Naturally thin

so ali michael was on the today show



and i think it's lovely she's a very strong and smart girl
but people on fashion websites and blogs are saying the most ridiculous things
there are a million things they say that piss me off but the one that stands out to me is that a lot of people think the solution to this problem is to use only naturally thin girls. if agencies didnt sign girls who needed to lose weight than none of this would ever happen.

ali is naturally thin. weighing 130 lbs at 5'9 and wearing a size 2 is naturally thin.
that's not thin enough for the fashion industry.

there aren't any naturally thin people, even children or guys whose elbow is the widest part of their arm or whose top part of their leg is the same width as the bottom part



that's just not how human anatomy works. even if you have no fat on your body, the muscles are going to add some bulk and make the top portion of your arms and legs bigger than the bottom
the only way you can achieve this look is through muscle wasting
when your body has burned up all the fat reserves and starts eating at muscle.. and other tissues
and if looking like that is the only way a model is going to get work, then they're going to have to go to extreme measures to do it
any talk about natural thinness or healthy weight loss is really irrelevant

here's a "before" pic of the same model


so there's obviously something going on
and the fashion world needs to make themselves look good
so there's some bullshit like this from the council of fashion designers of america

• Educate those in the industry to identify the early warning signs of eating disorders.

• Require models identified as having an eating disorder to receive professional help and only allow those models to continue with approval from that professional.

so if models have to look that thin, and will face consequences for having an eating disorder then they just have to keep pretending like nothing is wrong

so all these models insist that they're naturally that thin, that they eat like a pig and never exercise
when i hear that i don't think "wow she's really lucky she has a great metabolism"
i think something must be wrong with me.. i must have some kind of genetic defect that makes me gain weight when i eat - if these girls are healthy and natural and normal

and that must be what the models are thinking. when everyone around them is so thin and no one will admit what got them there
it's a lonely and awful place to be. you don't meet your own or other people's expectations of you
so you develop an eating disorder

ali says
“I was sitting in a group of four girls. I mentioned I hadn’t had a period in over a year and one by one, each one of them said, ‘Me, too.’ These were girls in their late teens, early 20s. There was no reason for that.”

you stop getting your period when you're so thin that your body is just focused on survival and shuts off all non vital stuff- like menstruating
and this is apparently a common phenomenon among models

the issue is that models are expected to be too thin. and people in the fashion industry are saying that the girls with eating disorders are doing it wrong. that somehow there's a natural or healthy way to look like that. and there's really not.