As a pear-shaped woman, I’m more than a little concerned to read a scientific study reporting we pears are far more likely to have memory problems as we age than the so-called apple-shaped women who carry their fat in their stomachs, not their hips.
This doesn’t even make any sense if you think about human anatomy. Look, I’m no doctor but it seems to me that, geographically speaking, the brain is a lot closer to the waist than it is to the butt. Soooo, ipso facto, presto chango, if fat is clogging up your brain and causing memory loss, why wouldn’t it be a bigger problem churning its way to the brain from the much-closer, uh, waistal area? Well science community? I’m waiting here.
Is it actually possible that, just as some rather heartless readers have suggested to me over the years, all my brains are in my butt?
Researchers believe that the reason larger, pear-shaped women have more memory loss is the TYPE of fat deposited around the hips vs. the waist.
Fat is fat, I always thought but it turns out that butt fat is largely made up of cytokines, creepy hormones that can mess with your memory and brain function. Waist fat, on the other hand, is composed exclusively of chicken-fried steak from Golden Corral and the occasional theater-size box of Junior Mints and does nothing whatsoever to your brain. Although it does wreak considerable havoc with your ability to buy off the rack at skinny-waist boutiques.
It doesn’t seem particularly fair the location of my fat is going to make me forget stuff as I get older. Actually, I’m pretty sure that it’s already started. I was going to tell you a story to illustrate this, but I forget.
One doctor involved in the study said this means “if we have a woman in our office carrying excess fat on her hips, we might be more aggressive with weight loss.” Great. Apple-girl out there in the waiting room gets a free pass while I get a lousy lecture about diet and exercise that y’all know I’m going to forget 20 minutes later on account of that problem I now disremember.
I’m guessing that Sir Mix-A-Lot of “I Like Big Butts” fame will have to revise his famous ode to the pear-shaped woman: “Shake it, shake it, shake it, shake that healthy butt…” Not hardly. Maybe, one day, me and J-Lo can hang out and forget stuff together. She should probably start with “Maid in Manhattan.” We’ll invite that pretty skank Kim Kardashian over, too.
Bottom line, (ha!) I plan to parlay this “my butt is killing my brain” thing into a positive but I haven’t figured out how. I may have to ask my apple-shaped friends with their scary-good memories for help with this.
Celia Rivenbark is on vacation. This column originally appeared in 2015 but she’s banking on pear shapes not to remember a word of it. So there’s that.