Bone broth, I would like to clarify, is not a replacement for a meal. But because it’s temporarily so filling, for many who find themselves searching for the latest greatest solution to the problem of needing to eat but wanting to look starving, it was seen as just that. It joined a long line of alleged meal substitutes—green juice, smoothies, protein bars—and diet trends: keto, Whole30, Paleo, cleansing, fasting.
An obsession with healthy eating is called orthorexia. It’s not a diagnosis in the DSM, but it was defined in the mid-1990s to describe what one doctor noticed in some patients: an overt fixation with eating healthy, or eating “right.” Wanting to eat healthy is not a mental illness, but restructuring your life so that you only eat foods you define as healthy can be. I didn’t really develop orthorexia; I chose to just not eat anything. But orthorexia was all around me and in many ways enabled me. Among certain people there’s just an assumption that if you are skinny you also have your own custom list of foods to avoid. Some people have told me that their list comes from a doctor; others have said an allergist; others still tell me they base it on a DNA test that tells them the foods that make them puffy. They often plan their lives around these lists—they can only go to certain restaurants, or they won’t go to restaurants at all. Their self-imposed dietary restrictions dictate every aspect of their lives.
Interestingly enough, what I haven’t heard is anyone call this behavior dieting. Dieting, in our performatively woke world, is not cool. Orthorexia, instead, is flaunted as more of a lifestyle, one that is structured around an idea of healthiness. It is very Instagram friendly, making it impossible to escape. And when you’re trying to get over something like anorexia and are surrounded by people who “don’t have an eating disorder” but are “trying intermittent fasting” or are “taking a break from sugar and dairy and carbs and alcohol and fat” or maybe are “doing an olive oil cleanse for my liver,” which involves not eating anything but a shot glass worth of olive oil once a day for a week (yes), the line between healthy and not healthy becomes very, very blurry.
It’s hard not to feel anger toward people who exhibit this behavior, since it usually comes with an air of moral superiority. Orthorexics tend to be convinced that there are “right” foods and “wrong” foods. The concept of “right food” and a “best way to eat” isn’t just oppressive for those who think that way; it’s alienating for the people around them, which causes even more damage: left to their own devices, they can implement whatever obsessive diet structure they want without a witness.
My nutritionist, it seemed, was used to people who have orthorexia. In one of our first sessions together, she wanted to make a list of foods that inspired fear, categorizing food into stuff I would eat and stuff I absolutely wouldn’t. She didn’t quite get that I was willing to eat a bite of anything; it was quantity that was the problem. Or maybe it wasn’t: we had a full page of foods that I wouldn’t mind eating, until she said, “Banana bread.”
“It’s not that I’m afraid of it,” I said slowly. “I just don’t see a point.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, sounding genuinely confused. “Banana bread can be a great snack.”
“But, like, what even is it?” I said. “Is it dessert? Is it bread? There’s no point. It’s dessert. I wouldn’t eat dessert as a snack. I wouldn’t eat a piece of bread, either.”
She said, “Plenty of people do.”
I was stunned. “But why?”
She was curious about why banana bread as a snack was so mind-blowing to me, so she pushed me to elaborate. “What is banana bread bringing up for you right now?”
“Nothing!” I insisted. And then the memories came flooding back and I said, “Oh. Well…”
Julia, my fraternal twin, who has always been smaller than me, couldn’t put on weight when we were kids. I could. So I’d drink skim milk, and she drank whole milk; my mom bought her a whole pile of junk food at the grocery store every week, and she’d devour all of it, seeming to digest it as quickly as it went into her mouth. Her favorite thing was Entenmann’s banana cake. You know the one: a big square cake with yellow frosting and dark-brown frosting accents. Julia used to eat it with a fork out of the box. Sometimes she’d eat more than half of it in one sitting; sometimes that would be her dinner. I understood that the cake was for her and not for me. Banana bread and banana cake have become synonymous in my memory; it’s something that I shouldn’t have.
All of this came, surprisingly, tumbling out of my mouth. My nutritionist asked if I’d talked to my therapist about it. I laughed. I hadn’t even thought of it until that moment. And really, it didn’t seem like an important memory compared to everything else I was talking about in therapy. The next week my nutritionist brought two slices of banana bread to my session, and we ate it together, which she seemed to think was a big milestone, and I frankly found it kind of annoying.
She was also trying to convince me to work out less, an idea that made me bristle. But I was somewhat self-aware about the intensity of my workouts; I knew it was too much. I no longer was sore from my go-to barre class, but not going made me feel awful. I was planning my life around it, often lying to people about where I was. I’d cancel plans with friends to go. If I couldn’t get into an evening class, I’d go in the middle of the workday. I kept yoga pants in my purse. I even ran to a class in the middle of helping my sister move, a decision so selfish I am literally cringing as I type it.
I had started taking barre classes the previous year for a story. I’d launched a series called Bootcamp; the idea was that since the majority of my team were self-proclaimed couch potatoes, it would be funny and engaging to send people to different cult workout classes and review them. I picked barre because it sounded about as far outside of my comfort zone as I could go—I hadn’t done anything resembling ballet since I was a toddler. I don’t like dancing, and no one would ever call me graceful. So a free three months of standing on my toes sounded like it would be, at the very least, a hilarious story.
I had also just gained a bunch of weight—happy weight, from my new relationship with the Scorpio, though I was far from happy about it. The instructor, after the first class, offered to take “before” pictures of me from all angles, which I saved in my phone in a folder I titled “Body.” She said, “You’re small, so you’re going to see results very quickly.” I figured she was just being nice. I didn’t feel small. I felt huge. I hated the photos of me in my yoga pants and sports bra. I didn’t recognize the rolls in my lower back or the curve of my stomach when I stood to the side.
Barre was really hard at first. I could barely keep up with the moves, not to mention actually do them. I felt awkward and embarrassed. It didn’t help that the class I was going to was full of famous models, actresses, and other editors; I was told that many women love barre because it elongates your muscles, meaning it makes you lean rather than bulky. It’s a favorite among fashion-industry types who are chasing that long-and-lean body thing. I woke up sore every single day, in parts of my body I didn’t know existed. But a couple of months in, something magical happened: I could do it, and I loved it. I started to see muscles forming. I felt strong. I wrote a gushy review of my journey, and the manager of the studio thanked me with a year membership for free.
Having free classes made me feel obligated to go as much as possible, lest I let such a generous offer go to waste. So I did. At first, four times a week, then five, then every day. Then I noticed some of the models were taking two classes in a row. “They’re trying to lose weight before Fashion Week,” an editor whispered to me. I rolled my eyes, agreeing it was ridiculous. Then I waited for her to leave so I could double book myself for classes that weekend.
It’s hard to work out when you’re starving, at first, and then it’s not: my doctor explained to me that starvation makes you run on adrenaline. Though every class got harder and harder to begin, by the halfway point I’d feel like I was floating. By the end of class I’d feel so sad that I had to try not to cry. I
was surprised to find myself with a workout addiction. And it was funny, really, to have gotten addicted to that specific workout class, which prided itself on being body positive and absolutely never used language of weight loss but instead encouraged people to just do what feels good. There was nothing in the structure of the method to make me feel bad about myself. That time, it all came from me and what I walked in the door carrying.
At this point, I also had a weird fixation with smoothies. For whatever reason, I was able to justify drinking a meal more than chewing it. There was a Juice Press a few blocks from my office, and I’d go every day for lunch, which was as much a horrendous waste of money as it was a poor excuse for a meal. But a lot of my coworkers did it, too, and it became very normalized. I remember one editor who would have a spicy juice shot for lunch and drink the whole thing while she paid. Others added probiotics to otherwise fiber-filled drinks in order to constantly “cleanse,” aka give themselves diarrhea. When I told my nutritionist about my Juice Press habit, she pulled up the menu and pointed out which smoothie I should be having that was an actual substitute for lunch, and I agreed to switch to it instead of the lighter one I’d been slurping. The next time one of my work friends went on a smoothie run, she asked if I wanted the usual, and I told her I needed something with a little more calories. In a teasing voice, she said, “What, did you lose too much weight?” as though that weren’t possible.
One day in barre, midsquat, I looked around and realized that I was the smallest person in the room. It was shocking to see. I looked… puny. The next time I saw my doctor I told her about it and she said, “That awareness is your brain flickering back on.” She was proud of me.
As I tried to cut down on barre classes, I thought I’d check out another kind of workout to see if diversifying my routine would make me feel better about doing less. I went to a HIIT class, which stands for high-intensity interval training. It was coed, which I wasn’t used to; usually there are just one or two guys in barre. The instructor came over to teach me one of the positions and I said, “Oh, I know this one from barre; I stick my bootie out, right?” She quickly shushed me, saying, “We don’t use that word here. The men don’t like it.” I was totally taken aback. Since when had I ever not used a word because men don’t like it? She continued, “It’s too feminine.” That just about blew my mind. I didn’t go back—not because I didn’t like the workout (I loved it) but because I couldn’t imagine having to tailor my vocabulary to avoid accidentally emasculating someone.
Speaking of gender, I’ve never worked in an office that’s not majority-female, so I don’t know if this phenomenon happens in more gender-balanced spaces, but once I started focusing on my recovery, I was astounded by how my office had become a bubble of disordered eating. At one point I noticed that a particular coworker had dropped a ton of weight really quickly, and so I asked her privately if she was okay; she replied that she was doing Whole30 (a strict elimination diet), as was her entire row of desks. They had all decided to do it together. She was amused at my alarm.
This is not uncommon. A former deputy editor at a women’s magazine told me about a boss who would walk around the office talking at full volume nearly every day “about Whole30, or ‘being naughty,’ or whatever diet she was on to lose weight for whatever thing. She also commented on everyone else’s food and would loudly compliment thin women on being ‘so damn skinny.’ ” After ten years of being on top of her own eating disorder, she told me, it was this environment that caused her to relapse. Another editor who worked at what she described to me as a “woke female fashion publication” recalled once preparing a bagel for herself in the office kitchen only to have a coworker come in and say, “Carbs. You are so brave.” She continued, “They were not kidding, and I remember feeling distinctly like a garbage monster.” This same person told me that at the time, she was very thin, not so much because of body dysmorphia but “more about stress, lack of affordable and nutritional food options, and working myself to the bone.” She went on to describe something I am too familiar with: the lack of lunchtime at fashion publications. “Most people worked through it, didn’t eat at all, or ate, like, cucumbers.” All this, again, at companies creating empowerment-driven content, many of which were simultaneously implementing size-diversity missions.
Another former fashion editor at a magazine preaching women’s empowerment told me that the editor in chief said to her, “Let’s not wear that dress ever again. We look pregnant.” She was there from 2013 to 2017, when digital feminism was really taking off. Meanwhile, she told me, her eating disorder affected her work; she gained thirty to forty pounds and “constantly felt like I wasn’t good enough. That I didn’t look the part. [I] wanted to hide my body.” While she dealt with the comments her boss made about her appearance and other institutionalized pressures to look a certain way, she observed other people—people who fit the mold—climbing the ranks. Her eating disorder became a defense: “I took it all out on myself by using it as a way to cope with really negative, toxic feelings.”
Women like me aren’t supposed to talk about things like this, about the ways that all-female spaces aren’t automatically the feminist utopias we want them to be. But eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, and I can’t remain silent about something that is actually killing people and yet is culturally—and, it seems, professionally—glorified. One woman who used to work for a major fashion house recently told me that her coworkers would regularly faint from hunger in the office, which everyone else would then gossip and joke about. She said she had hoped that working in a space that was mostly women and gay men would have liberated them from those kinds of pressures. Instead, as I understand, it was more like a petri dish.
At work, as in life, women are under incredible pressure to be our best selves. We have shattered the glass ceiling and now we must burst through the space where it once was, sparkling and glowing phoenixes, deserving of wealth and recognition and equality. We must battle the imposter syndrome that we are told we all suffer from. We must get promoted, and if we don’t, we must find new, more impressive work. We must document it on Instagram. And because we have been told, again and again and again, in infomercials and talk shows and magazines and movies, that inside every woman there’s a thinner, better woman waiting to be released, even the most levelheaded of us fail to separate the shape of our bodies from the merit of our work.
And what’s even more disturbing is the way that behavior is rewarded. An editor confirmed to me that at two different large media companies, she observed that people who conformed to the “ideal standard” were valued more than others; “their relationships with management were positive and more outward facing.” The aforementioned deputy editor told me, “When I worked at one magazine there was another editor that was thinner, younger—she would go on TV to talk about my stories.” A high-level creative at a women’s media company had a similar experience: “As a plus woman I was constantly left out of front and center forward-facing PR. Only the ‘coolest’-looking people were paraded in front of press.”
And a former Condé Nast and Hearst editor recalled that from 2005 to 2016, she’d get advice to “dress for the job you want, not the job you have,” but: “That wasn’t easy for someone who was obese,” because, obviously, fashion has a long way to go in terms of plus-size options. The year she was laid off, she says she lost one hundred pounds, “and definitely felt I had more opportunities afterward as a result of the weight loss.”
While none of the women I spoke to for this chapter thought that this was unique to the industry in question, many of them pointed out that it’s just more of an open secret in women’s media. The deputy editor said, “It’s weirdly hidden in women’s media because everyone is nominally feminist and body positive—so it’s even more insidious.” She continued, “Bonding over barre and Paleo is almost the female equivalent of men going golfing. It excludes people.”
The toxicity of openly complaining about
your body or bragging about your diet at work cannot be understated. Many people told me about how damaging it was to have to constantly overhear people talk about how much they hate their bodies, and the creative mentioned above said that fashion teams in particular would talk openly about starving in preparation for New York Fashion Week. As one freelance writer expressed, “When people complain about something they don’t like about themselves and it’s something I also have but never really paid attention to or felt bad about, suddenly I wonder if I should feel bad about it. Then I fixate on it and berate myself for not noticing and worry about how people saw me.” I personally never would have started my bone broth and smoothie habits if the people around me hadn’t been flaunting their liquid lunches, and I’ll never forget the one time I brought a croissant for breakfast and an editor said to me, “I don’t know how you justify eating that shit,” or the time I got ice cream for my team only to have a marketing person walk by us and say, “Wow, I can’t remember the last time I ate that.” In those moments I was annoyed, but from the other side, I just feel deeply concerned for them.
Once I was running my own office, I had very few employees who did this. Most of the ones I worried the most about were either laid off in the print closing or left shortly thereafter. There were only a couple of people remaining who said things like, “I’m not going to eat until Fashion Week,” and I just had to roll my eyes at them, throwing an invisible wall up to not get sucked in.
As for that news show I decided to starve for? Well… as it turned out, even though we had sold an up-to-the-minute pop culture news series, the platform required a three-day approval process before anything could be uploaded. That meant by the time the episodes went live, the news was stale, so we couldn’t really promote it on our social platforms—calling it news would make us look out of touch. So in the end barely anyone watched it, except my friends and family, really. My team decided to reframe it as a proof of concept that we could take to other buyers in the hopes of a more lucrative partnership. But when the ten-episode run wrapped, leadership had changed, and interest faded. It had been, in the end, a massive waste of money and time, which was actually a really good lesson for me: I had been so worried about my weight for truly no reason. Not that there’s any real reason to do what I did, though.
Everybody (Else) Is Perfect Page 14
