MY STORY, WITH JOE SCARBOROUGH, BRIAN STELTER,
VIRGINIA CHA, REBECCA PUHL, DONNY DEUTSCH,
SUSIE ESSMAN, GOVERNOR CHRIS CHRISTIE,
DR. NANCY SNYDERMAN, SAM KASS,
REAR ADMIRAL JAMIE BARNETT (RETIRED)
That experience, and others since then, have taught me that weight and looks affect value. For me, it was literally the difference between “no thanks” and getting a job offer. When I was a little bit overweight and didn’t look quite as good, I struggled, and I could see that people with power just didn’t have much interest in me. But when I looked svelte and fit and put together, those same people pursued me.
Diane fears that her weight has held her back from fulfilling her full professional potential and being adequately recognized for her value. “As a teen in the 1970s I was influenced by the feminist movement, and I believed that women would be judged on their talents and their smarts, not on how they looked,” she admitted to me. “It hasn’t turned out that way entirely, though, has it?”
Diane is a blonde, I’m a blonde. She’s bright, I’m bright. And we’re both skilled journalists. Did her weight tank her dreams of working for a network news program? Is it the reason I succeeded and she lagged behind?
It has been more than fifteen years since I started down the path toward a healthier weight. In the last decade, I have mostly managed to end the binge-and-starve cycle that held me captive for so long. I don’t do that anymore. I can’t. I have kids, and I have a career, and I have too many things on the line to act so foolishly. I feel good now. I try to take care of myself, and I look like I have my act together. My efforts have paid off in an exhilarating career. Today, when cake is served I usually don’t eat it. I have trained myself not to touch it, not to get anywhere near it.
Still, I am far from conquering my problem with food. The attraction remains powerful. I continue to send a lot of contradictory messages to myself. I try to listen to the one that says, Stay away. This will make me fat. Don’t eat this. But occasionally I am swayed by the one that says, God, I want to eat all of that. That voice is still there, too, and I still have relapses.
I have a tightly regulated way of eating because I simply don’t trust myself to eat reasonable portions of certain foods. Some nutritionists think my diet needs more repair, and I’ll be honest—I am frequently on the edge of hunger. I still exercise to a degree that some people might term compulsive. Achieving a healthy thin is a continuing struggle for me, and I expect it always will be. I envy people who are much more comfortable than I am in their attitudes toward food and body image. I wish I could relax my approach toward food a bit. That’s Diane’s challenge to me, and I’m trying.
But my life is so much better than it once was. My strict approach largely works for me, at least for now. I look at my weight goals this way: I run a business that I know as “Mika, Inc.,” and it runs on the fuel of being thin and healthy and energetic. That’s the juice that inspires me and keeps me going.
In Knowing Your Value, I urge women to send a clear and commanding message about who they are and what they are worth. You can’t do that if the message is a lie. For the bulk of my career I thought the only thing that mattered was being thin. I thought that thin equals success. It took me a long time to realize that it’s not enough just to look good. That image won’t last unless you are healthy on every level, and honest and transparent about what it took to get you to that place. That honesty will give you a sense of peace and clarity, along with the confidence you need to do the job before you, and to be recognized for your accomplishments.
For me, it has been a matter of getting the message I send others in sync with the message I send myself. My outward appearance and my internal sense of self are finally coming together. I feel a lot more sure of my value, not only in terms of dollars and cents, but in terms of my own self-worth. What you see now on Morning Joe is a woman who isn’t hiding anymore. I know who I am, and I think I look better now than I ever did, because I am more able to be myself.
Virginia Cha, that journalist–beauty queen who took the news anchor job I thought should have been mine, taught me a lesson that has stuck with me to this day: you have to look at what you have to offer and feel good about it, instead of being consumed by what other people do or have. It took me a long time to figure that out.
Friends of mine in many walks of life agree that when you walk into a room looking good, you are sending a message about yourself that says “I have my act together.” There is research to suggest that carrying extra weight sends an opposite message. Overweight women are generally viewed by their employers as less disciplined, less emotionally stable, and less desirable employees. A study published in the Cardozo Journal of Law & Gender showed that 60 percent of overweight women report being discriminated against in the workplace.1
The impact on the pocketbook is stark, too. People who are obese have a harder time finding jobs and are less likely to be promoted than their thinner counterparts. And whatever work they find pays less. “Women who are obese earn about six percent less than thinner women for exactly the same work performed. Obese men earn about three percent less than thinner men,” concludes Rebecca Puhl, PhD, of the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University.
Actually, these numbers might even be more dramatic than Puhl estimates. I have also seen a study that concludes heavier women may face a penalty of as much as 11 percent of their salary.2 Based on the 2010 average US wage of $669 a week, this would be like paying a tax of $76 a week for being fat, according to health economist John Cawley of Cornell University—and that’s provided you get the job in the first place.
Admittedly, weight is less important for men. Joe Scarborough has put thirty pounds on his six-foot-four frame over the past five years and it hasn’t hurt his earning potential at all. This doesn’t mean that men are immune to the pressures of professional judgment and public scorn, as Brian Stelter, the media reporter for the New York Times, understood. Brian began to gain weight at around the age of sixteen, about the same time he got his driver’s license. Having a car for the first time gave him not only the freedom to get around, but also the freedom to eat badly. “I trace it back to being able to go through the drive-thru, because until you have a car, your parents can control your eating more effectively,” he said ruefully.
By the age of twenty-four, Brian weighed 280 pounds.
“I looked like a slob, and in the back of my head I sensed that my bosses would judge me as a result,” Brian says. “I just felt in my gut that I wouldn’t succeed as much in my professional or my personal life if I didn’t lose the weight. I write about television, sometimes I’m on television, and I didn’t like the way I looked on television. And I thought to myself, I’m probably not going to be booked on the shows I want to be booked on if I hold on to this weight.”
There was also that woman who turned him down for a date, and unintentionally helped to motivate his weight loss.
Brian started a Twitter feed, posting every time he put something into his mouth. That helped him lose nearly a hundred pounds, and to gain a lot more confidence in himself and his career.
Donny Deutsch is another successful man who knows that his physical condition has enhanced his value and doesn’t mind admitting it. Donny is a well-known advertising exec in New York City and a regular on Morning Joe. In his book Often Wrong, Never in Doubt, he has a chapter called “The Charles Atlas School of Management.”
“I always wanted to feel if shit went down at a meeting I could kick the crap out of the other guy,” Donny says. “Now, that’s obviously a metaphor, but I think staying in shape and looking good just helps your overall persona. I always say that when you look better, you feel better, and it shows self-discipline.”
Donny, like so many of us, admits that his weight goes up and down. “I was forty pounds heavier at one point. I find the times that I am on a physical regimen and eating right and looking the way I want to look, it is tremendously impacting on every area of my life.” Adds Donny, “I’m a guy that’s been made fun of a lot, because as a CEO I wore a tight-fitting T-shirt.” Go ahead and laugh, he says, but he thinks that sends a message about who he is.
“So many successful men are kind of schlumpy. I thought it was quite a feat to be somebody who was successful in business and at the same time focused on my physical well-being, because we all know the time and sacrifice it takes to be fit. I think people look at me and say, ‘Wow, this guy’s really got it going on! You know, he can really juggle a lot of balls!’”
I asked Donny how he thought my looks and weight affect my value as a newswoman. As an advertising expert who has sold all kinds of products, he knows what gets people to buy something—and those of us in the television business are truly selling ourselves. “Looks matter,” he emphasized. “There’s a reason you’re in that chair versus woman X. The brains and the ability are a given, so I’m not demeaning you by saying this. But in a visual medium or in any medium that has to do with imagery, thinking that looks don’t matter and we shouldn’t judge—that’s just not reality!”
Comedian Susie Essman, co-star of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, agrees that women on TV are especially likely to be judged based on what they look like. And Susie says it’s a no-win proposition: a woman who seems to care too much about her looks “gets described as self-loathing. If she lets her weight go, then she’s described as not caring about herself. It’s like you can’t win.”
That’s reality, and research backs up this “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” aspect of things. A 2012 survey conducted for Glamour magazine by Yale’s Rebecca Puhl seems to confirm Susie’s suspicion. Puhl asked nearly two thousand women, ages eighteen to forty, to envision a female stranger who was either “overweight” or “thin,” and then to choose two words to describe her. The most common words used to describe the overweight woman were slow, undisciplined, sloppy, and lazy. Thin women didn’t fare much better. They were called bitchy, mean, controlling, vain, and self-centered.3
Surprisingly, Puhl found that the weight of the survey respondents didn’t affect their answers. Heavy women were just as likely to use words like sloppy to describe someone who was overweight. Likewise, slender women were just as likely to say that a thin woman was mean.
“What that survey showed is that we judge people who are overweight in very negative ways, and then sometimes we judge people who are thin in negative ways as well. It’s a no-win situation,” says Puhl, who is an expert in weight stigma. Part of that results from stereotypes of overweight and obese individuals presented in both children’s and adult media. “We know that the more people are exposed to media, the worse attitudes they have, and the more prejudice they express toward people who are overweight and obese. That is something that has increased significantly during the past fifty years.”
Puhl wants us to confront some of that negativity. “This highlights the need to educate ourselves about how the media and how our culture are shaping these values that promote bias and prejudice and judgment. And we need to find ways to challenge those.”
Weight is almost the only place where people are willing to speak bluntly about their prejudices toward an entire group of people. At Yale’s Rudd Center, researchers use a tool known as the Fat Phobia Scale to ask people to rate characteristics of those who are fat. Puhl says she would not have been able to get candid answers if she had used a similar scale to study gender or racial bias. “It’s no longer socially acceptable or politically correct to say that someone feels negatively, or has prejudice, because of race or gender. With body weight, that’s not the case. People are willing to express very readily the stereotypes and negative attitudes that they have toward obese people.”
People are willing to express very readily the stereotypes and negative attitudes that they have toward obese people.—Rebecca Puhl
That willingness to stereotype reflects a prevailing idea that obesity results from lack of willpower and discipline. It totally ignores the reality of our contemporary food environment, which makes high-fat, high-sugar foods easy to access, and it shows ignorance about how such foods can get a grip on us that is hard to release. It shrugs off the mixed messages we get: one that tells us “being thin is worth just about any price” and one that says “this food is cheap, available 24/7, and designed to stimulate pathways in your brain that keep you coming back for more.”
When we lay fault entirely at the feet of people who carry extra weight rather than see them in that larger context, it becomes easy to say unkind things about them. “Blaming individuals for their excess weight is at the root of a lot of stigma that we see,” says Puhl.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie can attest to this. He is often in the spotlight, not only because of his leadership role, but also because of his size. Like any politician, he’s had to develop a thick skin, but he’s still deeply hurt by some of the hateful comments and tweets he gets. He read me these two: HEY GOVERNOR, WHAT DID YOU HAVE FOR BREAKFAST TODAY, ONE STICK OF BUTTER OR TWO? and THINK GOVERNOR CHRISTIE CAN BE VP? HE’S TOO . . . FAT, AND AMERICANS HATE FAT PEOPLE.
People would never say such vicious things about someone with any other type of health challenge. “It is extraordinary how brutal people will be about my weight,” the governor said. He thinks people assume he is lazy or lacking discipline because of his weight, and wonders, “Do they think I got this far in life without discipline?” I’ve heard Oprah say the same thing, and Diane says it, too.
“For somebody like me who’s had so much success in my life, and really been successful at everything I’ve tried, to not be able to be successful at this is incredibly discouraging,” revealed Christie. The attitude he encounters ignores the many complex factors involved in losing and regaining weight. Getting to a “healthy thin” certainly takes personal discipline and determination, but it also requires some changes in the world around us. It is not enough to say “eat less, do more.” Or to follow columnist Eugene Robinson’s simplistic advice for anyone with a weight problem: take a walk and eat a salad.
“That is the height of ignorance about what this issue is really all about,” Christie avows. “I’m well beyond the taking a walk stage. I work out four days a week with a trainer. I’m riding the bike and lifting weights and doing floor exercises for an hour a day. For people who have never had issues with their weight, they can’t understand it.”
Recognizing that our prejudices are counterproductive is a good place to start changing attitudes. Puhl thinks one reason our biases remain socially acceptable is that we somehow think they might be helpful. “There tends to be this perception that maybe stigma is not such a bad thing, that maybe it will motivate people to lose weight or provide an incentive for people to be healthier.” In fact, she says, the opposite is true. “When people are blamed, stigmatized, or teased about their weight, they’re much more likely to engage in unhealthy eating behaviors like binge eating; they’re more likely to eat more food; and they’re more likely to avoid exercise. All of those things actually reinforce obesity.”
So we need to get a lot smarter about how we look at people who are obese and how we support them. We also need our families, schools, and communities to protect our children from getting fat in the first place, and to support the work we need to do to reach and maintain a healthy weight. One out of every three Americans is obese (defined as a body mass index, or BMI, of 30 or above) and another one in three is “merely” overweight. With those numbers still rising, 42 percent of us can expect to be obese by 2030. We need to recognize that obesity is not just a problem that affects individuals. Right now, the costs threaten to cripple our nation.
In 2012, four former members of the president’s cabinet—two secretaries of agriculture and two secretaries of health and human services—weighed in with a report titled Lots to Lose: How America’s Health and Obesity Crisis Threatens Our Economic Future. Their report called obesity “the most urgent public health problem in America today” and concluded that “the costs of obesity and chronic disease have become a major drag on the economy.” The report blamed escalating health care costs, which are “the main driver of our spiraling national debt,” and observed that “obesity-related illness comprises an increasingly large share of our massive health costs.”4
“The obesity epidemic is jeopardizing our global competitiveness,” concludes former US Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman, who served under President George W. Bush. I’ve seen some variation in the estimates of what obesity will cost us as a nation, but a good study in Health Economics put the price tag at a gargantuan $190 billion every single year—about 21 percent of all medical spending. If we don’t reverse this epidemic, diabetes, one of the more costly conditions linked to obesity, will affect one in three Americans in their lifetime, according to federal government predictions. Heart disease, asthma, and kidney failure are among many other expensive chronic conditions linked to obesity.
The obesity epidemic is jeopardizing our global competitiveness.—former US Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman
Joint replacement is still another “incredible cost for our country,” said Claire McCaskill. The senator had a knee replaced and recognizes that the surgery might have been avoidable had she lost weight a decade earlier. “Any orthopedic surgeon, if they’re being honest, will say that a great number of those surgeries are a direct result of obesity. It’s the same thing with back problems and the same thing with the big elephant in the room—diabetes.”
Scientists at the Mayo Clinic say that the extra medical costs associated with obese patients are even greater than the additional costs associated with smoking.5 That’s a scary thought, considering that smoking adds about 20 percent a year to medical expenditures. Morbid obesity (BMI over 40) is even more expensive, leading to a 50 percent average hike in an individual’s medical bills.
People who are obese pay some of the costs out of their own pockets. Under the new federal health care law, employers can charge obese workers 30 to 50 percent more for health insurance if they decline to participate in a qualified wellness program. But in the end, we will all pay more. Working people will face higher taxes to cover Medicare and Medicaid, and they will be charged more for private coverage, as insurance companies raise prices to cover their own costs.
Another harmful impact, according to Duke University researchers, is that obesity is slicing into the productivity of the US workforce, with obese workers taking more sick days than those with a healthy weight.6 That costs employers as much as $6.4 billion a year. And it’s not just health-related absenteeism that adds to their costs; they also have to cope with “presenteeism,” where workers report to work, but do not perform well due to health-related limitations.
Ka-ching, ka-ching. The dollar figures keep rising. And we haven’t even factored in the human cost of shorter life spans for obese Americans, or the misery of the chronic illnesses associated with excess weight.
The news looks even worse for our children. The American Heart Association says one in three kids is obese or overweight, triple the rate in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy defined physical fitness for youth as one of the goals of his administration.7 Fifty years and nine presidents after JFK, we are being warned that this generation of Americans may be the first that will not live as long as their parents did.
Dr. Nancy Snyderman has seen the change in her own practice. Nancy is now a cancer surgeon, senior medical editor at NBC News, and author of Diet Myths That Keep Us Fat, but she began her career as a pediatrician. When obese children came into her office in the early 1980s, she says, “We sent them to the endocrinologist because we were worried that they had a hormone problem, or that they had a pituitary tumor. We never had parents who were overfeeding. If anything, the reason children came to the pediatrician with weight issues is because they were failing to thrive, and couldn’t keep weight on.”
Snyderman says childhood obesity has “caught us unaware, and frankly, unprepared for the onslaught of problems.” Conditions that were previously rare in children—like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes (which was called adult-onset diabetes until we began seeing so much of it in a younger population)—are becoming common.
And the impact on young people doesn’t end there. Partly as a reaction to bullying and teasing, obese children are more prone to low self-esteem and depression, which makes it a lot harder to do well in school. “There have been a number of studies in the past ten years showing that obese students are performing worse on generalized tests at school,” says Rebecca Puhl. “In the studies that we have done, kids who report they’re getting teased about their weight are much more likely to skip classes and are reporting that their grades are harmed by this.”
Bullying can start as early as preschool and continue for years. At first, researchers assumed that obese students were performing worse because they had some sort of learning challenges, but it turned out to be a response to the cruelty of their peers. “If we look at the teasing and bullying relationship, no wonder these kids aren’t performing well,” Puhl explains. “They have no support, they’re facing relentless teasing, and they can’t function at school.”
In one survey Puhl asked fifteen hundred Connecticut high school students why kids are teased or bullied at school.8 Out of ten options, body weight ranked number one. “It was ahead of sexual orientation, it was ahead of race, it was ahead of everything else,” she reports. “The consequences for these kids are devastating. Kids who are teased about their weight are two to three times more likely to engage in suicidal thoughts and behaviors, compared to their overweight peers who are not teased.”
As fat children grow into fat young men and women, we also face a national security challenge unlike any we have seen before. Mission: Readiness, an organization of retired senior military officers committed to supporting smart investments in America’s children, calculates that 9 million young people ages seventeen to twenty-seven are “too fat to fight”; that is, too heavy to be accepted into the military. That’s more than one-quarter of that age group. According to Sam Kass, the senior policy advisor for healthy food initiatives in the Obama White House, delivering a keynote address at a CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) conference, “Obesity may be our nation’s greatest national security threat.”9 It’s the number one disqualification for military service.
That’s especially troubling because the military has already become more selective in its recruiting than it used to be. “It’s not the old paradigm of anybody can be in the military,” according to Rear Admiral Jamie Barnett (retired). The military has gone high tech, and it “increasingly needs people who can handle complex systems: sensors, weapons, aircraft, submarines. Now we have to have really smart people, and here’s a whole category of people who are smart and who want to serve who can’t get in because of the weight barrier.”
Ultimately, Barnett says, the nation could face a situation where it simply doesn’t have the people it needs, particularly in specialty areas of the military. “We have to address this,” he emphasized. Otherwise, the military will lose out on much-needed talent, the nation will lose out on the protection it needs, and whole groups of young people will lose opportunities for well-paying, secure jobs.
“There’s significant research that the rise of the middle class after World War II was in large part due to GI benefits: education, housing, things like that. Now we have a huge number of young people who won’t even get a shot at that,” warns Barnett. “It may take a while to understand what that means for America.”
I’m completely on board with what all of these findings suggest—that there is real value in being thin. But hitting that target is not going to be easy, not for us as a nation, and not for any of us individually. I get angry when I see weight-loss commercials with women holding jeans that are ten sizes too large for them and saying, “This used to be me.” They throw the jeans off to the side and show a newly slim body to the camera. Everything is now just perfect. In all our media we are bombarded by messages that seem to say, “This is how easy it is. Follow this diet and you’ll be happy.” Take it from me: maintaining a healthy weight is a lot of work, and it is forever. Constant. It’s difficult.
We are not “done” after we lose the pounds. It’s not as though we can finish the dieting process and then just start eating again. It doesn’t work that way. Obesity experts will tell you that losing weight is difficult; keeping it off is nearly impossible for many people. That’s why we need to be much more strategic about how we address this difficulty. And we need to do it together.
It begins with sharing our stories, both the ones that show the value of being thin and the ones that reveal just how hard that is. As a country, a community, and a family, we have to be open about all of this. We should be able to talk about obesity just as we talk about smoking or diabetes or heart disease or cancer. When we see someone who has cancer, we don’t think, Oh, they’re undisciplined, they did something wrong. We feel sympathy, and we want to help.
We need to bring the same compassion to obesity. We can’t spend so much time judging people; it’s not fair, and it doesn’t get us anywhere. And it doesn’t help to keep blaming and shaming ourselves either.
Instead, we have to have real conversations, just as I did with my friend Diane.