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Vanity Pounds
In this month’s News Break, Youth Radio’s Quincy Mosby talks about a huge physical transformation that has had major emotional effects. In the last year, Quincy dropped half of his body weight—a total of 145 pounds. He says he’s happy about his dramatic weight loss. But the process has been more complicated than Quincy had expected, in part because of the way his family members and friends have responded to the change.
“Right after he’d compliment me on how good I looked, he’d follow it up with a comment about how unlikely it was that I’d maintain these eating habits…”
Even though losing weight is an individual experience, eating habits are deeply social, connected to family practices, public health conditions, and media influences. And the results of any radical weight change are totally public—open to constant comment and scrutiny. Quincy may the one switching from baggy pants to skinny jeans, but he seems to be carrying many others along in his transformation, whether he wants to or not.
Click here to find the full script and audio for this story.
Teach Youth Radio
For this month's feature, you will be able to view these strategies and resources:
1. How teachers can align this Youth Radio story to National Standards in the classroom.
2. Suggestions for lesson plans that link the story's content to your classroom's themes and subject areas.
3. Suggestions for lesson plans that explore media literacy, using the story to re-read mainstream media.
4. Bios of the Youth Radio reporters who produced the story.
5. A list of resources and further research related to the story's themes.
6. Links to Youth Radio’s media production techniques as guides and inspiration for your students’ creative media-making projects.
1. NATIONAL STANDARDS: Standards Alignment
Subject: LANGUAGE ARTS
NL-ENG.K-12.1 READING FOR PERSPECTIVE
NL-ENG.K-12.2 UNDERSTANDING THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE
NL-ENG.K-12.3 EVALUATION STRATEGIES
NL-ENG.K-12.6 APPLYING KNOWLEDGE
NL-ENG.K-12.7 EVALUATING DATA
NL-ENG.K-12.8 DEVELOPING RESEARCH SKILLS
NL-ENG.K-12.9 MULTICULTURAL UNDERSTANDING
NL-ENG.K-12.11 PARTICIPATING IN SOCIETY
Subject: LIFE SCIENCE
NS.9-12.6 PERSONAL AND SOCIAL PERSPECTIVES
Subject: HEALTH
NPH-H.9-12.1 HEALTH PROMOTION AND DISEASE PREVENTION
NPH-H.9-12.2 HEALTH INFORMATION, PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
NPH-H.9-12.3 REDUCING HEALTH RISKS
NPH-H.9-12.4 INFLUENCES ON HEALTH
NPH-H.9-12.7 HEALTH ADVOCACY
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2. NEWS YOU CAN USE: Story content in your classroom, Suggestions for lesson plans
Pre-Listening Activity:
In Quincy’s own words, his commentary is “littered” with details about his family relationships. Before you play this story for your class, encourage your students to pay attention to every relationship Quincy mentions. Have them make a list and jot notes on how Quincy’s weight—the ups and downs—have helped shape those relationships. After your students hear the commentary, use this activity to launch discussion of the ripple effects of Quincy’s personal change. You might facilitate discussion of the language young people use to talk about weight, and what assumptions those terms imply (e.g., some fat activists object to the term “overweight” because it implies that there’s something wrong—outside the norm—with who they are). Broadening the discussion beyond body size, you might ask students to share stories of how their families and friends have responded when they’ve undergone any kind of dramatic change.
Language Arts:
Mixed Feelings:
Quincy says he’s really happy about his weight loss, but he hasn’t always felt the support he’d expected. “When I hung out with my dad,” he says, “right after he’d compliment me on how good I looked, he’d follow it up with a comment about how unlikely it was that I’d maintain these eating habits.” When Quincy was thinking about lesson ideas teachers could use to build on his commentary, he thought an interesting activity might be to have students write about a time in their own lives when they’ve done something they thought was good, but then faced mixed or even negative consequences they hadn’t anticipated.
Metaphor: In the second paragraph of Quincy’s commentary, he says that as he started to gain weight in junior high, his parents didn’t make him feel bad, but his peers seized the opportunity to do just that: “Kids suddenly had a buffet of insults to use, and my lack of self-confidence made me more than willing to eat them up.” Encourage your students to notice the way Quincy uses metaphor in this line, deploying the central topic of his commentary, and turning it into a figurative image to make a point. You can use this line to introduce the concept of metaphorical writing, highlighting its potential richness and also raising cautions about how metaphors can go awry (e.g., when they get “mixed” or corny or go too far). Have students experiment with metaphor in their own writing, perhaps assigning a series of images (starting with eating, to build directly from Quincy’s piece) and asking students to compose lines or paragraphs, and then discussing what makes for an effective use of metaphor in telling your story.
Echoes and endings: Quincy ends his commentary with a specific reference. He says the constant comments he hears about his weight can feel like criticism, but they do motivate him with one more reason “to keep turning down that greasy Chinese food every Friday.” The reference to Chinese food revisits an earlier passage in the story, when Quincy’s mom and sister expressed their frustration with the fact that he wouldn’t touch their traditional Friday meal once he made the decision to lose weight. Have students discuss the way Quincy chose to finish his piece. Does it work for them? What is his strategy for finding a conclusion? How is Quincy’s ending the same or different from other final lines in stories they’ve read or written? In our experience at Youth Radio, endings often present a huge challenge for students (and their editors!). Part of the difficulty is the sense that as a writer, you feel pressured to sum up your whole story in some grandiose final line, and that can be paralyzing. We find that often, it can be more powerful, and less contrived, to leave listeners with a concrete image that will linger in their heads, rather than to try to “tie it up with a bow,” as we sometimes say. Have students look back through their prior writing, and play with ways to tweak and transform their endings, sharing their various attempts in pairs or small groups and offering peer critique.
Echoes and endings: Like every Youth Radio commentary that airs on a major outlet, this story went through multiple rounds of edits—some cuts for time (the standard commentary can’t run much longer than two minutes) and some for style, structure, pacing, etc. Here are some lines and passages from earlier versions of Quincy’s story (to find the final script as it aired on NPR, see: How to Annoy Family: Drop 145 Pounds
• “… But a combination of my family’s horrible eating habits and a lack of physical education during junior high school changed all that. Suddenly, physical activities I used to enjoy, like kickball and freeze tag, weren’t fun anymore…My friends and family tried to help by saying things like, ‘You have a great personality, and if girls don’t see that they don’t deserve you.’ But when I stepped on the scale and saw I was over 300 pounds, I couldn’t be angry at anyone but myself.”
• “At first, my mother was very supportive in helping me lose the weight the right way. She tried her best to fix healthier meals, and she asked me to write down a list of diet-approved foods for the grocery list. But it seemed like the close I got to my weight loss goal, the more annoyed my family…became with me.”
• “Right after he’d compliment me on how good I looked, he’d follow it up with a comment about how unlikely it was that I’d maintain these eating habits. It seemed like the roles in my world had reversed. Just as I was beginning to receive all this positive attention from outsiders, at home, I’d have to defend what I was doing and prove to my family that I wasn’t starving myself. It felt like now that I didn’t need my family to heal my bruised self-esteem, they didn’t know quite how to interact with me.”
Have students compare and contrast these passages with the two scripts. What do they think about the changes? What was gained, and what was lost? You could use this activity to inspire a wider discussion about editorial processes in writing and journalism and the complex (often fraught!) relationship between editing and censorship. Students could also play the role of editor themselves, marking up the “final” version of Quincy’s commentary with questions and suggestions that in their view would make the story even stronger.
Health and Science:
Health information: When Quincy made the decision that nothing would keep him “stuck in that overweight body,” he started to do a lot of research. He came across two indices to determine a ballpark goal for a healthy weight loss strategy: the Body Mass Index and the Glycemic Index (see below under resources). Have your students calculate their own BMI scores. Then contextualize these numbers in debates and controversies surrounding health measurements like this one. Health experts point out that the BMI is not always accurate because it does not take into account the difference between muscle and fat, racial differences or age. Youth Radio’s Health Manager reports, “BMI is not the best, nor only, way to determine your health risks. It should also include age (i.e. going through puberty or not; losing bone density because of age), gender, mental status, health risks related to one's race/ethnicity, level of exercise, body type, country where one currently lives and family history of health issues. People who might be concerned that they are at an unhealthy weight need to make that decision with the help of their healthcare provider, noting however that most Western medical doctors use the BMI.” You can use this feedback to encourage students to think critically about “scientific data,” and to help students identify concrete steps they can take to live and eat in healthy ways.
Sugar: In one of the more provocative lines in his commentary, Quincy says it’s “irritating that my family had nothing to say when I was on the verge of diabetes but is riding me now that I’ve worked so hard to be healthy.” In January 2008, the New York Times published a report on some of the latest research on Type 2 diabetes (see below under resources). Have students review this article to familiarize themselves with the risk factors and health outcomes associated with this disease. What factors put Quincy at risk of diabetes? What steps do medical professionals recommend to prevent the onset of Type 2 diabetes? What medical and life-style interventions do those with Type 2 diabetes need to take to stay healthy?
Access, Inequality, and Public Health: Quincy says he understands that “a lot of factors” helped shape how his family ate. “At times, we didn’t have much food. So when your aunt shows up with three cheeseburger meals, you don’t send her back for hummus.” He also notes that the elimination of physical education in his junior high school helped bring about his weight gain in the first place. Have students do some research in their own neighborhoods and school cafeteria (if they’ve got one) about the availability of healthy food options. How far would they need to walk or drive, or how many busses would they need to take, to get to a place where they’d find affordable healthy food, compared to fast food? How much do the two options cost? Have students research nutritional information for standard fast food items. They could also go to the corner store nearest to their school, and other schools in different neighborhoods in their town or city. What’s on the shelves? Students can interview the shopkeeper about what they stock, what sells the best, and how they make decisions about what their stores carry. What do the findings from these various research efforts reveal about young people’s access to healthy food?
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3. CRITICAL MEDIA LITERACY: Putting This Story in Context
Weight loss entertainment: While brainstorming curriculum ideas linked to his commentary, Quincy was struck by all the popularity of television shows that turn dramatic weight loss make-overs into a kind of spectator sport. Assign students to watch one episode each of The Biggest Loser and Celebrity Fit Club (see websites below under resources). There is also a phenomenon of thin movie stars and celebrities dressing up in fat suits for entertainment and “investigation”—see Gwyneth Paltrow in Shallow Hal, Courtney Cox in Friends, Tyra Banks on her talk show. Have students discuss representations of weight gain and weight loss in these episodes and artifacts from popular culture. If your students wanted to develop a show related to healthy eating with a positive message for young people—one that did not mock or disrespect people who fall outside Hollywood’s beauty norms—what would they put on the air? How, if at all, would their pilot be different from what’s currently available in the popular media?
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4. MEET THE COMMENTATOR
Quincy Mosby currently works for Youth Radio as a project associate. After dropping out of high school, Quincy received his G.E.D. in 2005. He currently produces music and vodcasts and hosts a moderately successful internet radio show on www.youthradio.org. Quincy loves to dance but not in public, and he has an unhealthy obsession with comic books.
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5. RESOURCES AND RESEARCH
• Body Max Index - BMI
• How To Measure Your Body Mass
• Body Mass Index
• Glycemic Index and its controversies
• Type 2 Diabetes
• Celebrity Fit Club website
• The Biggest Loser website
• The Biggest Loser website
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6. MEDIA PRODUCTION FOR LEARNING: Making Audio Narratives
Click here to link to Youth Radio's guidelines for conducting interviews, writing commentaries, and producing features.
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