How My Life Changed with One Sentence
On a sticky summer evening back in the 1990s, I sit in a chair in a therapist’s office and cry. My body, I tell her, is too fleshy, too hungry, too uncontained. It doesn’t look like the bodies I see five hundred times a day*online, on TV, in magazines, and on billboards. It doesn’t look the way it’s supposed to, the way I want it to. There have been years when it did, when I weighed and measured and wrote down everything I ate, worked out twice a day, pummeled my body into shape. Inevitably, though, it reverts to its natural state. Like now, when it’s thirty or forty pounds heavier than I want it to be. Than it should be.
I’m here because I want someone to fix me. Specifically, to tell me how to regain control of my body (and, yes, the brain that goes with it). This therapist runs a ten-week program that’s supposed to help people with eating issues. I hope she’s going to teach me how to control my appetite again, something I was better at in my twenties. Now, more than a decade later, after three pregnancies and a whole lot of living, I just can’t seem to do it anymore. So I sit in the chair, leaking tears of self-pity, and wait for the therapist to break out the Kleenex and reassure me that yes, it’s OK, she’ll help me lose weight, we will take care of this together.
She does hand me a box of tissues. But she doesn’t murmur soothingly. Instead, she leans back in her chair and looks at me. This woman in her fifties with spiky dark hair, a soft stomach, and stocky legs bridges the space between us with an expression I can’t quite read. Pity? Sorrow? Judgment? Sweat slides down the back of my neck as I wait for her to save me. A long moment goes by, and then she says something unimaginable, something that will change my life, though I don’t know it yet.
“What if you were OK with your body the way it is right now?” she asks.
I stare at her. What I want to say is “Are you fucking nuts?” I mean, that’s why I’m here, because I’m not OK with it. Does she want me to have a heart attack or stroke or get diabetes because I’m too fat? Does she know how much time I’ve wasted crying in front of the mirror? Does she think I want to look like her for the rest of my life?
Of course I’ve never considered the possibility of being OK with this body. This unacceptable body. And I’m not going to consider it. That would be letting myself go, as my grandmother used to say, shaking her head, about any woman who’d gained a few pounds. Even as a child I knew what she meant: they’d stopped caring about themselves, and they’d stopped taking care of themselves. And now they deserved exactly what they got from my grandmother and every other woman in their social circle—censure, gossip, and pity.
I will never let myself go. I will never, ever, ever be the sloppy, lazy, dull, fat friend or mother or relative people like my grandmother shake their heads about.
This therapist must understand how hard it is to be a woman in this time and place and not have the right kind of body. After all, she’s not exactly thin herself. She must have experienced the nasty comments and patronizing remarks directed at any woman who’s considered too big. She must have felt the same shame at having a body that won’t behave, can’t be reined in, and doesn’t look the way it should. How can she possibly ask me such a question?
I consider leaving now, mid-session, and never coming back. But something keeps me in the chair. I have the sense that if I walk out, I’ll be missing something big, something important. So I sit and I rock and I stutter through the rest of the session. I don’t ask any questions because I don’t want to hear that I’m unfixable, that I’d better get used to living this way for the rest of my almost-certainly-shortened life. By the time I get home I’m furious with her for suggesting that I’m the kind of person who would let go of the thing I want most in the world. I might be fat; I’m not a quitter.
But her words stay with me. They haunt me as I brush my teeth and talk to my daughters and put dinner on the table. I’m in my late thirties, and it’s actually never occurred to me before that some people might be OK with not being thin. Some women. It’s as if her words revealed a huge blind spot in my vision, one I didn’t know I had.
So over the next few weeks, without meaning or wanting to, I do consider them. Actually, I think about them night and day. I think about what it would be like to live in this body for the rest of my life. I also start panic-dieting, though not very successfully, swearing off carbs, then cutting out desserts, then declaring myself strictly vegan. It’s all futile and ridiculous, because I can’t keep up any of these new regimens for more than a day. I find myself jolting awake at night, drenched in sweat, adrenaline burning through my veins, the words I’m fat I’m fat I’m fat beating time in my head. I’m smart, disciplined, hardworking. By any standards I’m a successful woman. And I just can’t do this anymore.
WE’RE IN THE midst of an epidemic, one that’s destroying both the quality and the longevity of our lives. It affects not just us but our children, and likely their children, too. And while this epidemic has been around a while, it’s growing at an alarming rate, not just here but around the world. You’d be hard-pressed to find a twenty-first-century culture that didn’t struggle with it.
I’m not talking about overweight or obesity. I’m talking about our obsession with weight, our never-ending quest for thinness, our relentless angst about our bodies. Even the most self-assured of us get caught up in body anxiety: 97 percent of young women surveyed by Glamour magazine in 2011 said they felt hatred toward their bodies at least once a day and often much more. Ninety-seven percent—that’s pretty much everyone. Another eight out of ten women say they’re unhappy with their reflection.
I’ve interviewed hundreds of women about weight and body image over the last few years, and every one of them says she has struggled with body hatred, or continues to struggle, to one degree or another. Too many of us waste our time, our emotional energy, our very sanity trying to meet the ever-more-rigid rules about what size and shape our bodies are supposed to be. Even for women who get it, who know intellectually that the quest to be thin is ultimately both fruitless and pointless, it’s unbelievably tough to challenge the cultural norms around weight.
The barrage of prescriptive messages starts early. Several studies have shown that three- and four-year-olds are afraid of getting fat, and no wonder: They’re primed to absorb and internalize the lessons we teach them, which in this case means shame about their bodies and self-loathing. Even if they don’t hear it at home, they get it from TV shows, books, teachers, doctors, games, and other children. Even the most confident women struggle to navigate a daily gauntlet of images and messages warning us of the psychological, social, and physical perils of not meeting society’s unattainable body ideals. And this isn’t just a women’s issue, either; men and boys are increasingly caught up in their own variation of body anxiety (in fact, 18 percent of men say they feel fat every day)1: Women want to be thin; men want to be buff. Women want thigh gaps; men want six-packs.
This obsession isn’t new, of course; my friends and I spent many miserable hours in front of the mirror as teens in the 1970s. What is new is how encompassing the issue has become. It comes at us from all directions—from the media, from doctors and medical professionals, from school administrators, from politicians, from environmentalists, for pity’s sake. Practically every modern problem from the recession to climate change has at some point been blamed on fat. We’re told that we’re undisciplined, gluttonous, lazy, that our children will be the first modern generation whose lives will be shorter than their parents’ because of obesity. That weight issues rack up an extra $66 billion a year in health-care costs, contribute to global warming, strain the world’s food resources as much as an extra five hundred million people living on the planet.
Obsessing about weight has become a ritual and a refrain, punctuating and shaping every relationship, including our relationships with ourselves. It’s become social currency not just for women but for teens and even children. My younger daughter was fifteen when she told me (with a great deal of exasperation at my naïveté), “Mom, fat-bashing is how girls bond with each other. I have to say bad things about my body if I want to have any friends.” And saying those “bad things” to others reinforces our own inner critics, the ones that pick apart every outfit, that assess every inch of flesh, every blemish, every choice we make. We’re so used to that constant inner judgment, we don’t even think to question it.
The words we use to talk about our bodies have changed, too. We’re no longer plump or chubby, stocky or stout or husky; now we’re overweight or obese, words that connote facts and figures, illness rather than aesthetics. You’re considered overweight with a BMI over 25 and obese with a BMI over 30. (According to the American Medical Association, with a BMI over 30 you’re also diseased.) These words influence the way other people—including our doctors—relate to us. And, most devastatingly, they change the way we think about ourselves and others. The word overweight, for instance, suggests there’s one acceptable weight, and everything above that is too much. It’s “over” what it should be. The word obesity has become a diagnosis rather than a description, shorthand for a boatload of undesirable qualities: gluttony, lack of self-discipline, laziness, sloppiness, grotesqueness.
If you’re reading this and thinking wait a minute, that’s not what’s going on, cast your mind back to the last TV news story or web article you saw about obesity. I bet it was illustrated with photos of extremely heavy people shown from the neck down, no faces, plodding along or overflowing a chair or scarfing down French fries or ice cream—what British psychotherapist Charlotte Cooper has described as “headless fatty” images.2 It’s tough to empathize with or relate to a faceless, fleshy blob, which is, of course, the point. (And maybe, too, there’s also an element of “It’s too embarrassing to show someone this fat, so we’ll hide her identity.” Which is equally offensive.)
I prefer the word fat, which is based in description rather than judgment. We have fat on our bodies, all of us; you can’t be alive without it. More than half your brain is made of fatty acids;3 without enough fat, your brain deteriorates, leaving you vulnerable to ailments from depression and anxiety to fatigue and cognitive decline.
But some people fear the word almost as much as the condition. At Syracuse University, where I’m a professor, I created a class on body diversity, in part because I’ve watched my students struggle with body issues over the years. They practically fall out of their chairs the first time I use the word in class. To call someone fat in this culture is beyond offensive; it’s unforgiveable. Even Lance Armstrong wouldn’t do it.
What was once a source of personal anxiety and distress has morphed into an ongoing public dialogue. Just ten years ago, a Google search for the word “obesity” returned about 217,000 hits. A similar search in just the first six months of 2014 turned up nearly twenty-seven million hits. Not that Google searches represent a scientific standard, but they do reflect a culture’s preoccupations—in this case, the reality that we’re more freaked out than ever about how much we weigh and what our bodies look like. Many of us believe, as the Duchess of Windsor so famously said, that we can never be thin enough—and that if we’re not thin, we can never be successful, desirable, lovable, or worthwhile, either.
In fall 2013, former Good Morning America host Joan Lunden joked on the Today Show that one of the benefits of having triple negative breast cancer, and going through several rounds of aggressive chemotherapy, was losing weight. I know this was gallows humor, meant to help defuse a terribly painful situation. But no one would have laughed if there wasn’t some truth to the idea that thinness is prized even if it comes from battling a potentially fatal illness.
The way we talk about weight has become a kind of code. “I need to lose five pounds!” we complain to a friend, meaning Tell me I’m OK the way I am, meaning I don’t think I’m better than you are, meaning I feel inadequate. “I just can’t find a way to lose this weight,” we say in despair, meaning I can’t find love, or work, or success, and it’s all because of this one enormous thing wrong with me.
Every January, for instance, when the whole country engages in its annual post–New Year’s self-flagellation, the media run countless stories on resolutions and diets, bikini bodies and love handles. And those stories make us feel worse, not better. They reinforce the idea that we’re supposed to have Michelle Obama’s arms, Jennifer Aniston’s stomach, Joe Manganiello’s six-pack, but they offer no useful resources.
If all this body angst made people healthier and happier, maybe we could argue that the end justified the means. But it doesn’t. Instead, many of us spend a lot of our waking hours on a hamster wheel of self-loathing. We’re screwed up about food, too; one recent survey found 75 percent of American women report disordered eating behaviors.4 I believe it. I’ve heard my students boast about eating only once a day, seen grown women stare at a piece of bread with a heartbreaking mixture of fear and longing. We bounce between depriving ourselves and then “eating with disinhibition,” a fancy way to say overeating.
And we’re paying the price. Many prices, actually. When we focus on the size of Hillary Clinton’s ankles rather than on her voting record, we miss the chance to make a meaningful political choice. When we can’t skip a day working out at the gym, we sacrifice the chance to get a graduate degree, learn a language, acquire career skills, develop relationships, do volunteer work—to spend that time more productively in so many other ways. When we nag our children about their weight or what they eat, we’re telling them they’re not good enough and damaging our authentic relationships with them.
Over the years I’ve seen my body as an enemy to be conquered, deprived, and beaten into submission—that is, into the smallest possible shape and size. Occasionally I felt proud of its strength and curviness. But more often I saw it as a symbol of my personal weakness and shame, an outward manifestation of my inadequacies and failures. Catching sight of myself in a mirror—an experience I tried to avoid—could send me into a dark place for hours. I spent years wallowing in self-hatred because of the size of my thighs. My weight went up and down over those decades, from the low side of “normal” to mildly obese, but my level of despair and self-loathing stayed sky-high.
The worst part was that I knew better. I’d read Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf. I understood intellectually that the more freedoms and power women achieve, the more insistent and damaging the social pressures that squeeze us (and, increasingly, men) into a certain shape, size, and attitude.
But when it came to my own body, everything I knew evaporated and what I felt became overwhelming. So while I understood that in reality I was a reasonable-looking woman, with a loving husband, beloved daughters, and good friends, I still felt freakish and ugly. I felt like I took up way too much space; I imagined myself lumbering rather than walking, bulging where I should be taut. I got so used to thinking of myself as enormous that sometimes I was surprised when I caught sight of myself in a mirror and thought, for a second, She looks normal. I could argue a friend off a ledge of body hatred, but I couldn’t feel good about my own body. Some days I wished I could just wear a plastic bag and be done with it.
Each of us thinks our obsession with weight and body image is ours alone. We blame ourselves for not being thin enough, sexy enough, shaped just the right way. We believe we’re supposed to fit the standards of the day. And if we’re not in the 1 percent of the population born with the body du jour, we feel it’s our fault. We believe we can get there if only we eat less, eat differently, work out more, go vegan, throw up what we eat, give up gluten, take laxatives, fast, give up sugar, fill in the blank.
But the reality couldn’t possibly get any clearer: This is not a personal issue. This is not about your weakness or my laziness or her lack of self-discipline. This obsession is bigger than all of us. It’s become epidemic, endemic, and pandemic. It comes from all around us, but it’s dug its way deep under our skins, and it festers there. It’s a pain that involves our deepest sense of who we are in the world. We experience the world through our bodies, our skin and neurons and nerves. Other people see us only and always in the context of our flesh and bone and blood. How can you feel good about your essential self when you hate what contains it?
You can’t, as it turns out. That’s how I wound up in the therapist’s chair, staring at her in disbelief, wondering if she’d lost her mind. And that’s how I started on a journey that’s put me into a completely different place. Along the way, my relationship with food started to shift, and so did my physical sense of myself.
It took years for my perspective to evolve, years of thinking and knowing before the feelings began to change. While I still occasionally react to food as if it were an enemy to be conquered, most of the time now I focus on what feels good—physically and mentally—rather than on weight. I eat well and enjoy what I eat. I take long walks and go for bike rides because doing those things makes me feel good, not because they burn calories.
And I see the beginnings of change in other people, too. There’s evidence that fewer American women are dieting now than in previous years.5 We’re starting to talk about health rather than weight—at least occasionally. We pay lip service to the fact that bodies naturally come in all shapes and sizes even if many of us don’t believe it, especially when it comes to ourselves. I think we’re smart enough to be confused by the half-truths and misconceptions, to know there’s a lot we don’t yet understand about weight and health, about how metabolism works and why “calories in, calories out” may not always hold true. We’re beginning to separate facts from fictions and, each of us, make decisions about what’s best for our health.
Because contrary to what you hear in the media, the relationship between weight and health isn’t simple or straightforward. It’s terrifically complex, as multidimensional and complicated and elegant as the human body itself. We automatically conflate fat with being unhealthy, and praise thinness as a model of health. But in reality, that’s never been the whole truth, or even most of it. People naturally come in a range of shapes and sizes. We might be short or tall, lanky or curvy, athletic or clumsy. We might feel wretched at a weight the doctor says is fine and comfortable at a weight society deplores. We might be actively engaged in taking care of ourselves or not. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach (so to speak). We each have our own physical and emotional realities, which, along with all the social and cultural baggage we carry, shape our experiences and reactions.
I still have occasional moments when I look in the mirror and feel a little zing of panic, when I find myself thinking I won’t ever eat any more bread! Or sugar! Or fat! Luckily, I’ve learned to deflect and redirect the inner monologue that still sometimes runs on a continuous loop in my head, commenting viciously about the size of my thighs, my waist, my chins, my appetite.
I know I’m not the only one who’s fed up with this obsession, who’s tired of seeing weeks and years of my life go down the drain of self-loathing and self-denial. Over the last decade I’ve interviewed hundreds of women about how they feel about their bodies. I came away from those conversations with a profound sense of sadness at the real suffering this obsession creates and perpetuates. And eventually I got mad. Mad enough to spend years immersed in the research so I didn’t have to believe everything I read, so I could understand the facts for myself. Mad enough to talk to many of the scientists who study obesity and eating disorders, to ask them the tough questions and know enough to contextualize their answers.
What I’ve learned from this process has been shocking and enlightening, enraging and empowering. It has forever changed the way I look at myself and others, how I think about weight and health and food. There’s no question that we need a different kind of conversation, one rooted in science and evidence and reality rather than blame and fantasies, our own and others’. This book, I hope, will help move us in that new direction.
When I give lectures on this subject, audiences often react with disbelief—at first. Our intellectual perspectives and emotional comfort zone around weight and body size have developed over years, and are reinforced constantly by much of what we see and hear. It takes time to understand things differently. And it can be scary to shift the paradigm; many of us have a lot invested in seeing things the way we’ve always seen them.
Some of what you’re about to read here may feel shocking to you, too. But I believe each of us deserves to hear the whole story. I encourage you to keep an open mind and, ultimately, come to your own conclusions.
*In 2007, a marketing research firm estimated that people living in cities saw up to five thousand ads a day; some advertising executives and commentators question that number. Considering the continuing proliferation of ads over the last eight years, five hundred ads a day seems a conservative estimate.