Weight Watchers at Guantanamo Bay

Any woman who has grown up in this Western Society has at some point been told that if you just eat 1,200; 1,000 or just 800 calories a day you'll meet our body standards and be accepted into society.

Apparently something else can come from limiting energy for your body and forcing it into starvation mode. You can also get a prisoner to talk.

Quoted from The F Word

In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.

“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”

Here's the gist, the Bush administration is taking a cue from companies like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig and saying that because people elect to do something it means it must be healthy and okay to inflict on prisoners. Well hell then I think they just said that Marijuana, huffing paint and meth are all healthy for you because people do it.

There have been some great thoughts on just how mind blindingly asinine that is from the great Sweet Machine at Shapely Prose.

What kills me the most is the simple fact that what every single woman across America is expected to do in order to fit in, what we are bombarded and ordered to obsess about, what we must do every day for the rest of our lives was being used to get alleged terrorists to confess.

They held dieting up there with things like water boarding or walling (where they slammed someone into a false wall) because they truly believed dieting was a form of torture.

Yet every fucking god damn day we are told that we must diet, not eat enough to fuel our bodies, just to be allowed to exist. We must torture ourselves every day for the rest of our lives to be worth something.

I say to hell with all of that. To me diet is not some counting calories obsessed nonsense, or putting foods on good or bad lists (newsflash: foods can't rob convenience stores or build homes for the homeless, food has no morality. Everything can kill you).

A diet is what you eat, it is not what you don't eat. I learned that in my Animal nutrition class where societal prejudices didn't come into play. We didn't learn that animals should only eat pomegranates because one flawed study found that feeding it exclusively to mice kept them skinnier. Instead you work to get that animal all the energy it needs to live and grow.

Meanwhile out here in the people land we are telling people they must torture their bodies, that flour is evil, and babies are going on diets.

Sometimes I wish I could wake up and find out all this is some sort of screwed up television show.

And please think before you respond. I would love a world where we actually think before we open our mouths instead of spewing the same old doctorine. Really, diets were used for torture. Let that sink in for a minute. What you have been told to do your whole life was used to get information from alleged terrorists. How would you feel if say you found out they used your beloved cosmetics to kill people?