All We are Saying is Give Diets a Chance

BFBer Amy found a Salon article on filmmaker Yael Luttwak's new film, "A Slim Peace." This film looks at the struggle for peace in the Middle East within the frame of weight loss. It sounds like an interesting work, but it's incredibly unfortunate that negative body image is considered the bond that these women all share, background be damned. Ms. Luttwak:

It was very important to me that it be a program that the women would benefit from, too. They're opening up their personal lives and sharing of their lives and their bodies and their families. So I got amazing dieticians, luckily: the head of nutrition at Hadassah Hospital, Israel's premier hospital, and a Palestinian dietician, who is amazing in her own right. It's a new approach in that it's not about dieting. Diets don't work, based on research. It's about changing the way you relate to food and changing your lifestyle. We had a lot of weight-loss success stories.

She talks in the interview of her own weight, and how she eventually put peace and weight loss together.

I think the positive aspect of this - stay with me - is that these weight loss meetings were providing a relatively neutral environment for these women. That is, they weren't being labeled by the usual labels: ethnicity, religion, etc. It is a strange thing, then, that one of the only neutral environments for women still labels all of them fat (in a bad way).

Negative body image is everywhere, no doubt. But it seems weird to me to bring these women together and say, "Let's put aside our differences and agree - we all hate our bodies." Odd, just odd.