Forced To Be Fat

In Mauritania, where big is beautiful and stretch marks are sexy, young girls are brutally force-fed a diet of up to 16,000 calories a day--more than four times that of a male bodybuilder--to prepare them for marriage. -Marie Claire

Wow!! I am always amazed at how varied the views of beauty are around the world. I guess I live in a bubble sometimes and think that our way of life is the way of life of everyone else. But in Mauritania, the bigger you are the more men chase and pursue you, women are actually jealous of friends who are bigger than them, and having stretch marks is a huge bonus. It is so important to be big, that parents send there young daughters to force feeding or fattening camps to gain insane amounts of weight in a short period of time. For a lot of women this may sound like heaven, but it is just as stressful for them to gain and keep the weight on as it is in Western society to diet and exercise. One woman who is 5'6" and weighs in at 180 pounds is desperate to gain even more weight because her husband "didn't like sleeping with a bag of bones". They resort to taking black market pills that aid in increasing appetite as well as insane diets that consist of such things as drinking pure animal fat. It just goes to show that women all over the world are pressured and held prisoner to the standard of beauty in their communities. And the men of Mauritania? According to the article, they are all generally rail thin. SMH

To read the entire article click here.