Big and Beautiful

Well hope everyone is having a great weekend. I sleep most of Saturday and went out last night to a really nice pan concert (full detail tomorrow). Actually the one thing I can say about the show was Afropan did a rendition of Barber of Seville using pan that was sweet for days. London Philharmonic and Boston Pops and them big bands aint got nuttin on Afropan. Lawd a mercy!

Anyway let me give you my entire show critique tomorrow.

Saw this article in the Barbados Nation today. Its about the "big and beautiful" beauty shows that that have been going on there recently. The shows are beauty shows for full figured women. Now while I aint too big on the whole beauty show thing (I gine still watch dem if dem show dem pun tv though) I am all for the concept of the big and beautiful shows because for one it shows that beauty is not confined to some concept of a bony half starved runway model with her ribs popping out. Voluptuous is good! The lord din mek all a we the same and everybody cant be light enough that a strong breeze pick dem up and blow dem way. Most women cant come close to those magazine models' statistics and looks but yet this is what the media pushes at us as the concept of beauty. And yes as a Caribbean man sometimes me like see woman wid likkle meat on her bones. Nuttin wrong wid dat. So yes lets show that big can also be beautiful. Its not healthy to make women believe that the waif look is the one to strive for.

These shows can build the confidence and self esteem of the bigger ladies out there and show us that even if ya coca-cola shape turn pet bottle ya can still be beautiful. That was jus a lil joke I hope it aint offend nuhbody.

In reality its about being healthy and living a healthy lifestyle. What weight are you healthy at? It appears different for everyone. For most people being pencil thin aint the healthiest. But because the media throws those images at us that's what the ladies strive to be. For men the image is either the muscle bound Arnold look or the sleek athletic Olympic type bodies. We must all realize that we cant all get to that ideal look so being healthy is actually the goal.

Anyway I still wanted to point out that we as a Caribbean people are still too big or not taking the healthy thing serious enough in general though. The show's organizers say that the ladies must be around 250lbs or above to enter. They said that the last show they did in Barbados most of the ladies they had were under that range and were some of the smallest in this series of events being held all over the Caribbean. Wow! Now like I said I'm all for the full figured look and think the contest is great but when you stop and think about it 250lbs is a real lot of weight for the average woman who somewhere between 5'-2" and 5-10". I mean even if you consider its like the average Caribbean beauty show where most of the contestants start at 5'7" and end up around 6'0" those ladies are still pushing into the realms of obesity with body mass index above 33. (Mind you BMI aint that great an indicator in my opinion because if you working out and put on muscle it duz tell ya alot a foolishness bout ya overweight and ting so and it don't take into consideration that certain groups apparently seem to have denser bones)

Yes I know that for alot of Caribbean (read that as black) people, you look at us and don't realize that we are heavier than you can imagine (myself included cause people used to always look at me and think me maga an weigh about 160 and I weighed about 185) but 250lbs no matter how you cut it is still quite a bit of weight to be carrying around. So are these beauty shows promoting obesity or unhealthy behavior? Because with obesity comes alot of health issues and I would hate to think that we going from one extreme to the next, from promoting the waif thin look with its health issues to promoting obesity with its own set of problems.

Maybe we need a beauty show for women who fall somewhere in between and healthy.