Author Launches a Campaign Against Heightism and a Message of Inspiration to Live Beyond Measure

With a height of 4’8 ½,” Ellen Frankel takes a tall stand against heightism and encourages people of all shapes and sizes to live beyond measure. Tune in to the “Size Matters too” on-line radio show with the velvet voice of size diversity, Veronica Cook-Euell, as she interviews Ellen Frankel, author of the groundbreaking book, Beyond Measure: A Memoir About Short Stature and Inner Growth.

(PRWEB) September 14, 2006 -- Ellen Frankel, a Massachusetts based clinical social worker specializing in the field of eating disorders for nearly twenty years, has long been involved with challenging fat prejudice. Now she is on a mission to challenge height prejudice. Frankel explains that heightism, like weightism, is rampant in our society and that we glorify tall people the way we glorify thin people, and stigmatize short people the way we stigmatize fat people. She notes that the tendency for people to round up their height and round down their weight is a symptom of this cultural bias.

Ellen wasn’t immune to this social prejudice. She wanted to be tall and thin just like the models that decorated the covers of her glossy teen magazines. She explained that growing up, the fantasy she had of herself losing weight included a tall, leggy thin woman walking along the seashore, her long blonde hair swaying gently in the breeze, her blue eyes as crystal clear as the turquoise sea. She says, “I would be, quite frankly, Sea time Barbie. Never mind that I was and still am 4’ 8 ½” tall with red hair and brown eyes. These were mere details.”

As a child, Ellen’s parents brought her to different doctors in an attempt to add inches to her short stature despite the fact that she was healthy and simply short because her parents were short. “They did this out of love. They believed I would suffer because of the bias against short people.” But Ellen explains that as a result of so much attention on her height and the pressure to grow, she came to believe that she didn’t “measure-up.”

In her new book, Beyond Measure: A Memoir About Short Stature and Inner Growth, Ellen speaks to the soul breaking attempts to fit an arbitrary and elusive cultural ideal of physical perfection. Ellen insists that being short is not the problem. She claims that the real difficulties lie in the social prejudice against short people whether it occurs on the school playground or in the corporate boardroom.

Ellen highlights the extreme of height prejudice in the FDA’s recent approval of using human growth hormone for healthy short children in an attempt to make them taller. Treatment involves subjecting the child to growth hormone injections six times per week over an average of five years. The cost of this treatment is between $20,000 and 40,000 annually, and may be physically and emotionally harmful. Ellen explains that at most, some children may gain an extra 1 inch to 1½,” if any extra height is gained at all.

Ellen states emphatically that such treatment is a mistake. “What we need is education for those who discriminate against short people, not the attempted physical altering of the victims of that prejudice.” She is on a mission to educate adults and children about the dangers of heightism and to stop healthy short children from needless medical intervention. “Both fat people and short people have been discriminated against, marginalized and ultimately medicalized. This has to stop.”

Laughing, Ellen tells me, “I know my Achilles heel, and for a long time that heel craved a stiletto. Now I am proud to stand on my own two feet, short legs and all, and take a stand against heightism. Short stature is not a disease!”

Ellen encourages her readers to stop weighing their self-esteem by the numbers on a bathroom scale or measuring their self-worth by the inches of a tape measure. She advocates the celebration of people of all shapes and sizes and encourages people to live fully and freely in the world by living an authentic life and speaking their truth. Her spiritual pilgrimage to Nepal, trekking in the shadows of the tallest mountain in the world, allowed Ellen to fully discover her own strength and spirit and to come to the realization that we are all dwarfed by Everest and beyond measure. Ellen invites you to visit her website at www.beyondmeasureamemoir.com

Tune in to www.sizematterstoo.com click on listen to this weeks show now through September 20 for Part I and through September 27th for Part II.

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