girlwithnojob.

But it’s not just the obviously offensive fat jokes that meme accounts and out-of-touch influencers are posting. What’s more shocking are the dozens of frantic weight gain comments—almost all masked in sarcasm or wry self-deprecation—I’ve seen close acquaintances post. These are smart women—the ones who usually rally against diet-talk and fatphobia—that are sharing photos of cookies with captions like, “Going to have to buy a size up after this” or “Looks like I won’t be wearing jeans ever again.” Eating the pasta is what you’re worried about? OK.

A small sampling of the memes going around on social media right now.

Instagram

It’s not just within my circle of friends either. An alarming amount of people, it appears, are publicly broadcasting their fear that this time indoors will cause them to gain weight.

“I’m seeing so many memes that show before COVID-19 body and after COVID-19 body, or jokes comparing ‘COVID-15’ to the Freshman 15,” says Elizabeth Denton, an L.A.-based writer. “At first I chuckled, but then I thought about what that means. Whoever posted that thinks ‘fat’ bodies are funny or something to be ridiculed.”





Source link

Categories
Health

John Mayer Spoofed That Viral Celebrity ‘Imagine’ Video, and I Can’t Stop Laughing


Today’s little escape from the coronavirus comes in the form John Mayer spoofing the video of celebrities singing “Imagine” that went viral last week.

You know the video I’m talking about. Gal Gadot, Amy Adams, Kristen Wiig, and several other A-listers recorded themselves singing “Imagine” by John Lennon and spliced it into a super-cut. The intention was to lift people’s spirits during this hard time—and while they meant well, the stunt didn’t land properly. Social media backlash was swift, and everyone from Charli XCX to Trevor Noah took a shot at spoofing it.

But the award for best spoof, hands down, goes to John Mayer, who joked in a new Instagram video that he was approached about doing the video but thought the celebs wanted him to sing “Imagine” by Ariana Grande, not John Lennon. He then recorded himself belting some particularly funny lyrics on Grande’s song and intermixed it with the original “Imagine” super-cut. The result? Pure hilarity.

“Gal Gadot and a bevy of other celebrities released a rendition of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ that went far and wide across the internet,” he said in his video. “She asked me to be a part of this and I totally misunderstood the assignment and thought they wanted me to sing ‘Imagine’ by Ariana Grande from her 2019 smash hit album Sweetener.” (Mayer mixed up his Grande facts right there. Sweetener actually came out in 2018, and the song “Imagine” is off her 2019 album Thank U, Next, but I’ll let it slide.)

Check his spoof for yourself, below.

Mayer has been serving up some excellent quarantine content lately. He has a weekly live show on IG called Current Mood that’s a must-watch. Other celebrities like Miley Cyrus and Katharine McPhee are also blessing us with periodic feel-good content. Keep it coming, pals. We need it.





Source link

Categories
Health

Hugh Grant Is Recreating Love Actually Scenes To Try To Stop Brexit


For years, Grant had a reputation as a charming playboy. Reports of his romantic life, coupled with his wink-y, roguish interview style, gave him an appearance more like one of his bad-boy characters than a woke activist. But though his dimples are the same, his behavior has changed over the years. Grant’s Twitter account, complete with a picture of Audrey Hepburn dressed as a nun, posts constant political content. He’s also an active board member at Hacked Off, a campaign to hold press in the UK accountable. His quotes these days contain fewer and fewer witticisms about tea with the Queen and more comments like his August tweet in which he raged against current Prime Minister Boris Johnson, “You will not f**k with my children’s future. You will not destroy the freedoms my grandfather fought two world wars to defend.”

Asked by reporters about his habit of knocking on random doors, Grant referenced a gig from long before his Love Actually days. “I did used to sell fire extinguishers door-to-door,” he said. “I was very good.”

Ah, Hugh! Same dry humor, new desire to make the world a better place for his grandchildren. It’s just like he says—“If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.” And if you open your door in London this week, Hugh Grant might actually be all around.

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour.





Source link

Categories
Health

Sex After C-Section: Sex After My C-Section Helped Me Stop Feeling Like I’d Failed Giving Birth


It turns out that tiny strips of silicone can help reduce the appearance of scars. You place them on top of the wound at night, and over time the scar fades. I wasn’t home a few hours from the ob-gyn before ordering a jumbo pack online. The sooner it came, the sooner I could start getting rid of This Thing.

Before the scar, stretch marks, and baby, my marital sex life was hot. We were the kind of couple who often wouldn’t make it to the bedroom, christening the couch or a beach blanket in our desire. I felt confident as I figured what my husband saw in me was what I saw in the mirror: a former collegiate swimmer with small perky breasts and firm thighs. After my C-section, with grayish purple lines dancing around my nipples and lower abdomen, and a scar cutting through my pubic region, I’m not so seamless, the physical changes a reminder of what my body has been through.

When we were cleared to have sex after five weeks, I was excited to be close to my husband again but apprehensive about how it’d go. I wasn’t feeling particularly seductive—with breast milk leaking out of my nipples and my hair in an unwashed bun, I wasn’t exactly turning myself on. My body and mind had been through a transformation, one that felt far from anything bedroom-related.

But something changed when we had sex, my angry scar on full display. Naked again with my husband, I not only felt worthy; I felt hot. I felt reminded that my body is powerful, feminine. After all, it brought our baby safely into this world, vaginal birth or not.

“Pin me down,” I commanded, hardly believing how confident I felt. My husband grinned, never more willing to oblige. I finally felt like the strong, beautiful woman my husband had been telling me I was. His excitement for me—scar and all—reminds me to embrace myself more fully.

Our scars are difficult to accept. They remind us of something in our lives that didn’t go quite as we expected. But they are also a part of our journey, our story, our beauty. My C-section brought me my giggling babe. It brought me closer to my partner. Perhaps most important, it brought me closer to loving myself even when things don’t go to plan.

When I think about it that way, I don’t hate my scar at all. In fact, I don’t need those silicone strips. I never even opened the box.

Jenna Jonaitis is a writer in Michigan covering lifestyle, wellness, and parenting. Follow her on Instagram and see her other work here.





Source link

Categories
Health

Jennifer Siebel Newsom: It’s Time to Stop Treating Parenting as a Mom’s Burden and a Dad’s Adorable Hobby


On the morning of January 7, 2019, my husband was about to become the 40th governor of California, I was going to become the first “first partner” of California, and our four young children were going to take the stage and be thrust into the spotlight with a new level of national attention.

I had a plan for how I wanted to introduce our family to our state. The fight to put on tights and button-down shirts was won, though the fight to take off one coat was lost, and their hair was combed just so. And then, just a couple of minutes into my husband’s inaugural speech, our little Dutch wandered onto the stage holding his binky and his “passie”—much to the audience’s delight and my chagrin.

The media hailed Gavin as “Governor Dad,” and our son Dutch became an internet sensation. I, on the other hand, was asked by too many people to count—in that half-joking but in fact quite serious tone—how could I have possibly let him get up on that stage, and also, why did he still use a pacifier?!

California Governor Gavin Newsom at his 2019 inauguration, alongside his wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom and their four children

Eduardo Ezequiel

I tried to pretend it didn’t bother me, but the truth is it did. It was a reminder that despite our partnership and despite the support I feel in our relationship, I will always bear the responsibility of our children in a way Gavin never will.

And therein lies a deep truth about the struggle for equality, a truth that can often be hard to acknowledge: Policies and structural changes are essential, but on their own those can’t change our cultural attitudes and behaviors toward women. Until we stop treating parenting as a woman’s burden and a man’s adorable hobby, the gender gap we see at work and at home won’t disappear.

The research shows that when women become mothers they face a motherhood penalty at work. Employers are less likely to hire moms than they are to hire women without children, and when they do hire a mother, they offer her a lower salary than they offer women without children. Studies also show that mothers are considered less committed with their jobs in comparison to their childless coworkers, while men are considered more committed once they have children. In fact, men actually receive a fatherhood bonus, seeing a 6% increase in their salaries once they become parents! It’s not surprising then that my husband’s popularity seemed to soar after his big onstage dad moment!



Source link

Categories
Health

Lung Cancer Left Me In Limbo—But It Won’t Stop Me From Living My Life


At 32, I embarked on a second career—I love kids and was meant to be a teacher so I got my master’s in education. That same year, my son Parker was born, so I finished my classes online with a baby in tow.

Juggling the two wouldn’t be easy under any circumstances, but ours was particularly tough: Parker has hemophilia, which means he can bleed spontaneously and internally. Falls, broken bones, and even going to the dentist can be concerning. I have to give him intravenous injections. When Parker was 2, we found ourselves in the ER—except this trip wasn’t for him, it was for me. I was faint, dizzy, and had an immense feeling of malaise.

A chest x-ray revealed a mass on my lung. I knew instantly it was cancer.

I saw a pulmonologist, who wanted to take a wait-and-see approach. “No way,” I thought. I wanted the mass out. As the parent of someone with a bleeding disorder, you learn how to advocate for yourself. My doctor ordered a PET scan and there was god news: My mass didn’t appear to be cancerous. We scheduled another scan for six months later just to be sure.

By the time I got that second scan, I’d started teaching. The pulmonologist left me a message with the results. I didn’t listen to it for two weeks. When I finally did, I learned that my mass had grown and I needed to have surgery to remove it. I was scared to death—I had a 3-year-old son with health issues. I needed to be there for him.

When my surgeon opened me up, he didn’t know what he was seeing. The mass was like jelly. He sent it out to another clinic, and a week later, I found out it was an extremely rare type of lung cancer. I had to have a second surgery to take out the lower left lobe of my lung and my lymph nodes. I went to most of my appointments on my own so that my husband, Aaron, could be with our son. I started going to therapy to try to figure out to process everything, and my therapist suggested I ask Aaron what it’s like to be married to someone with lung cancer. He’s strong but he told me he felt like he couldn’t show weakness. Then he sobbed for the first time since my diagnosis.

I got involved with a lung cancer nonprofit called Lungevity. I also started going to Gilda’s Club, a cancer-support community named for Gilda Radner. I’m an African-American woman, and I met another African-American woman there who had breast cancer for the third time. She had to take two buses and then walk to chemo, which would sometimes make her late. The nurses, pissed at her tardiness, would sometimes turn her away. I meanwhile, had people at school sending food and helping to take care of my family. I had a supportive church group. I had other mom friends who helped to pick up the slack. We should all have that kind of support. How do you survive stage-4 cancer without it? My mission is to help other women of color survive cancer.

Three months after my first surgery, I started teaching middle school full-time. I couldn’t just stay at home and perseverate on my cancer. I had to do something. My students helped heal me. I didn’t tell them about my lung cancer until a month or two in. It was wonderful to be able to say, “If you feel like your life sucks right now, I promise it will get better.” I teach language arts, which is all about sharing stories and understanding characters. I think I have a lot to pull from.

For the first year after my surgery, I got a scan every three months. Now, in my second year of recovery, I get one every six months. Once I make it to five years, we get closer to talking about being cured and not having a reoccurrence. I don’t want to say I’m in limbo, but I can’t lie and say I don’t get worried when I lose a couple of pounds. I call what I’m doing “surviving.”



Source link