Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body

by Courtney E. Martin

  Willpower, fastidiousness, dedication—all qualities spuriously associated with being thin—are lauded, while powerlessness, laziness, weakness—all qualities spuriously associated with being fat—are detested. All of this is socially constructed, a symbology of our own making. In fact, obesity† results from numerous factors, just as anorexia does. Some of these are obvious: Scientists continue to identify genes associated with obesity. Some are harder to pin down: a family culture of celebration through fattening foods, a mother who teaches her daughter that food is associated with guilt and shame, layers of fat added to ward off sexual abuse. According to the Clinical Guidelines on the Identification, Evaluation, and Treatment of Overweight and Obesity in Adults, “Our understanding of how and why obesity develops is incomplete, but involves the integration of social, behavioral, cultural, physiological, metabolic and genetic factors.”

  Susie Orbach, author of the groundbreaking book Fat Is a Feminist Issue, was in 1978 the first to publicize the idea that there was an undeniable psychological component to the female struggle with fat. She wrote: “Fat is a social disease, and fat is a feminist issue. Fat is not about lack of self-control or lack of will power. Fat is about protection, sex, nurturance, strength, boundaries, mothering, substance, assertion and rage.” Nearly three decades have passed, yet very little progress seems to have been made in the way people understand this issue. It is easier to blame individual women than to tease out complex causes or hold amorphous institutions, such as the fashion and diet industries, accountable.

  Our lifestyle seems to perpetuate both obesity and our ignorance of its causes. We are a society, an economic system, even, based on excess, a nation of addicts in one form or another (TV addict, alcoholic, cokehead, nymphomaniac, workaholic). We drive our cars to work through smog-clouded traffic jams and vie for the best parking spots so we don’t have to walk too far to the office, then spend our lunch hours cooped up in an airless workout room, spinning in circles. We stay up late at night watching bad television and then drink a quart of coffee the next day, rinse, and repeat. We drink Diet Coke with our Big Mac and fries, consume massive quantities of low-fat, low-calorie, wheat-free, fake cookies hoping that one will taste like the real thing. We barter with ourselves—the denial of dessert brings self-worth, the consumption of calories is a loss of control. The contradictions are thick.

  The Ignorance Epidemic

  Gareth looks up from her crochet project just as the train pulls into the Brooklyn Jay Street station, where she must get off and switch across the platform to the A train to Manhattan. She stuffs the yarn into her new orange leather clutch—her guilty pleasure is purses—and positions herself in front of the door, waiting for it to open.

  “Yeah, that’s right, get off the train, you fat bitch!” yells a man sitting nearby. He looks to be in his forties or fifties, dressed in jeans and a leather coat, possibly drunk but not obviously so. His words hang in the air like a noxious gas. A woman nearby gasps, clearly offended. An older man with white hair and a friendly, wrinkled face shakes his head silently. Two schoolkids in puffy jackets muffle their giggles with their hands.

  It feels like the doors take a year to open. Gareth stands there, staring straight ahead, humiliated and silent, unsurprised. She has heard this kind of thing before. In fact, she has heard it so often that the effect is dulled at first. Later she will relive this moment in her head many times over, articulating the multitude of sassy responses she could have spat back, but ultimately this reflection will do nothing except give her the sharp stab of familiar pain. It is loneliness so deep that she must turn it into anger in order to survive.

  Gareth is my best friend, and yes, she is obese by clinical standards. She is also brilliant, kind, popular, magnetic, and in a loving relationship. She dresses up to go out on Saturday nights, dances her ass off, gets the occasional free drink from a hopeful guy. She is a power-house at the office, blazing through her daily tasks with efficiency and conscientiousness. She is an activist and an actor—mentoring a little girl with AIDS, marching in pro-choice rallies, writing and performing monologues in off-Broadway productions.

  This is not a woman who has “checked out,” contrary to what so many thin people assume about those who are fat. She doesn’t sit at home and lament her size. She isn’t passive or embarrassed. She certainly isn’t lazy. In fact, she is the quintessential perfect girl; she puts a tremendous amount of pressure on herself to excel in everything. In college, she was so overextended that she basically stopped sleeping; She had to get to her job in the college activities office, attend her a cappella group meeting, ace all of her sociology classes, memorize her lines for her part in The Vagina Monologues, and still have time to party with friends.

  There is nothing atypical about Gareth’s biography. In fact, even at her present size, she is certainly not unusual—64.5 percent of U.S. adults age twenty years and older are overweight, and 30.5 percent are obese. She grew up in Connecticut in a divorced, middle-class family, made it to New York City as soon as she could, excelled in college, moved to Brooklyn, and got an administrative job at a nonprofit. She spends her time trying to make the world a better place and figuring out how the hell she fits into it. On paper, she is a perfect girl. To the ignorant, naked eye, she is flawed.

  Sizeism, in fact, remains the only truly socially acceptable form of discrimination on the planet. We see living in a fat body as an insurmountable disability. The feminist therapist Mary Pipher wrote “Fat is the leprosy of the 1990s” almost a decade ago. Today fat is the death penalty of the twenty-first century. Skinny girls, counting their carrot sticks for lunch, can’t imagine being lovable at that size, applying for a job at that size, even living at that size. In their minds, fatness is a social death sentence. When I asked the fourteen-year-old Manhattanites how their lives would be different if they were fat, they were struck silent. After a few moments, one responded, “I would be dead.”

  Paradoxically, we as a society catastrophize the state of being fat for a woman like Gareth, but we have little awareness of the pain of her internal world. We dramatize fatness through news segments on the obesity epidemic and Morgan Spurlock, of the 2004 documentary Super Size Me, stuffing his face with McDonald’s fries, thanks to which the general public’s awareness of this health-economic crisis has skyrocketed in recent years. Yet our awareness of the emotional and psychological pain of fatness remains virtually nonexistent.

  We are deathly afraid of fat. In some ways, we should be. According to the World Health Organization, there are 1 billion overweight and 300 million obese adults across the globe. Fatness is linked to an increased risk for heart attack, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and some forms of cancer. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), health care costs for treating diseases caused by obesity are estimated at $100 billion a year and rising, just within the United States (inexplicably, the NIH spends less than 1 percent of its annual budget on obesity research). The physical, psychological, and economic implications of widespread obesity are undeniably frightening.

  These figures call for increased scientific investigation, programs that teach children how to eat nutritious food and exercise, and large-scale reeducation of medical professionals. We all indulge in something—too much sitting in front of the computer and TV, too much eating out, too much smothering of bitter feelings with sweet desserts. The obesity epidemic does not, however, call for mass hysteria— pumping more money into the already bloated diet industry.

  There is evidence that our approach to fatness is about as unhealthy as fatness itself. In a recent poll by ELLEgirl of ten thousand readers, 30 percent said they would rather be thin than healthy. Dieting is ineffective 95 percent of the time. That means, in America alone, we pump $40 billion a year into a crapshoot industry with only a 5 percent chance of payoff. Besides being hard on our pocketbooks, dieting is hard on our bodies and hard on our psyches. Many women are pushed to use diet pills that damage their organs, such as twenty-three-year-old Janet,
who admits, “Even after my friend had a mini-stroke from taking ephedra, I sometimes wonder if I can search the Internet and find some on the black market. Crazy, right?’”

  Thirty-five percent of those who diet go on to yo-yo diet, dragging their bodies through a cycle of weight gains and losses; 25 percent of those who diet develop partial- or full-syndrome eating disorders. As the mindfulness expert Susan Albers writes: “The dieting mindset is akin to taking a knife and cutting the connection that is your body’s only line of communication with your head.” There is little hope for long-term health improvement with this vital line severed.

  In fact, studies show that prolonged weight loss is more often the result of psychological work. In a two-year study by nutrition researchers at the University of California, Davis, behavior change and self-acceptance were far more effective in achieving long-term health improvements in obese women than America’s most lucrative scam: dieting.

  Although obesity is generally unhealthy, some smart people are saying we should focus on fitness, not fatness. J. Eric Oliver, an expert in obesity and a political scientist, argues in his 2005 book, Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic, that the health risks of obesity have been grossly exaggerated. Being fat, he maintains, is not equivalent to being unfit. The latter is actually the most accurate measure of a person’s health and life expectancy, not weight. In fact, being underweight actually kills more than thirty thousand Americans a year. Equating weight loss, instead of lifestyle changes, with improved health, Oliver argues, is “like saying ‘whiter teeth produced by the elimination of smoking reduces the incidence of lung cancer.’ ” Even a group of researchers at the Centers for Disease Control admits, “Evidence that weight loss improves survival is limited.”

  Conflating obesity with laziness or stupidity is an inaccurate habit of linking a physical trait, in this case fatness, with personality, in this case slovenliness. This is equivalent to believing that all smokers or anorectics are incompetent. Just the fact that someone is genetically predisposed to fatness and struggles with the complex psychological implications of food and body image does not disqualify her from being brilliant, talented, and effective. As obvious as this sounds, many of the health professionals I spoke to about this issue aired an unmistakable tone of disdain for fat patients. While they were able to empathize with women who undereat, the idea of overeating sent them into a dispassionate laundry list of how to decrease input and increase output—as if people were machines.

  Another reason that we chalk fatness up to lack of willpower and neglect a variety of other causes, as the writer, comedian, and fat activist Wendy Shanker points out, is jealousy: “The perception is that fat folks are just lolling around their living rooms like Jabba the Hutt, bathing themselves in tubs of ice cream and candy. Not true. But I think the fantasy of ‘eat whatever you want, fuck everyone else’ is really appealing, scarily appealing, so a good way to stamp that fantasy out is to get all willpower-y on some fat ass.”

  While talk of the obesity epidemic is everywhere, honest conversation about our knee-jerk disdain for fat people is nowhere. A small community of brave women and men, like Wendy, have raised their voices in the past decade, calling for an end to fat discrimination, but they are fat themselves—distrusted by the majority of Americans, who are either disgusted by them or fearful of being associated with them.† Fat people remain the butts of jokes, even in our politically correct climate. They are ridiculed and belittled in school, singled out in shopping malls, bombarded with diet tips from strangers and family members. Susie Orbach writes: “Above all, the fat woman wants to hide. Paradoxically, her lot in life is to be perpetually noticed.”

  Weighing the Blame

  Gareth remembers, “Weight was an ever-present fixation in my family’s house.” Both of her parents were big, though her mom fought her size constantly. She even opened up a Gloria Stevens, a chain gym for women in the eighties (like Curves today). Gareth remembers sitting on the carpeted floor of her mom’s office, doing her math homework and listening to the women pounding away on the floor. “Grapevine now, ladies!” her mom would shout. “No pain, no gain!”

  Gareth’s then-single mom (her parents divorced when she was young) started bringing her to Weight Watchers when Gareth was still in grade school. The experience of fidgeting in her seat in the waiting room until the woman in the white coat came in and weighed her in front of everyone is indelibly burned in her brain: “I can still hear that woman’s voice, announcing my weight. I can still see the look of disappointment on my mom’s face, on the faces of all the women in the room.”

  At the dinner table, her grandfather would say, “You can have more of these vegetables, Gareth. These vegetables won’t hurt you.” He would add, “Look, it’s not our fault.” Gareth’s grandmother would nod and tell her that fatness had genetic roots.

  All this made Gareth feel torn in two. Was she naturally fat, as her grandparents attested? Or, as her mom seemed to believe, was her weight in her control and, therefore, a sign that she wasn’t trying hard enough? Though she didn’t realize it at the time, these questions would deeply affect her entire life. In fact, these questions are some of the most pressing medical-psychological-social preoccupations of our time.

  As a society, we seek answers—black-and-white declarations, either-or cures. But fatness is not simply a medical issue. Gareth is fat not only because of genetics. Just as she is fat not only because of a lack of willpower. She is fat because she has a genetic predisposition to fat, because she grew up with a father who sells chocolate for a living and often showed his affection through tarts and candy bars, because her mother—however well intentioned—restricted her food and, as a result, made love feel conditional. She is fat because she is fascinated by food, generously cooks for others, and enjoys a good hamburger. She is fat because she refuses to live a watered-down life—cutting out carbs or sugars or meat, becoming one of those difficult dinner guests or boring picnic companions—so that she can be thin. She is fat because, like so many of the rest of us, she sometimes uses food to fill an emotional void. She is fat because she lives in an advertising age when every potential craving, insecurity, and discomfort is preyed upon.

  Most programs designed to curb obesity neglect the complicated causes of fat. Dr. Janell Lynn Mensinger, an expert on both eating disorders and obesity in women, has been continually frustrated by the culturally ignorant, gender-blind, and usually unsuccessful interventions by medical doctors to reduce obesity. She explains, “There is such an emphasis on the body as this biological organism that must be controlled in a completely medical way. Emotions get completely pushed aside because most physicians have very little psychological training.”

  At a recent conference on pediatric obesity, Dr. Mensinger sat next to a tiny white exercise physiologist who was lamenting the low success rate of programs to teach children to maintain a healthy weight. Dr. Mensinger remembers, “She segued right into talking about how she used to be a size nine and now she is a size five, thanks to two hours a day of rigorous exercise. She acted like size nine was an atrocity! And this is who obese children from poor, minority backgrounds are supposed to identify with?”

  If we admit that obesity is linked to poverty, then we have to look at classism, perhaps the only issue we are less willing to discuss than sizeism. If we admit that obesity is linked to culture, then we have to look at race, an issue still tolerable only in bite-size, politically correct portions. As the health expert Natalie Angier writes: “Despite the non-denominational nature of fat . . . in many cases, obesity is inversely proportional to socioeconomic status—that is, the higher your station in life, the lower your weight.” If we admit that obesity is linked to incest, then we have to look at a long-standing taboo discussed only on Oprah and in banned books. Dr. Michael Myers, a physician who has been treating obese women for over twenty-five years, estimates that 40 percent of his patients have been sexually abused. If we admit that obesity is linked to
our culture of extremes, then we have to talk about advertising—the crooked backbone of our economic system.

  There is only one rational reason to fear fatness: health risks. The other reasons, which play unconscious and insidious roles in our negative perception of fat people, are profoundly American. Obesity is rampant in the heartland of America—the sprawling suburbs of the Midwest and the South, the farm towns throughout Texas. But it is rarely admitted that our struggle over the meaning of fat is at the heart of our national identity.

  Fat Inside

  Twenty-eight-year-old Felice is a woman who changes the air that she walks through. She is tall, big-hipped, dark-skinned, has a laugh that can turn around a no-good day. She is so striking, in fact, that she intimidates men. They can imagine asking her for advice, lavishing her with compliments, respecting her as much as they do their beloved mothers, but they would have no idea what to do with a woman so powerful in form and spirit.

  Felice wasn’t always so intimidating. There was a time, back in her middle-class, Episcopalian youth in Mount Vernon, New York, when she was nerdy and shy, teased by her family about being chubby. Her mother was a nutritionist and her next-door neighbor her pediatrician—a nasty combination when you are twelve and still carrying around baby fat. She suffered Sunday weigh-ins, where her adherence to her imposed twelve-hundred-calorie-a-day diet was assessed. Usually she failed these tests. Felice sneaked off to the candy store with her friends after school in secret protest. She ate a sandwich with real mayonnaise for the first time on a class field trip and remembers turning to her bus buddy and asking with wide eyes, “What is this magical thing?” She liked to run around the neighborhood with the bottom of her shirt pulled up through the middle and back around—every little girl’s sweet misinterpretation of sexy in the eighties.