Not Tonight Dear, I Feel Fat

“I’ve lost ten pounds and gained it back so many times I’m not sure why I even bother. Once, I lost twenty-five pounds and instead of feeling good about it I started obsessing about my cankles. It’s like getting the room painted—it feels good for a couple of days until the rug starts looking bad by comparison. Then you change the rug and it feels good for a few days until the furniture starts looking scruffy. There’s just no end to it.”

Can diet and exercise get you closer to a body that would improve your self-image? Yes, in the same way jumping gets you closer to the sun. If it were true that losing weight improved body image, studies would show that thinner women would be more satisfied with the way their bodies look than normal-weight women. But they aren’t. Studies consistently show that underweight women are nearly as dissatisfied with their bodily appearance as normal or overweight women.

From ordinary women who force themselves to eat dust for dinner to supermodels who treat cocaine as a food group, nobody is immune to distorted body perceptions. This is how bad the situation is: slender women consistently overestimate their body size more than heavier women! Supermodels have something in common with the truly overweight—they think their butts are too big.

So do professional ballet dancers. Who doesn’t envy these petite flowers? If anyone knows about her body, it’s a dancer who scrutinizes her physical appearance for a living. Yet one famous survey showed ballerinas significantly overestimated their true percentage of body fat!

The fact that thinner women may have an even worse body image than you do is difficult to grasp. It probably violates one of your deepest-held beliefs—that if you lost weight you’d feel better about your body. But it’s true. Losing weight rarely results in an uptick in body confidence, because nearly all women are dissatisfied with their bodies.

As I mentioned in the introduction—and which I’m repeating because it’s so important—researchers have come to the conclusion that body dissatisfaction is so widespread that they’ve labeled the phenomenon “normative discontent.” In English, it means body dissatisfaction is the new normal. It is now standard and predictive that most women have a negative body image—no matter how skinny or how fat they are. It is now normal for most women to diet and try to lose weight, even if they objectively don’t need to. Even if it’s medically dangerous for them to try.

Of all the body image surveys done over the years, academic researchers have gravitated toward the two they consider most important: the 1997 Shape Magazine survey and the 1997 Psychology Today poll. Both support the academic contention that body satisfaction is a “normative discontent.” In the Shape magazine survey, 90 percent of women reported feeling “somewhat, moderately, or very self-conscious about their appearance.”

The Psychology Today survey showed that 89 percent of women wanted to lose weight. Across the board, in both surveys, women thought they were too fat. Skinny women thought they were too fat. Normal-weight women thought they were too fat. Overweight women thought they were too fat. Here are the editors of Psychology Today, commenting on this phenomenon:

“The truly fat despair but there is an equivalent amount of self loathing on the part of thin people, suggesting a different type of problem (other than fat): distortion on top of dissatisfaction. Thin women distort reality by seeing themselves as fat. This type of distortion is rampant and has become the norm. 159 women in our sample are extremely underweight and 40% of them still want to lose weight.

Another example that it isn’t fat that’s the problem: Younger women are at a weight that most women envy, but they are still plagued by feelings of inadequacy.”

Yes, for about ten minutes. And then you probably realized that you still didn’t look like the ideal you see in the media, and a thought creeped into your self-congratulations: If I could just lose another five pounds, THEN I’ll really be satisfied. And the struggle began anew.

Think about it—deep down, is your real goal to be thinner? Or to look like those models in the media? In the next chapter we’ll talk about a “yes or no test” the media offers women. Namely, do you look like the women the media holds up as ideal? It isn’t graded on a curve. You don’t pass by getting closer to the ideal. You pass the test by being the ideal. Secretly, you know this. Ten pounds? Please. You aren’t even close to passing the test. And that’s why your “victory,” while real, is so short-lived.

Don’t get me wrong: if you are truly overweight, losing the pounds will make you feel better—you won’t get out of breath as much, you’ll be able to do more, move more, and prevent a lot of weight-related diseases like diabetes and heart disease. But that isn’t necessarily going to improve your body image. Why?

Because the perception of your body has little to do with your actual body size.

It’s simply not true that women who can fit into a size 2 dress always feel better about their bodies than women who wear a size 14. Research shows that the strongest predictor of body shame and anxiety isn’t actual weight but perceived weight.

Dr. Michael Wiederman, in his seminal study published in the Journal of Sex Research, reported that 35 percent of women experience body consciousness to the point where it interfered with sex at least some of the time, but only 10 percent were objectively overweight according to the criteria set by the National Center for Health Statistics (a BMI greater than 24.9; BMI is calculated by dividing your weight [in kilograms] by the square of your height). That means over two thirds of women who experienced sex-interfering self-consciousness were normal or below normal weight!

Supermodels Have Awful Sex Lives

You might want to look like a ballerina or a supermodel, but you wouldn’t want their sex lives. Studies show that models and actresses in the media have 10 to 20 percent less body fat than healthy women. They’re not only in danger of the wind blowing them to the next street, but they’re also more prone to sexual dysfunction than women with a healthy percentage of body fat. They’re much more likely to have lower libidos and yawn-producing orgasms (not having enough body fat messes up your sexual plumbing). Yes, supermodels rule in the media, but their sex lives are locked in the castle tower. Isn’t it ironic? The women you want to look like not only feel as badly about their bodies as you do, but they also actually have worse sex lives!

The average runway model is estimated to be 5 feet 9 inches tall and weigh 110 pounds—resulting in a BMI of just 16.2. A BMI of 18.5 is considered the lowest end of normal, healthy weight. Think about what that means. The media’s beauty ideal is dangerous to your health. Not just bad for your self-image—dangerous to your health. For example, we know that women cease ovulating and menstruating when their body fat falls below about 10 percent of body weight. This is the reason for amenorrhea (absence of menstruation) in patients with anorexia nervosa and in overtrained female athletes. BMI has long established itself as a marker for health. Being outside the normal range—on either end—is a strong predictor of disease.

Most women cannot accurately perceive their weight or shape. Normal-weight women consistently rate themselves as overweight, and underweight women consistently rate themselves as normal weight. It seems almost all women believe they are the reason the earth wobbles on its axis.

Researchers call it “perceived-actual disparities,” or the inability to correctly perceive objective traits about your own body. This inability to see yourself as you really are is the main reason you think your partner lies when he says he loves your body. You think he sees what you do. He doesn’t. His reality doesn’t buy into your fiction. There’s very little “perceived-actual disparity” in his assessment of you. The truth is that he’s a much better judge of what your body looks like than you are.

One study that documented women’s inability to judge themselves objectively found that normal-weight women who overestimated their true weight had a worse body image than normal-weight women who perceived their weight accurately. Think about this for a moment: If you could perceive your body size accurately, your body image would improve.

But if you’re like most women, you can’t. And that’s why even if you lose weight, you’ll most likely have a skewed perception of how you look. Weight isn’t the problem. Your preoccupation with it is.

Then you should lose weight. But not because you’ll feel better about your body—because you’ll feel better period. You should not rely on your own opinion to decide if you should lose weight. Your ability to make an informed decision is too compromised by your desire to look like those media models. Instead, use the tool preferred by most physicians—BMI.

You can check your BMI by using the National Institute for Health’s automatic BMI calculator (www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi/) or a BMI chart produced by any reputable medical organization. If you find yourself outside the healthy weight category (defined as a BMI over 24.9), it’s time to change your eating and exercise habits. As a rule of thumb, the average 5-foot 4-inch American woman should weigh between 108 and 144 pounds to stay within the designation of healthy weight.

Although BMI is absolutely the best way of quickly assessing healthy weight (outside of skinfold thickness measurements with calipers and other procedures that require a doctor’s supervision), it has a few quirks you should be aware of. Because it does not distinguish between bones, muscle, fat, or organs, BMI can and often does mislabel some people as overweight when they are not. Muscle weighs more than fat, so BMI can be problematic for athletic women.

BMI can also sometimes label you as normal weight when a caliper exam shows you’re overweight. Despite these problems BMI is fairly accurate for the vast majority of people. If you sense that your BMI index isn’t accurate, make an appointment with your doctor so he can do a custom body fat check and determine your weight classification.

Despite research to the contrary, it’s hard to let go of the idea that losing weight will make you happier about your body. After all, you were taught that thinness is the secret to happiness from the time you were a little girl. Somehow, some way, you have to make peace with the startling reality uncovered by twenty years of academic research:

Since body image is such a strong predictor of sexual functioning and satisfaction, the answer to improving your sex life seems obvious: improve your body or your image of it. We’ve just seen that “improving” your body through diet and exercise cannonballs you to a net that catapults you right back to where you started. Is working on your body image more effective? Will reciting positive affirmations in front of the mirror, correcting self-talk, and keeping body image diaries help? Yes, but only in the way that sofa change helps pay the rent.

It’s not that trying to improve your body image is a bad thing; it’s just that it has some excruciating obstacles. How on earth are you going to look in the mirror and convince yourself that you have a beautiful body? You may in fact have one, but as you just saw, women are very poor judges of what their body looks like. To most women, “positive thinking” their way into feeling better about their body amounts to lying and self-delusion.

While it may seem obvious to attack the problem directly, the shortest distance between two points is rarely a straight line. You might only be five hundred yards from the top of the mountain, but unless you’ve got the gear—and the stomach—to climb up its sheer wall, you’d be much safer (and get there faster) using the switchbacks.

There are two reasons that the direct method—“working on your body image”—is at best insufficient and at worst ineffective. First, it keeps the focus on your body and how it looks when you should be concentrating on things that have nothing to do with your appearance. Second, focusing on your looks runs the risk of actually perpetuating the sexual dysfunction you’re trying to resolve. See, right now, you’ve probably made the decision that you won’t have sex (at least not without a lot of conditions and concealments) until you lose ten pounds or feel better about yourself (whichever comes first). I call it the if/then “sex diet.” It goes something like this: If you lose weight, then you’ll make love. If you feel better about your body, then you’ll have sex. Well, diets never work and this one won’t either. Sex is not the reward for losing weight. It’s the reward for being human.

This sex diet, or self-imposed sexual “time-out,” which is extremely common among women with low body esteem, actually reinforces the idea that you don’t deserve sex unless you look a certain way. You’re actually punishing yourself for the way you look. What a terrible line of thinking!

Since when do you have to earn the right to love or be loved? Since when is weight love’s wages? Conditional love has no place in our lives. You are lovable because. Period. Not because you are, or will soon be, thin. Not because fill-in-the-blank. Just because.