File this under f****d up

192 pounds

Amanda Seyfried—star of Dear John, Mamma Mia!, Big Love, and Mean Girls—has announced that the only way she can stay thin enough to work in Hollywood is to stick to a strict raw-food diet and exercise all the time.

As Seyfried told Esquire magazine this week, "It's intense. And sort of awful. Yesterday for lunch? Spinach. Just spinach. Spinach and some seeds."

Spinach and some seeds?

I'm sorry, but that is completely fucked up.

A fact so obvious that even Seyfried has to admit it.

"'If I didn't run and work out, there's no way I would be this thin,' Seyfried told Glamour magazine. 'But I have to stay in shape because I'm an actress. It's f****d up and it's twisted, but I wouldn't get the roles otherwise. If I'd been a bit bigger, I don't think they would have cast me for Mamma Mia!'"

I've been a fan of Seyfried since she first starred as the already dead Lilly Kane on Veronica Mars (shown below), and I do remember that on that show, she seemed the tiniest bit curvy.

But now, as you can see in the top photo, Seyfried's clearly much, much thinner than she used to be, making Lilly dead in more ways than one.

Seyfried is obviously beautiful at either weight, but hearing her admit that she is basically starving herself breaks my heart. Yes, this is a sad, sad day for someone who believes that dieting is one of the most unhealthy things we can do to ourselves, and it's especially frustrating to hear about Amanda's INSANE diet because she has also claimed that men can't make women feel glamorous, and that feeling attractive has to come "from inside."

What I want to know is how could a woman so smart be so . . . oh, forget it.

I feel for Seyfried. I really do, and I sincerely hope that she will realize that no job—even a job being a world famous actress—is worth giving up cooked food.

The Oscars, Part I: A plea to all Hollywood starlets

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As I'm sure you all know, the Oscars were Sunday.

It was a great day for women because Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman in history to take home the Academy Award for Best Director. And her film—The Hurt Locker—also won the Best Picture award.

I also felt like the narrative of the evening focused on strong women—Sandra Bullock, Mo'nique, Meryl Streep, Gabby Sidibe, and Bigelow to name a few—and that those women thankfully had bodies of all sizes.

But before the actual ceremony began, I found myself cringing during the Red Carpet show.

At first I wasn't sure why the Red Carpet didn't have as much appeal for me as it normally does, but after the first sixty minutes or so, I put it together: many, many of the women who walked it looked too thin to me. To the point that they almost looked as if they were sickly.

I've made it a point on this blog NOT to criticize skinny women or name names about women who I think look like they are at an unhealthy weight, and I think I'll stick with that decision because it doesn't really help anyone to attack the way certain women look—whether they be too small or too big. I've always said that the point of this blog is too help people accept themselves they way they are, and calling someone anorexic-looking doesn't really serve that purpose, does it? After all, it's just as easy to be naturally thin as it is to be naturally curvy.

But I do want to make a plea to the actresses and celebrities of our time, and that plea is this:

Please be true to your bodies! Please accept your body at the weight it should be rather than giving into the weight everyone else tells you it needs to be! We need you to do this for us! We really, really do!

My husband always says he believes that after we stop growing, people settle in at a certain weight, and that that weight is often where we are supposed to be.

And, for the most part, I agree with him.

It's the same principle as aging gracefully—meaning, accepting the fact that at the age of forty, you shouldn't have the same body you had when you were twenty. We don't expect our faces to look the same as we age (at least most of us don't), so why do people expect their bodies to look the same?

And when I see people—and by people, I mean, celebrities since I don't know ANY regular people who have this problem—who are my age but weigh the same or less than they did when they weren't even old enough to drink, it scares me. There is no doubt that there are some really young celebrities out there who are pushing the thin thing too far, but there are also plenty of middle-aged superstars who are simply way too skinny.

To be honest, I find that extreme gauntness actually ages women dramatically, making them appear much less attractive than they would with just five or ten more pounds on their body. Let's face it, at some point—maybe around the age of thirty-five—women no longer look healthy being the same weight they were when they were eighteen.

Don't get me wrong, I get it.

I get why they do it.

I get that the pressure—pressure from the media, pressure from casting agents, directors and producers—to be whippet thin in Hollywood is completely insane and insanely unfair.

I've even witnessed evidence of that insanity this week. Since the Oscars I've heard one fashion commentator say something like Kate Winslet (see picture above) "has always been bigger" and another point out that Molly Ringwald (pictured below) is "not a size 0."

I mean, why is it necessary for us to talk about Ringwald not being a size zero? Is that really supposed to be some kind of freaking ideal?

And in what universe could either of these women be called "bigger"?! That is complete crap! If anything, they look pretty darn thin to me. Maybe what these critics meant to say is that they don't look anorexic or unhealthy, and it scares me to think that not looking anorexic translates to "bigger" on the Red Carpet.

So, yes, I get it, but I'm begging all of you Hollywood types out there: Do not give in to this bullshit! Let your body be the size it wants to be!

If nothing else works, look at Meryl Streep, the most successful actor in history, and recognize that you don't have to be super skinny to be huge.

A taste of their own medicine

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I'm the first person to applaud Dove for their "be comfortable in your own skin" campaign. They might have even been the first major company to show regular-sized women in their ads, and I love them for that.

But their new ad for Dove "Men + Care"—which premiered during the Super Bowl—has me scratching my head.

The ad—which you can watch here—shows a man's life from conception to "middle-age" accompanied by a staccato voice-over of the man's life story.

(I put middle-age in quotation marks because the actor who plays this part is clearly not middle-aged.)

The ad begins with dozens of purple sperm going after a huge cantaloupe-looking egg (see picture above) and this voice-over: "Get born, get slapped, now get to school."

Then the man is shown progressing through his life—playing football . . .

getting married . . .

having three kids who hilariously have his head superimposed on top of their bodies . . .

and generally settling into the American notion of domestic bliss . . .

After all that, the voice-over wraps up with this lovely coda:

"You've reached a stage where you feel at ease.

You've come this far, and it wasn't a breeze.

You can take on anything, of course you can,

because . . . you're a man!"

This wonderful reinforcement of the importance of "being a man" is heard while showing said "middle-aged" man—now with a perfectly groomed beard to let us know that he's aged—throwing his arms up in triumph as he jogs through the streets in his beat-up old grey sweatpants.

After the man's life story comes to an end, a new, slicker voice-over announces the following:

"Now that you're comfortable with who you are,

isn't it time for comfortable skin?

At last there's Dove for Men. . .

Be comfortable in your own skin."

While these words are being said, we see the "middle-aged" man in the shower, soaping his upper body with a product that we can only assume is the new Dove product for men.

The problem is that his body is definitely not the kind we would expect to see on the average middle-aged man with a wife, three kids, and a house. It's not even the kind of body we would expect to see on a fit middle-aged man. No, in fact, the body we see is the incredibly sculpted upper body of a man in his twenties who spends all of his free time at the gym, lifting weights, running on the treadmill, and maybe even doing a little bit of yoga.

So in reality the message of this ad is "Be comfortable in your own skin

. . . or if you're not comfortable with your own skin, just imagine that you are a really hot younger guy with cut abs and a sexy beard."

The whole premise of the Dove "Campagin for Real Beauty" is to help people accept themselves the way they are and to make people feel like they do NOT need to look like a model to have a healthy sense of self-esteem, but I doubt that any regular middle-aged man would feel pleased with his body—or even find it remotely attractive—after watching an ad that features a man who looks like he spends every waking moment at the gym.

On the one hand, I'm offended by Dove's insensitivity. After all, this is not the message we want to send. We don't want men—or anyone—feeling like they have to have a perfectly sculpted body to feel good about themselves.

On the other hand, I think it's a little bit funny to see men finally getting a taste of their own medicine. Women have been struggling to reconcile their very real bodies with the totally unreal images we see on the screen for years, and now men are getting their turn.

So you'll forgive me if I laughed out loud when I saw this smoking hot Ryan Gosling look-alike lathering up at the end of a Dove ad trying to reach "real" men. As much as I hate to admit it, it's nice to have the shoe on the other foot for a change.