It’s All in How You Look at It
“You know what the meanest thing you can say to a fat girl is? ‘You’re not fat.’”
—“Fat waitress” Vanessa, played by actress Sarah Baker,
in a scene from Louis C.K.’s comedy series Louie
A few years back, I got the chance to interview the executive chef at a hospice. I was fascinated by her descriptions of how she worked with patients to offer both nutrition and emotional comfort through food. She visited each resident every morning to ask what, if anything, he or she could eat and wanted to eat; many of them could no longer eat, or had problems tasting or digesting certain foods. And then she came up with creative ways to work with the patients.
For instance, for someone who loved chocolate cake but couldn’t eat it anymore, the chef would bake one every day and put it in the room, so the patient could breathe in the aroma and, also, offer it to visitors. Patients loved being able to give pleasure to visitors, and took vicarious pleasure themselves in watching others eat what they could not.
Working at a hospice might seem like a depressing job, but the chef told me how much she loved it. In fact pretty much the only thing that distressed her—aside from the inevitable—was the fact that many of the women who could still eat refused bread, salad dressing, butter, chocolate, desserts, and other “fattening” foods. Being thin and being “good” about their eating had become such integral parts of their identities, they couldn’t bear to leave them behind.
If ever there was a WTF moment, this was it. These women couldn’t let go of their dieting even though they were dying. Who in the world were they still dieting for? What a perfect metaphor for the Mobius strip of crazy we’re caught in.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if the thin-is-always-better mentality might have what psychologists call corollary benefits. That is, does it fulfill some emotional or psychological needs beyond weight loss or body size? Maybe one reason these dying women could not, would not eat the butter or the pasta or the cake was that it would violate some fundamental sense of themselves. It would alter some core aspect of their identities at a time when they were already losing so much.
Certainly the way we think and talk about weight and health and beauty can serve other purposes. Take the phenomenon known as “fat talk.” We’ve all done it, ruefully or cheerfully or with real despair, telling a friend, a colleague, a stranger in a clothing store, “I’ve just got to do something about these thighs!” Or arms, or stomach, or neck or hips or waist. We do it to ourselves, a kind of self-bullying we wouldn’t stand for from a friend, in part because we think it makes us feel better about our bodies.1 We disparage our own physical selves, whatever size they are, in a kind of call-and-response that’s come to be a ritual among American women. The conversations typically go something like this:
“I feel so fat!”
“You’re not fat! I’m the one who needs to do something about these thighs.”
“Get out—your thighs look great. You’re a stick. I’m the one with the problem!”
“Stop it! You look fantastic. Me, on the other hand, I really shouldn’t have eaten that half of a mini-cupcake. Now I have to work out an extra hour to burn it off.”
“No, I’m the one who pigged out on breadsticks!”
And so on, and on, and on. We do it without planning it or thinking about it, for the most part. We do it because it’s become a social norm, something we expect others to do and do ourselves because they expect it from us.2 A lot of the time we don’t even know we’re doing it, that’s how automatic it’s become—like saying “God bless you!” to someone who sneezes.
Most of us think this kind of self-disparagement makes us feel better about our bodies; we think (if we think about it at all) we’re looking for validation from other women that no, we’re not fat, and yes, we look good. And we get it, or think we do.
In reality, though, what fat talk actually accomplishes is to reinforce the idea, to ourselves and others, that we should be thin and that our bodies need policing. On the surface it may sound reassuring (“You’re not fat at all!”), but dig a little deeper and you’ll understand how such talk enforces those rigid ideas around weight. Think about it: to knock your own body for being too fat is to show your support for the notion that fat is bad, unattractive, unhealthy, unacceptable. Even if the reassurances you get from others are well intentioned, they’re still coming from the perspective that fat is not OK.
Which is why, for instance, on the show Louie, when comedian Louis C.K. tells Vanessa, a waitress who has just asked him out and been rejected, “You’re not fat,” she responds, “That’s the meanest thing you can say to a fat girl.” He’s perplexed; he was trying to compliment her. But, as actress Sarah Baker, who played Vanessa, explained to Vulture.com, his reassurances ring false because they’re still predicated on the idea that to be fat is “awful, like that it’s the worst thing a woman can be, overweight.” He’s denying a basic truth about her, an aspect of her identity, one that she sees as no big deal, just part of who she is, like the color of her hair and her height. He’s the one perpetuating the stereotypes; she’s just a woman asking out a man.
Even as we use fat talk to get others to reassure us, we know it’s hollow and meaningless. The more we fat talk, the worse we feel about ourselves,3 which in turn makes us more likely to gain weight, exercise less,4 develop type 2 diabetes,5 and eat in a disordered way.6 And we’re not dumb; we know we don’t feel better about ourselves after a back-and-forth bout of fat talk. But we keep doing it, in part because it’s a way to reach for a sense of belonging—even though that belonging often leads to misery, obsession, and despair. We need to be part of the zeitgeist, even if it makes us feel crappy about ourselves.
I’ve done my share of fat talking, especially earlier in my life. But I didn’t think about it much until I watched, with sadness and horror, my daughters and their friends going through the same rituals. It reminded me of the way dogs behave in a group, especially dogs that don’t know one another and need to establish a hierarchy. The more submissive dogs bare their throats, demonstrating that they aren’t going to challenge the leader. That’s what fat talking sometimes feels like to me, a way to signal to other women that we’re not challenging their place in the pack.
And it brings up another vexing question: Who are we doing all this for? Who benefits from the fat talking, the dieting, the endless closed loops of body angst? When we stand in front of the mirror in despair, when we starve ourselves or overexercise, when we cry in the store because the clothes don’t fit, when we walk down the street judging other women’s bodies, who are we trying to impress?
One answer is that we want to be considered sexually attractive. We want partners and lovers and mates, and we are taught over and over that we won’t find love or success or happiness or sexual satisfaction if we’re overweight or obese. None of that is true, of course, and we pretty much know it. We certainly know that men find a range of women’s body sizes attractive. One example: a 2012 poll conducted by the British Grazia magazine found that men are most attracted to women with curvy rather than ultrathin bodies. And we also know that lesbians and bisexual women are most attracted to curvy women who are heavier than social norms dictate.7
So I don’t think that fully explains our obsession with thinness, or why we pursue it so single-mindedly. It doesn’t illuminate, for instance, the real distress of a student who sits in my office crying because she wears a size 8 and not a size 0. The range of body types our culture deems attractive is much broader (in both meanings of the word) than the range, or lack of range, we see every day in ads and media.
Another answer is that loathing our bodies has become part of our identity as modern women. We’ve grown up and continue to live in a culture that tells us our worth comes in large part from our bodies and our appearance. And even the most revolutionary among us can find it tough to push back against that equation. UCLA sociologist Abigail Saguy coined the term “moral panic” to describe the blame, fear, and disgust we’re now conditioned to associate with overweight and obesity. As we’ve discussed, being thin has come to represent not just a physical condition but a spiritual and moral one. The divide between thin and fat marks a line between good and bad, virtue and sin, success and failure, beauty and ugliness, health and sickness. And who among us wants to construct an identity around being sinful, ugly, sick, and a failure?
So while the women in the hospice who couldn’t or wouldn’t let go of their lifelong dieting rules seem extreme, to say the least, many of us can relate to the fear of losing some fundamental element that makes us who we are. And yes, many of us feel that body anxiety defines us and our social roles. Dieting stories are, like childbirth stories, our ticket into a club, a shared experience that bonds us in suffering and hope. If you’re a woman who doesn’t diet, you inevitably wind up feeling like an outcast because you don’t know or care how many points are in a slice of bread or a serving of cake, because you won’t engage in the white noise of fat talk and self-disparagement that sometimes passes for small talk among women.
That feels both terribly sad and infuriating to me. We’ve gotten to a place where one of our core human needs, the need to belong, now requires us to hate our bodies (or say we do, which amounts to the same thing). Where we believe, deeply, that we need to police ourselves and one another when we break the unwritten rules, when we don’t look or behave the way we’re “supposed” to.
I’ve certainly learned to put on my inner hazmat suit whenever I publish anything about weight and health. A few years ago, I wrote a story on weight bias among health professionals for the New York Times. The piece was reporting, not opinion, and cited a number of specific research studies documenting attitudes among doctors and other medical professionals. It racked up more than seven hundred comments on nytimes.com, many of which were angry, nasty, and cruel (even more than usual for online comments). “Being fat and disgusting is a personal choice,” wrote one. “Fat people take up handicapped parking spaces when they should be parking further away than anyone! The only handicap they have is laziness and self-control.”
Many of the New York Times commenters defended doctors’ bias against fat patients and became furious when others suggested such attitudes might not be constructive—including doctors themselves. A self-identified cardiac surgeon wrote, “I am generally repulsed by [obese people] and am acutely aware of their eating habits in public. It is really quite simple: calories in and calories burned; just change the ratio and you can lose weight. It’s not the fault of others that you make the wrong choices, and quit blaming them.”
A number of comments went something like this one from “Gary”: “When I gained thirty pounds my freshman year of college, I sold my car and bought a bicycle. I’ve never worried about exercise since. When I suggest this to people struggling with their weight, I consistently get some form of ‘It’s too hard for me.’ Well, suck it up. I did the work. You do not get to complain just because you find it challenging.”
If you’ve ever seen The Devil Wears Prada, this attitude will feel familiar. Psychologists call this attitude “queen bee syndrome,” and use it to describe women who have worked their way up the corporate ladder, usually in a male-dominated career, and think other women should have to do the same. They refuse to mentor younger women, and are often much tougher on women in the workplace than they are on men.8 I call it misery-loves-company syndrome. I sucked it up; you should, too. Why should I give you a hand when no one helped me? Or, in the realm of weight, I suffered to achieve this body, and if you want to look like me you can damn well suffer, too. “People may feel losing weight is their proudest accomplishment,” notes Abigail Saguy, “and they don’t want it to be devalued.”
Another piece I wrote for the New York Times, on the obesity paradox, attracted even harsher comments. You’d think we’d be relieved to learn we’re not doomed to an early death if we gain five pounds. But the suggestion that in some cases there might be some health advantage to being heavier really makes people mad.
And I get it. Sort of. We’ve bought into the notion that being thinner is always better—some of us more than others. People who have struggled or are still struggling to lose weight are deeply invested in the process and in the idea that it’s necessary. Many of us literally organize our lives around the imperative of getting or staying thin: what we eat and how much, whether and how much we exercise, how we shop, how we dress, how we raise our children, how we think and talk about ourselves—some of the most fundamental elements of our lives can be driven by an emphasis on thinness at any cost. Especially for people who are not naturally thin, who are what psychologist Deb Burgard refers to as “weight suppressed,” meaning they’re fighting their biology to stay at a lower weight. Because that’s the kind of tunnel vision it takes to maintain a significant weight loss. As Debra observed in Chapter 2, keeping weight off is not a lifestyle, as weight-loss advocates often say; it’s a job, the hardest job you’ll ever have. And a more-than-full-time job at that.
Prejudice of any kind comes from a place of fear. In a culture where many fear fat more than they fear death or disease or bereavement, people feel free to voice the most vitriolic opinions on the issue of weight. They get angry enough to end friendships, send hate mail to strangers, publish mean-spirited tweets like this one, written by University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller: “Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation #truth”. They’re afraid that they, too, could someday be fat, or fat again if they’ve lost weight. (By “fat” here I mean anything from five pounds “overweight” on up.) And that, apparently, is a terrifying prospect.
Other factors come into play beyond fear. Part of our concept of identity, how we see ourselves in the world, can derive from a sense of privilege, a special advantage granted to members of a particular group. Being thin in this culture certainly confers privilege, and lots of it. Thin people don’t have to worry that someone will make fun of them for eating in public, will give them dirty looks on an airplane, will repurpose their photos to ridicule people with larger bodies. They enjoy the privilege of not having to deal with the shame and stigma heavier people encounter every day. And, let’s face it, no one wants to let go of privilege. Once we have it, we feel entitled to it. “People don’t want to be told privilege is undeserved,” says Saguy thoughtfully. “They want to think they’ve earned it by working hard and counting calories, and they cling to it.”
Several years ago, when Saguy published a book called What’s Wrong With Fat?, she got plenty of nasty letters and hostile comments. A few of them surprised her. “People have said to me that I don’t know what I’m talking about because I’m a fat woman,” says Saguy, and laughs. She happens to be both slender and conventionally pretty. Before she started writing about weight, she studied sexual harassment, another topic that inspires passionate debates. The responses she got to that work, says Saguy, were nothing compared with how people have reacted to her work on weight. “I had an awkward moment at a dinner party when a friend actually screamed at me over weight,” she says.
The good news—if there’s ever anything good to be said about prejudice—is that people on the receiving end of weight stigma are beginning to speak up about it. Last year a young woman named Rachel Fox, who’d just graduated Wesleyan with a degree in biology, wrote an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Too Fat to Be a Scientist?” where she described some of her experiences with weight shaming in the STEM fields. One research professor who was interviewing her for a lab job commented that her employees worked collaboratively, adding that she didn’t need someone who was “going to eat more than their fair share of the pizza, if you know what I mean.” When Fox, stunned, stammered no, she really didn’t know, the professor abruptly ended the interview and didn’t return any of Fox’s follow-up e-mails.
During a summer fellowship, Fox was accosted by a senior colleague who told her she shouldn’t be eating “more than 1,200, maybe 1,400 calories a day.” When Fox responded, “How do you know I’m not?” the colleague clearly didn’t believe her. She suggested maybe Fox wasn’t measuring her portions accurately. “Here was a woman with whom I worked side by side, a colleague who counted on me to keep her cell cultures alive while she went on vacation, insinuating that I didn’t know how to use a measuring cup!” Fox fumed. “How could she trust me with the future of her research one minute and then imply that I’m too dumb to read a nutritional label or a food pyramid the next?”9
The prejudice hurts even more, she added, when it comes from scientists who are supposed to understand complexity and nuance, especially when it comes to the workings of the human body, but who revert to the same stereotypes and assumptions as the rest of us when it comes to weight. Fox is now working toward a master’s in narrative medicine, which she hopes to use to do advocacy work. It’s sad that a clearly talented scientist—and a woman scientist at that—was driven away from the field she loved. But the fact that she was willing to take a stand and make a very public statement about it gives me hope. Because that’s the only way things will ever even begin to change.
Former pharmaceutical rep Chevese Turner used her experiences with weight stigma to launch the Binge Eating Disorder Association, a nonprofit that advocates and lobbies for awareness and treatment of binge eating disorder, which affects up to 5 percent of the population. (Not all overweight and obese people have BED, and not all people with BED are overweight or obese.) Turner herself has struggled with BED and knows weight stigma from the inside out. “People look at it as if it’s the person’s choice to be fat and so they’re to blame,” she says. “I can tell you firsthand that boy, we didn’t choose this. It’s a set of circumstances. You get there, and then you have to deal with it.” Turner’s “dealing with it” has included creating a national organization that brings information, awareness, and resources to thousands of people.
One TV anchorwoman who found herself on the receiving end of weight prejudice fought back in an inspiring way. When Jennifer Livingston, a broadcast journalist in La Crosse, Wisconsin, got a nasty e-mail criticizing her weight, she read it on the air and then took the opportunity to call out the e-mail for what it was: bullying. “What really angers me about this is that there are children who get e-mails as critical as the one I received each and every day,” she said, with enviable poise. “To all of the children out there who feel lost, who are struggling with your weight, with the color of your skin, your sexual preference, your disability, even the acne on your face, listen to me right now. Do not let your self-worth be defined by bullies. Learn from my experience that the cruel words of one are nothing compared to the shouts of many.” Her passionate, articulate response racked up millions of online views.
At least Livingston’s critic stopped with an e-mail. Filmmaker Lindsey Averill from Boca Raton, Florida, wasn’t so lucky. Along with her business partner Viridiana Lieberman, Averill put up a Kickstarter last spring to fund a documentary called Fattitude, about the ways culture encourages fat prejudice. Along with the early pledges, they got a few negative e-mails, messages that read “Shut up and eat your doughnuts” and “Get off your couch and exercise, you fat slob.” This didn’t surprise them; anyone who blogs or writes or speaks about weight issues learns to expect messages like these, whatever their body size.
It’s a little harder to laugh off the hate when it hits closer to home. After Averill and her business partner initiated their Kickstarter, they found two videos on YouTube that used clips from their trailer inappropriately (one video spliced them with snippets of racist and anti-Semitic footage). Averill asked YouTube to take them down for copyright infringement, and that’s when the campaign against her started in earnest. On top of the usual vicious messages, she started getting deliveries of pizzas and other things she hadn’t ordered—evidence that the haters knew where she lived. Her husband began getting calls at his real estate office, recordings from the movie Casino of someone saying “When I get out of jail, I’m going to come kill you.”
“At that point we started to feel freaked out,” says Averill. She called the police, who were sympathetic but couldn’t do much, even when an anonymous online poster claimed he lived in her town and wrote, “I can find this bitch and kill her.” A local news station covered the story, and soon media outlets around the country picked it up. Which, ironically drew attention to the project. The Kickstarter funding came through, and the documentary is in process.
I asked Averill why she thinks her project attracted such violent hatred, and her answer jibed with Saguy’s perspective. “Fat or thin, the entire American population has internalized this idea about fat being terrible,” Averill told me. “They’re overexercising and undereating and living in a constant state of fear and panic about this horrible, hateful thing we must avoid at all costs. So if they allow someone else to say ‘It’s OK to be fat and you should stop being mean to fat people,’ their entire life of self-torture is a waste.”
Back to misery loves company, in other words, mixed with a fair amount of judginess. And everyone feels entitled to dish it out. Not long ago a student at my university published an opinion piece in the daily student newspaper arguing, basically, that while it’s OK to eat an entire pint of ice cream once in a while, it’s just not OK to be fat, and that if you do wake up one day and find yourself fat, you have an obligation to do something about it. “Everyone should be inspired to live a wholly healthy life,” she wrote. “It is not OK to accept yourself as something that is blatantly unhealthy and, in most cases, changeable.”10
I invited the student to come talk to me, and to her credit, she showed up. But she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, even begin to question her assumptions around weight and health. I understand that’s a scary process, whether you’re questioning assumptions about weight, race, climate change, or fill in the blank. I understand that a twenty-year-old runner who’s healthy and conventionally attractive might find it hard to put herself in other people’s shoes.
What I don’t understand is the veneer of concern that overlays so much of this judgment. Nobody says you have to like fat people or marry one; weight-based prejudice isn’t illegal, and it’s certainly commonplace. But if we were really worried about people’s health, we wouldn’t be OK with the nasty tweets and e-mails and public comments. We wouldn’t be OK with the fat-shaming and the death threats and the anonymous letters. We’d be talking about how best to support people to be as healthy as they possibly can be—and not just fat people, or white people, or affluent people, but everyone. Judginess and disapproval don’t come from a place of promoting health. They’re part of the cultural tsunami of shame we’re all swimming in.
That shame and stigma have physical repercussions as well as emotional ones. Stigma of any kind, whether it’s around weight or race or class or gender or mental health, can increase levels of cortisol, the so-called stress hormone, which in turn raises blood sugar and blood pressure and—ding ding ding—can lead to weight gain.11 Peter Muennig, a professor of health policy at Columbia University, has investigated the connections among stigma, weight, and health, and concluded that the stress of being fat in a culture that demonizes it is not good for your health.12 “If we believe being overweight is stigmatizing, and we believe stigma is psychologically stressful, why wouldn’t we believe that at least some of what we’re observing with obesity is coming from psychological stress?” asks Muennig. His findings suggest that people belonging to all sorts of stigmatized groups are more likely to develop diabetes and other weight-associated diseases.13
Pat, who’s in her sixties, teaches communications law at a university in the Northeast.
I first found out I was a fat person in kindergarten, when people I didn’t know before told me I was a fat person. I have over the course of my life been of normal weight three times by doing extraordinary dieting. Each time I do that I ratchet my metabolism down one more notch, which has been counterproductive in the long run.
The tragedy for me is that I judge other large people the way people have judged me. I find myself looking at a large person and assuming they don’t care enough to look right. And that they probably are lazy. And that they’re probably stupid. And I know that’s how people have judged me in the past. It’s incredible to me that I do that. And I wish I didn’t.
So I’ve tried to consciously make myself see people as individuals, as people who have a being underneath whatever their body type is. I hope more people can learn how to do that, and I hope we can share how to do that in the years to come. It’s very, very difficult. The idea that there’s a “right” way to look is so deeply ingrained, even in those of us who don’t look “right.”
He also points out that until recently, there’s been little sense of identity or community among people society considers fat. “Even obese people believe their weight is their fault,” says Muennig. “Therefore, anybody else you see who’s obese, it’s also their fault.” We truly can be our own worst critics. It’s so much harder to face off against the nasty voice in your head than against any amount of prejudice from the outside.
Rebecca Puhl and others see weight-based discrimination as a social justice issue. “Millions of people are potentially affected by this kind of discrimination,” she says. “It’s just as damaging as other forms of prejudice but it’s not much on the radar of the public health community.” Tell that to people like Daniel Callahan, who continues to insist that prejudice makes a good health-care strategy for fat people.
EVEN IF YOU never suffer from weight bias yourself, it’s likely to affect you if you have children, or nieces and nephews, or friends with children. While heavy children are bullied more than thin ones,14 even thin kids are sometimes harassed about their weight. A 2011 study by Rebecca Puhl found, surprisingly, that plenty of teenagers with average and just-above-average BMIs reported being teased and humiliated about their weight. Puhl can think of two explanations: maybe current beauty ideals are so narrow, so restrictive, that even the tiniest deviation can trigger shaming. Or maybe teens tease one another about weight because they know it will hurt; they know it’s a vulnerable spot, even if their victims aren’t overweight.15 Because the anxiety about getting or being considered fat has become so pervasive, even naturally thin children internalize it.
Which contributes to the fact that it’s damn near impossible to know how to handle (or not) the issue of weight with your children, especially daughters. It’s impossible to say the right thing or do the right thing when you’re struggling with all the same issues as your child. In my interviews, I’ve talked with many mothers grappling with their own body issues and trying to figure out how to help their children. The story that’s haunted me the most came from a mother who was obese, and had suffered enormous shame because of her weight as a child; her own mother had set up booby traps with food around the house, to catch her in the act of eating something she wasn’t supposed to. She didn’t want her daughter to go through what she had. “So I’d interrogate her, around and around, about what she’d eaten,” she told me. “I’d grab her by the double chins.” The interrogating led to screaming, tears, and a ruptured relationship, one the mother is hoping to mend now that her daughter is grown up.
The pain of having a parent, someone you love and trust, criticize your body, which feels indistinguishable from your essential self, stays with a person. When Rebecca Puhl surveyed kids and teens who’d been at weight-loss camps, she found that more than a third of them said they’d been teased or bullied about their weight by their parents. Another half said they’d been bullied about weight by teachers or coaches, and virtually all said they’d been bullied by peers.16 Maybe some of those parents were just plain mean or even abusive, like the father of a twenty-five-year-old woman named Crystal from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, who pointed to her thigh, when she was about eight years old, and said, “Your thigh is bigger than mine.” When he picked her up from his ex-wife’s house, he’d tell her, “You’re bigger than last time I saw you.” When she dressed up to try to please him, he’d curl his lip and tell her that her feet were fat.
But I’m guessing some of the parents in Puhl’s study were trying (however misguidedly) to spare their children the kind of stigmatization that comes with being obese in this culture. Once you’re labeled a fat kid, once you take that on as part of your identity, you never let it go.
In one disturbing study headed by Janet Latner, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii, subjects read descriptions of two categories of people: those who had been obese and were now thin, and those who had been fat, lost weight, but were still considered obese. Then they filled out questionnaires on their feelings about those imaginary people. Unsurprisingly, the people who were described as having lost weight but were still considered obese came in for the highest levels of stigma. The unexpected finding was that people described as thin now but formerly obese also came in for a heavy dose of blame and shame.17 Once a fat person, always a fat person, at least in the eyes of the world.
On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve heard stories of pediatricians leaving the hospital room of a teen with anorexia and commenting, “I’d have anorexia, too, if I had a mother like that.”* Never mind the fact that parents don’t cause anorexia and that any parent whose child is hospitalized for an eating disorder is probably half out of her mind with anxiety and guilt, and has been for a while. Some days when my daughter was in the hospital I felt like I was walking around with a huge sign on my face that read “Yes, I damaged my daughter.”
It’s really, really hard for parents to help their children navigate the waters of weight, body confidence, and health. Most of us can barely do that for ourselves. I’m sure I never criticized either of my daughter’s bodies, partly because I never felt critical of them. But I do remember standing in front of the mirror and criticizing my body when they were young, even as I reassured them they were beautiful just the way they were. At the time I had no idea that in trash-talking my own body I was giving them a far more potent message than all the compliments in the world. That’s still one of my biggest parenting regrets.
ANYONE WHO’S EVER lost weight, even for a little while, knows it can dramatically change the way other people see and react to you. I remember one of the benefits of losing weight at age fifteen was that boys suddenly took an interest. I went from romantic untouchable to object of at least some desire. And that was just twenty pounds.
Which is, of course, a big part of why we go on diets in the first place: to change the way others react to us. In our weight-loss fantasies, our friendships and romances will bloom, our problems will vanish, and a magical unicorn will deliver a giant pot of gold to our doorstep. And then we’re surprised when things don’t turn out that way.
Terri, the New York City bank examiner whose doctor thought she was lying about what she ate, remembers the feeling of losing eighty-six pounds on Weight Watchers about fourteen years ago. It wasn’t what she expected at all. “I felt really vulnerable,” she says. “I didn’t like the way people treated me. My identity is I’m smart and capable, and I suddenly felt like people treated me like I was weak and helpless and stupid.” She also got a lot of unwanted romantic attention from people she’d considered friends.
Patrick, the librarian who became a runner and lost eighty pounds, never thought of himself as unhappy with his looks or his lifestyle before he went on his first diet. He was motivated by his doctor’s concern rather than by distress over his appearance. Maybe that’s why he was shocked to find that his relationships with other people changed dramatically as he became thinner. “It’s horribly depressing to realize that nothing has changed, really, you’re the same person, and people treat you differently,” he says. “It reveals these things about the world that are just gross, that have nothing to do with who you are. I’m sure for women it’s a hundred times worse.” It was a relief, he admits, when he and his wife moved to a different part of the country a few years later. “Here, not everybody knows I had this big weight loss,” he says. “I only share it with certain people now.”
It took losing eighty pounds for Patrick to realize that people had been judging him for his appearance all along, even people who knew him. Even his friends. Which wouldn’t surprise most women; we’re trained from birth, pretty much, to know others are constantly judging our bodies, and to inflict such scrutiny on ourselves.
Carole, a fifty-six-year-old arts consultant in upstate New York, had gastric bypass surgery four years ago and lost 175 pounds over the next two years. After the surgery, as the weight was coming off, many friends and acquaintances made a point of telling her she’d been beautiful before the surgery. Their comments confused and then angered her. “Nobody looked me in the eyes for those twenty-five years and said, ‘You’re really beautiful,’” she says now. “No one ever said that to me.”
She’s all too familiar with the experience of being stigmatized from her “fat years.” Before she started consulting, she was a dean at a prestigious university, where she was successful and, she thought, well liked. But she’ll never forget the day four of her faculty members showed up in her office to let her know she was an embarrassment to the school, especially in her role as a fundraiser—a role she was extremely good at. “They told me a new faculty member had described me by blowing out his cheeks. That was supposed to give me something to think about,” she remembers. She kicked them out of her office and held it together until they were gone. Then she cried.
Plenty of other work-related fat-shaming incidents came her way over her nine years as dean. Colleagues told her, for example, that she was perceived (always by other people, of course) as not very smart. Coworkers and supervisors felt free to ask, “So what is it with the weight, anyway?” Eventually the gossip and ridicule and sheer unadulterated scorn, even from people she considered friends, drove her to quit the job she loved and opt for bariatric surgery.
Since losing weight, Carole has seen her relationships with many former colleagues and friends change. A lot. “I’m convinced people believe I’m more energetic and smarter than I was four years ago,” she says. “And that is so untrue. If you think about all the workarounds I had to do to manage the world when I was almost two hundred pounds heavier. Just walking into a space and having to figure out where I was going to sit, and do that in a way that’s opaque to everyone but me. To navigate place and space all the time on top of the highly analytical job I was doing.”
Lizabeth is a business consultant in Washington, DC.
My mom has muscular dystrophy. It’s a disease that wastes the muscles and grows increasingly more serious. My mom will die with a brain as sharp as a blade but a body that disintegrates on her, her diaphragm losing its strength and her heart slowly losing its ability to pump. She has lost use of the muscles in her legs, and her chest and arm areas have withered to the extent that her heart sits at a funky angle.
My mom has a disease.
I am fat. I have a big, beautiful body that does all the things I ask it to, and for that I am very blessed. I would be clueless if I was not aware of all the things my body can do in comparison to my mom’s, and thoughtless not to acknowledge the privilege of that.
I do not have a disease.
There are many things that get casually conflated when people speak about size and shape related to health. To call my shape a disease when I know what a disease truly does to the body, to the mind, and to a family perks me right up and challenges my ability to remain gracious in conversation—not because I’m ashamed of my mom or of the idea of “disease” or even disability, but because comparing my shape to something that will kill my mother hits a very raw nerve.
But what about the fact that my mom conflates them? Ugh.
Mom, when she was healthy—or should I say physically able—was the same height I am and the standard bearer of what women in my family “should” look like. To this day, mostly housebound, unable to walk unassisted and with all the other issues impacting her health, she still diets. She believes that a “pouch” on the belly is something to fight against, even in a social circle of one.
My mom was, like many moms, the model of body acceptance (or lack thereof) as I was growing, and did the best with what tools she had. She wanted to keep me out of harm’s way, out of the line of fire, and so she taught me to diet and strive for the thin ideal and criticize and hate anything short of that. Today she smokes like a chimney, drinks, isolates, and as you would imagine, has serious bouts of depression and anxiety. Her disease, I believe, contributes significantly to that.
For me, on the other hand, proper rest, nourishing myself, loving self-talk, and mindfully enjoying movement are essential to keeping myself confident, mentally balanced, and happy. I gained so much in my life when I learned about size diversity, engaging in thankfulness rather than self-critical monologues. You see, I have been in the shame spiral and depression my mom is in now, only I felt it due to my size and the “understanding” that being fat meant I was sick.
It’s funny to view this from the external perspective and see the hypocrisy of unsolicited opinions in action. The behaviors that some people wouldn’t really mind too much if I engaged in; a little shame here, a little self-loathing there, a lot of diet talk and attempts at body change are the exact behaviors my mom engages in, but since she’s disabled with muscular dystrophy, they fall all over themselves to assure her that’s misplaced angst. They are the same people that would call my body shape a disease and want me to make those changes, but since her disease is different, by all means she should show herself compassion. Wasting disease = compassion; fat disease = hate the weight off.
The fact that I don’t try to change my body but my mother does, that I’m healthy and my mom is not—that’s a whole big bag of unfair. The further fact that she can’t see how self-compassion, self-care, and self-love have changed my life for the better and won’t engage in it herself, that’s simply a cruel truth.
I’m going to continue to talk to my mom, the person who thinks I’m wrong, that my body is wrong, and the fact that I can and do love it is wrong. I’m going to try to get her to learn to love the body that’s been on her journey with her, no matter what state it’s in now, because if I don’t, nobody else will.
And then there are the not-so-subtle shifts in her relationships with male friends and coworkers. One former colleague, a married man about ten years older, has completely changed the way he approaches her. Before, their relationship was collegial but not close. “Now he shimmies up to me, wanting to gossip and have lunch,” she says. “This is now how he wants to be my friend because he thinks I’m more attractive. Honestly, I prefer the way he treated me when I was fat, because it was more authentic about who I am.”
IN A CULTURE where body-snarking is practically an Olympic sport, I’d be shocked to find anyone who hasn’t fielded some of it from time to time. You don’t have to be obese or even significantly overweight, either, at least if you’re a woman, as Rebecca Puhl’s 2008 research on weight discrimination showed.18
Even if you haven’t directly been called names, denied airplane seats, or humiliated because of your weight, you’ve likely worried about other people’s perceptions of your body. The fear of getting fat starts early and lasts a lifetime; nearly half of those who took one now famous online survey said they’d give up a year of their lives rather than be obese. A third said they’d rather be divorced than fat, and a quarter chose infertility over overweight.19
That fear and prejudice play a huge role in driving our obsession with getting and staying thin. Joseph Majdan, sixty-five, is a cardiologist in Philadelphia who has gone around the weight-loss yo-yo too many times to count. He’s lost the same hundred pounds on Optifast, Medifast, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig—you name it, he’s tried it. But each time he’s regained the weight. “Really, the obese patient knows how to lose weight,” he says. “But how to keep it off? There is no pathway to that.”
Fat-shaming has driven Majdan to lose weight (and, ultimately, to regain it) again and again. Most of that shaming has come from medical colleagues. In medical school, a doctor approached him in the cafeteria line one afternoon and said loudly, “You know you should watch what you eat. Don’t you see yourself?” During Majdan’s third-year medicine clerkship, the attending physician who was teaching the group regularly marched the whole team up nine flights of steps on humid summer days in Philadelphia, announcing, “One of you has to lose weight.” At an interview, a cardiologist directed him to choose a different seat because he didn’t want to have to buy a new chair. Other doctors told his friends and colleagues they would never refer patients to Majdan because of his size. Another cardiologist stopped him on the street one day to tell Majdan he looked disgusting, and asked, “Don’t you feel any shame?”
“When a person has recurrent cancer, the physician is so empathetic,” says Majdan. “But when a person regains weight, there’s disgust. And that is morally, professionally abhorrent and wrong.”20
I’ve talked with Majdan several times over the course of a few years. When I first interviewed him, he’d lost about a hundred pounds and was maintaining his lower weight with a program of strenuous daily exercise (biking twenty miles and rowing on the Schuylkill River) and eating more or less the same restrictive menu every day: egg whites, fish, Greek yogurt, vegetables, salad (no dressing), sugar-free Jell-O, and one piece of fruit. When I commented that his routine sounded an awful lot like what I’d observed in people with eating disorders, he quickly agreed. “But this is what I have to do to keep the weight off,” he said. For him, the trade-off was worth it.
Two years later, he’d regained half the weight and was caught up again in the cycle of shame and self-loathing. This time, though, he was outspoken about the bigger picture. “Where in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence does it say all men are created equal except obese people?” he asks. “Society makes you think of yourself as a second-class, third-class, twentieth-class citizen when you’re overweight or obese.”
And that’s one of the issues that causes so many of us so much pain and anguish over our bodies: what we know about our own lives, our own struggles with weight, and our own behaviors inevitably bumps up against what society “knows,” or at least insists is true. To be “overweight” or obese here and now is to feel shame and despair and all the frustration of being trapped in a situation you probably can’t change. It’s to feel stuck where being heavier-than—whether it’s by 5 pounds or 105—makes you feel less than, and your identity depends on whether your collarbones protrude or your butt fits in an airplane seat.
So I’m delighted that people are starting to talk about weight in a different way. That they’re outing weight-based prejudice and pushing back on the narrow cultural body norms of the day. A change is beginning, I think, and the next big question we face is what that change will look like and how we can help it along.
*In her book Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa, Joan Jacobs Brumberg describes how the language around anorexia has shifted over time. When young women in medieval Europe starved themselves, they described it as a way of showing devotion to God; young women today talk about the fear of fat. The disease is the same, but the context shifts with each culture’s obsessions.