You Shouldn’t Eat That

I’ll take extra cheese, please.

For more than twenty years, I was on a diet. Sometimes it was a healthy one and sometimes an extreme version—and for at least five of those years, I was alternately anorexic and bulimic. In high school, in order to get and stay skinny I ran twenty-six miles every week, which may be the most un-me thing I’ve ever done besides winning a sports-based betting pool. (I did that once, but entirely by accident.)

My dieting history is far from unique. According to the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), “twenty million women and ten million men suffer from a clinically significant eating disorder sometime in their life.” On their home page, NEDA states the obvious: The best-known contributor to the development of these illnesses is “body dissatisfaction,” and they cite a 2011 study that says “By age six, girls especially start to express concerns about their own weight or shape. Forty to sixty percent of elementary school girls (ages six to twelve) are concerned about their weight or about becoming too fat. This concern endures through life.”^*

Well, slap my ass and call me jiggly. Who’d have thunk it? (I did. I thunk it. And chances are, you or someone you love has thunk it too.)

I was in a long-standing abusive relationship with my body, and those don’t typically end well. But before I tell you how mine did end, let’s take a look at how it started.

How did I get from being a kid with no awareness of whether my body was ideal or not, to an adolescent with acute “body dissatisfaction”? Apart from “general cultural bullshit,” there were three comments that stand out in my mind:

The first was a joke (“Your butt’s eating your bathing suit!”) that may have been intended solely to poke fun at my wedgie, or may have been an unsubtle hint that I was outgrowing said bathing suit. I was nine or ten.

The second was a backhanded compliment delivered by a classmate who upon seeing me in—you guessed it—a bathing suit said quite sincerely, “Wow, you’re not as fat as I thought you were.” I was eleven or twelve.

The third came after I’d dropped forty pounds and three sizes. I’d just cut bangs into my long dark hair and someone said, “Doesn’t she look like Karen Carpenter?” Another someone replied, “Yeah, BEFORE she got anorexic.” What I heard was “before she got skinny.” And since I had in fact become anorexic to lose all that weight but still wasn’t, apparently, thin enough to look anorexic, I was confused. Was this a compliment? It didn’t feel like one. I was almost fourteen years old.

In service to this chapter, I did some research to find out what Karen Carpenter weighed throughout her life. I learned that she was five feet, four inches tall (I’m 5’ 2”) and that before she started dieting around age sixteen, she weighed 145 pounds, which was about how much I weighed before I went on my first diet at thirteen. After she started dieting (initially, she claimed, to look better in her stage clothes), she got down to a reasonably healthy weight of 120 pounds and maintained that for several years before becoming severely ill and dipping into double digits on the scale.

When someone told me I looked like—again, to my ears—“fat,” preanorexic, presumably 120-to-145-pound Karen Carpenter, I weighed 99 pounds.

Gee, no wonder I was confused.

Our society has a bad habit of valuing people based on their looks, and demeaning them when those looks don’t match up with the “ideal.” The ideal varies from culture to culture, but generally speaking, in order to be lauded for your figure you actually have to squirm your way into a demographic as tight and unforgiving as those leather pants Ross tried to pull off on the New Year’s resolutions episode of Friends.

That’s the worst part—when it comes to body shaming and the resulting body image issues, it’s not like you’re even trying to fit in where “most people” fall on the spectrum. When it comes to our bodies, it isn’t even good enough to be average.

HOW. FUCKED. UP. IS. THAT.

Unfortunately, you cannot control the media’s barrage of what constitutes the ideal form. You cannot inhabit the brains and mouths of those who offer thoughtless or cruel comments about your body that make you feel self-conscious or like you have to develop an eating disorder and run twenty-six miles in one week even though you hate running as much as the Dude hates the fucking Eagles, man.

Which is why I’m telling you: You need to accept yourself before you wreck yourself.

It’s all in your head, not in your hips

So how do you achieve acceptance, bodily or otherwise? Well, letting me blow sunshine up your back end is a start. I’ve been doing that since here. And remembering that we’re all going to die—possibly tomorrow—is another useful technique. You could also just go on a diet, but this isn’t a diet book, so I can’t help you with that.

What I can help you with is learning how to tune out other people’s criticism, your own neuroses, or both.

To be clear: I’m not claiming that some people don’t need to lose (or gain) weight to address actual health problems rather than (or in addition to) confidence ones. I’m also not saying that people shouldn’t be attuned to what they eat and concerned with how they look IF THAT BRINGS THEM JOY. Go ahead and do your Whole30 cleanse and your side planks if it makes you happy. You do you!

I just want you to know—if and only if you’re interested—that there’s another way to get to self-acceptance that doesn’t involve deprivation, carb counting, spin class, or shame.

So… are you interested?

Okay, listen, you don’t have to decide now. This chapter will be here for you in your time of need, should that time arise. But for the sake of argument, let’s say that if body image is a problem for you, then one or more of the following is true:

You ARE over-or underweight, by some metric. Not a problem.

You have an ideal BMI but your mass is disproportionately located in places that make you self-conscious. Or maybe there’s something else you don’t like about your appearance—body image issues aren’t confined to weight. We can work with this, too.

You look absolutely “ideal” to even the most critical observer but you just don’t see it when you look in the mirror. You, my friend, are in for a treat.

Buckle up, Buttercup, because this here’s my hot take on all of the above:

If you’re over-or underweight, you can do your darnedest to lose or gain it, but society is still fucked and people are still assholes. Do you think you’re going to reach the Sports Illustrated ideal (for men or women)? That seems… unlikely. Do you think assholes can’t find another way to critique your appearance? Also unlikely.

If you have a physical imperfection that you can’t do much about—this coming from the woman who once said out loud to her boyfriend, “If I could have one plastic surgery with no pain or bad consequences I’d have my ankles thinned”—then you can’t do much except accept it. (Or amputate.)

And if you feel bad about your body for reasons neither you nor anyone else can understand, then it’s not your body that’s the problem, is it? It’s all in your head, and THAT is my specialty.

One groovy solution to all of these problems is—you guessed it—mental redecorating. Good old fêng shui with a side of “fuck that shit!”

Mental redecorating can help anyone who feels bad about their body for any reason: too fat, too skinny, knees too knobby, boobs too big or too small, chest too narrow, thighs too spread-y, chin too prominent, whatever.

How? Because it’s not about changing your body, it’s about changing your mind.

And in the case of using mental redecorating to make peace with one’s body, I’m like that guy in the Hair Club for Men commercials who exclaims, “I’m not just the president, I’m also a client!” Here’s how I did it:

• Societal pressure is like faulty wiring in your house. You can’t get rid of it entirely, but you can reroute and repair it.

I accepted that I would never have a physique that is “ideal” according to the culture I live in. My bones and muscles just aren’t made that way. And I accepted that it wasn’t worth my time or physical and emotional energy to beat myself up over two pounds or twenty, and that my value as a woman, a wife, a friend, a colleague, a beachgoer, or a human being was not tied up in the numbers on the scale or the letter on the tag on my bikini bottoms. My mental floor lamps still flicker occasionally when the connection gets overloaded, but overall, it’s a big improvement.

• Memories of mean shit people said about you are like unflattering photos you would never, ever frame and display.

I thought about all of the intentionally or unintentionally rude comments made about my body in the past, and I decided they didn’t merit a place of honor on my mental shelves. I dumped them into a box in the back of my mental closet, and the only reason I dusted them off and brought them out in You Do You is to show you how it’s done.

• I learned how to take a fucking compliment every once in a while. Today, those compliments get matted, framed, and displayed in a place of honor where the ugly comments used to reside. And they sure do brighten up my mental living room.

I do have a way with eye makeup—thanks for noticing!

This is how I slowly but surely redecorated my mental space—although I didn’t call it “mental redecorating” then because I was not yet a fancy-pants anti-guru. I called it “a slowly dawning realization that if I didn’t stop beating myself up about my size and shape, I might die of cardiac failure in my early thirties, and/or never experience a completely happy, carefree day in my whole motherfucking life.”

You could also just call it mind over matter, because honestly, that’s all it is.

It’s what I’ve been saying through this whole book: Do it yourself, because no one else can or will do it for you. The same way nobody is going to do those sit-ups or suffer through that juice cleanse on your behalf, nobody but you has the power to get inside your head and instill you with confidence.

At my biggest, smallest, and sickest—even though I was lucky to have people around me telling me they loved me and I was beautiful—I never actually felt that way until I finally accepted myself for who I am, flaws and all.

Acceptance breeds confidence.

And confidence is what you really need—not just to rock those knobby knees or totally average thighs in a pair of short-shorts, but to be weird, make unconventional choices, fuck perfection, go your own way, and make the decisions that work best for YOU and YOUR life.

Like, for example, what kind of pizza to order tonight.

(No, seriously, guys, which one should I get? I’ve been fantasizing about it all day. Will it be my latest obsession, pepperoni and banana peppers? Or a white pie, thick with ricotta, drizzled in honey, and speckled with oregano? A classic New York–style “plain cheese” or a Margherita, topped with splotches of creamy fresh mozzarella and garnished with a handful of fresh basil leaves? Hmm… Probably not that last one. The basil sticks to the roof of my mouth—it’s like trying to chew around a fragrant Band-Aid.)

But whichever one I choose, I can tell you this: I am going to enjoy the fuck out of it, I am not going to step on the scale tomorrow to see what pizza hath wrought, and I am not going to punish myself for days or weeks over a perfectly normal dinner that makes absolutely no difference to who I am or how I deserve to be treated—by myself or anyone else.

The world punishes us quite enough for eating and drinking and growing and shrinking, thank you very much. I’ll save the self-flagellation for when I forget, yet again, to ask for crushed red pepper flakes on the side.

Dammit.