Felice resisted her Sunday weigh-ins as she got older and her relationship with her mother got more complicated. She spent hours in the basement of her house, making dance routines that she thought worthy of The Grind on MTV. Black girls, she understood, were supposed to have big asses, small waists, and big breasts. One dancer, in particular, symbolized her ideal body—“She was in a lot of the early nineties videos, like the one for ‘Around the Way Girl,’” Felice reminisced, laughing heartily.
Felice was happy being a “geek,” playing in the marching band and excelling in her science and math classes. Going to engineering school at Columbia and getting out of Mount Vernon—and away from her mother’s careful eye—seemed logical.
College was an initiation into “geek as chic.” Suddenly Felice wasn’t just a nerd without any sex appeal, she was a beautiful, big woman who happen to be adept at calculating sine curves, designing unbreakable bridges, and writing poetry and autobiographical plays. She started to perform all over the city. She started to believe that she had the capacity to be pretty.
She still secretly longed to be as sexy as the ladies popping and locking in rap videos. Too many guys thought of her as great friend material. She felt smart, brilliant, even; now she wanted to feel hot. After a long Sunday at church on a visit home, her mother told Felice about a fellow parishioner who had recently lost a lot of weight on something called the Atkins diet (this was 1996, long before Atkins took over the world and then crawled away in bankruptcy). No bread, no sugars, plenty of protein—Felice was committed. Her mother was thrilled.
In the first two weeks, Felice lost nine pounds. Within a year, she had lost fifty. As the pounds dropped off, her fantasies added up— being toned and tightened, in her mind, was tantamount to happiness. She had always had everything going for her, except this one thing. Now that she would have it, she figured, there would be nothing standing between her and true bliss. Whenever she felt depressed or inadequate, it was always easy to blame her weight. Now that she would be smaller, there would be nothing to weigh her down. “I imagined the life that thin women led,” she explained, “to be easy, carefree. Everything just fits.”
It didn’t quite work out that way. As with any diet, eventually Felice hit a plateau. She was buying Dolce & Gabbana dresses at Filene’s Basement, feeling fine, but she still wanted to lose thirty more pounds, which just didn’t seem to be coming off. Atkins was hell to keep up, and her willpower was growing thin. When she sneaked a piece of bread, she felt guilty. Even fifty pounds lighter, she felt harassed by the voices of the perfect girl and the starving daughter in her head. She was exhausted by the effort to deny herself ten times a day. Even after all that effort, she felt perpetually unsatisfied. Looking back at photos of that time, Felice is shocked by how thin she was: “If I would have lost thirty more pounds, I would have been emaciated.”
Eventually Felice realized that there would be no “true bliss” moment, no matter how thin she got. Her life, from the outside, wasn’t that different. She got compliments at her thinnest weight, but not many more than she had at her heaviest. Guys were interested in her, as they had been when she was overweight, at about the same rate. Her spirit, after all, remained full-figured; guys were still intimidated by the heft of her intellect. Her job, her apartment, her lifestyle, all felt the same, if not a bit more restrictive, a little less spontaneous and fun.
But even more surprising, her interior life hadn’t changed either. Felice spoke of this profound understanding: “I realized that my weight had so little to do with my weight. If I’m skinny and tell myself I’m fat every day, it doesn’t matter what I look like. My experience of myself in the world is still unsatisfying.”
Our all-or-nothing nation is built on foundations of fantasy. Our imagination is harnessed to America’s favorite adolescent fantasy—how much prettier, thinner, richer, and more successful we will be one day. When Felice was sweating away in the basement of her childhood home, painstakingly imitating the dancer in her favorite video, she was rehearsing for a lifetime of longing: Someday I will be thin like her and my whole life will feel different. Someday I will fit into those clothes and get the attention of those boys. Someday my mom will be proud of how I look.
This perpetual American daydream is written in the language of “somedays.” “Someday” whispers us to sleep at night, gets us through a boring workday, makes our little lives bearable. The 250 ads the average American sees a day brainwash us into believing that we need more shiny, new things and, of course, food—glorious piles of chocolate chip cookies, decadent ice cream, burgers the size of elephants. “Someday” soothes insecurities, and numbs discomfort, and keeps perfect girls running obediently in the hamster wheel of weight preoccupation. Someday we will be thin. Translation: Someday we will be happy, loved, and powerful.
I asked Gareth, “How would your life be different if you lost weight?”
She answered immediately. “I think of the thin me as the better me, as a me with self-control and a me without health risks. Maybe my acting career would have taken off. Maybe I would just be happy.”
But even those precious few who get to this “someday” destination, as Felice did, aren’t happy or better. In fact, Felice was less joyful and interesting because she was expending so much energy denying herself the foods that didn’t fit into her diet plan. Felice wasn’t even healthier, because she was avoiding whole food groups and loading up on fats that raised her cholesterol. She may have been better at saying no, but true self-control would have allowed her to say yes sometimes too, without the fear of losing her resolve completely.
Dr. Sharron Dalton, nutritionist and author of Our Overweight Children, explains, “Many people believe that having personal control is ‘just saying no.’ In fact, saying no to food works for some people for short periods of time. For others, it becomes an unhealthy end in itself. For most of us, to maintain a balance between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ requires multiple skills in this food-laden, anxiety-enmeshed, sleep-and-time-starved environment that makes healthy living a big challenge.”
If you live fat in your head, then you are. If you believe you are unattractive, you will experience the world as an unattractive woman. If you hound yourself about everything you put in your mouth, you won’t enjoy eating. Regardless of the number on the scale, if the number inside your head is large, insurmountable, and loaded with meaning, then you will feel weighted down by its implications.
After publishing The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life in 2004, Wendy Shanker traveled the nation doing readings, signing books, and talking to fans. She reflects, “The best lesson that I learned touring is that every woman, no matter how heavy or how skinny, feels fat. When you’re thin, you’re never thin enough. When you’re fat, it’s not permanent—‘I’m a size eight stuck in a size eighteen body.’ When I used to see some hot-bodied girl saunter down the street, I’d give her a dirty look, sure that she had a perfect life. Now I know better. I know that she may look different on the outside, but inside she feels the same way I do. So instead of a dirty look, I throw a little mini-vibe of compassion her way.”
This is the heart of the matter: A perfect girl can rule just as tyrannically, and a starving daughter can ache just as deeply, inside a thin body. Our dissatisfaction is never, at its deepest, about our bodies. This is why fat women and thin women often experience the world in similar ways. If a thin woman feels inadequate and “thinks fat,” she may endure less hate coming from the outside in than a fat woman but just as much criticism and sadness from the inside out. Likewise, if a woman of any size is able to stop her negative self-talk and accept herself, she may experience the world with a little peace of mind.
The Swinging Pendulum
Tracing the blue veins visible under the pale skin of Susan’s* upper arms until they disappear under her microscopic tank top is evidence that you can be too thin, just as you can be too fat. Susan has inhabited both extremes.
Susan, though in her twenties, looks twelve. Her sk
in appears to be stretched over her tiny frame, her nose and eyes look too large for her head, everything about her reminds me of prepubescence, that time before hips and breasts and everything messy that comes after. When Susan was actually twelve, she was rudely introduced to womanhood through a pair of unignorable breasts. She remembers, “The boys stared at them, my aunts commented on them, my friends admired them. I hated them. I felt like they had taken over my identity.”
Susan cowered under the power of her new identity as a “blossoming woman.” For years she hid under big hooded sweatshirts and her father’s hand-me-down flannels. She sat on the sidelines of gym class, refused to go bra shopping in her hometown, gave her mom the evil eye anytime she mentioned Susan’s body to one of her sisters.
But when high school started, Susan tired of her wallflower routine and hungered for a special place in the crowded halls of her big public school. She flirted with the power of her body—shedding her baggy, ironic T-shirts for a tighter, clingier fabric—only to feel guilty afterward for garnering the attention of older boys. She learned to joke about her breasts, to make self-effacing comments that she knew would lead to compliments. She called her breasts by silly nicknames before her ogling boyfriends could. It somehow felt less embarrassing coming out of her mouth first. She coped but never felt comfortable, never got over the sense that her breasts and curvy body were foreign invaders. In fact, the more she joked about her size and became outwardly easygoing about her voluptuous breasts, the less powerful she felt—as if she were betraying her true self, accepting this form that never felt like hers.
Eventually the discrepancy between Susan’s behavior on the outside—witty, easygoing, playful—and her feelings on the inside—vulnerable, tired of being watched, powerless—developed into a pretty serious case of self-hate and weight gain. Her self-effacing humor grew even more bitter and frequent. The attention she drew from boys was no longer sexual but shaming. She became the fat girl who told the funny jokes, the best friend, the overlooked. In some ways, with more weight, she had gotten freedom from being watched, talked about, leered at. But she didn’t feel vindicated, she felt victimized. She realized that she did want attention. She wanted out of her folds of flesh and out of her misery.
She discovered veganism and running, and her life started anew. She passed on family dinners, instead preparing stir-fry and slow-cooked brown rice. She drank herbal tea instead of coffee, worked out at least once a day, went to yoga and Pilates classes religiously. She went out with new friends on weekends, but instead of resorting to the late-night pizza slice as she once had, she stuck to a strict rule about not eating after 9:00 P.M. Her veganism provided a sound excuse for not indulging in friends’ birthday cakes or her mother’s Thanksgiving pumpkin pie.
In just six months, Susan lost forty pounds. Since she was five foot four, this changed her appearance entirely, astounding old friends and family. Boys were starting to look at her again, even though, along with the stomach and the love handles, she had shed her breasts. Her chest wasn’t flat, but it was certainly not the center of attention any longer. Susan felt triumphant, healthy, even a little righteous.
But what had begun as a mission to lose excessive weight became an unstoppable process of paring down. Friends started to worry, inviting her out for coffee and nervously bringing up her dwindling weight as they drained the last gulp: “Are you sure you’re okay?” Susan insisted that she was fine, that she was eating three meals a day, that she felt better than ever. And she wasn’t lying; she still believed it herself.
When she lost her period, she started to suspect that her friends’ worry was warranted. She said nothing to anybody—afraid that they would watch her even more closely than they already seemed to be doing. Her mom looked worried and kept offering seconds. Her dad teased her about being so light she might blow away in the wind. Neither communicated their fears about her health in a direct way.
Now, still thin but trying to incorporate a wider variety of foods— including a few fattening ones—into her diet, Susan is struggling over the meaning of her own shrinking. “I don’t think I’m anorexic,” she tells me firmly. “It doesn’t feel problematic. It feels good. But I recognize that it looks problematic to some of those who know me best. I understand that I am worrying people, and I take that seriously.”
I believe her when she says this. Susan can’t lie. I believe that she is as confused as the rest of us about the way to lead a balanced life. It is as if she once dragged her extra weight across a land of minefields and now floats through the air, weightless and far from the ground. The latter feels better, I understand; it just doesn’t engage you with earth.
Susan’s journey from one end of the spectrum to the other is a battle for control. This word spills out of the mouth of almost every woman with whom I speak about food and fitness, no matter where she sits on the spectrum. It is the zombie mantra of a generation of perfect girls: control, control, control. Their eyes glaze over, their authentic hungers dissipate, their unique notions of beauty or health or quality of life fade into a guilt-producing, impossibly rigid refrain. Bodies on either end of the spectrum seem to become public property, though of course the larger the body is, the more cruelly it is treated.
Being thin doesn’t prevent self-hate. Susan struggled to put almonds in her mouth not because she wasn’t hungry for them or detested their taste but because they symbolized a terrifying slip down the slide of self-control that she had so carefully avoided with her rules and regulations, with her life-strangling refusal to be spontaneous, indulgent, or silly. Authentic hunger had become anathema.
Gareth experiences stints of fierce self-control punctuated by devastating falls out of control—bingeing and purging. Her cycle of deprivation and indulgence, followed by shame and then more deprivation, can complete a full revolution in just hours. Sometimes she doesn’t even binge, just feels a swell of anxiety about her size and how she fits into the world, and purges even the most sensible meal. Susan has stretched her own process over a decade. For now she is thin and in control. But of course, as her anxiety over the small stuff indicates, she already knows that it is only a matter of time before a big fall.
Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, author of Eating, Drinking, Overthinking, writes about this cycle: “Here’s where the all-or-nothing thinking kicks in and sabotages us. . . . In the scientific literature, this is called the abstinence violation effect—we’ve violated our diet (our abstinence from food) and our all-or-nothing thinking leads us to eat far more than we need to quell our hunger and need for nourishment.” Where there is no balance, there is only saturation or starvation. Feast or famine. Gluttony or deprivation.
True health is “the middle path,” along which control is sometimes lost, sometimes won, without much fanfare. There are unexpected and delightful detours along the way. There is no “good” or “bad,” only “right now”—tastes, moods, the occasional craving, like different kinds of weather, all welcomed and satisfied without judgment. True health is balance. Balance is freedom.
Fat Bitch
Gareth is onstage, the shadow of her voluptuous silhouette on the wall behind her. I am watching it, instead of her, as she gives her monologue, because it feels too hard to look her in the eye when she is speaking such brave and brutal truths. Her words start celebratory but quickly become accusatory:
In a way it is easy to be proud of my body. I’m proud of what it does for me and what it can do for other people. But every time I get dressed I think about how other people will see my body and I can’t help but hear the words fat bitch in my head. I’ve been hearing them most of my life. It’s as if people feel the need to make judgment on my character as well as my body all at once. And it works. It makes me feel huge and obtrusive and grotesque, deformed.
It’s true. I am fat. I am not attractive to most people. Most of the time, I am not attractive to myself. Where does that leave me? Angry with myself? Yes. Angry with society? No.
I think that’s a cop-out,
and it’s not a cop-out for me. It’s a cop-out for the people that judge my size. It’s like, at this point, we all know that the media, old white men, corporations, the fashion industry, and all sorts of bad people or things out there shape the way we view ourselves and others. Okay, I get it. But don’t you think, at some point, knowing all this, we should start taking some responsibility for our thoughts and words? I mean, isn’t that the point of all this higher education, all this enlightenment?
As she reaches the end, she starts screaming her questions at the stunned audience: “So what’s going on, people? Why do I still feel like crap? Huh? Who can tell me? Do you know? Can someone please explain it to me?”
I can almost hear the audience members’ brains buzzing with rationalizations:
But fat is unhealthy.
I don’t date fat women, but I have nothing against them.
Why is she complaining? She’s one of those beautiful fat women.
When is this going to be over? It’s torture.
Gareth pulls herself together, takes a deep breath, and says calmly, “I know what you are all thinking, and it’s okay,” then ends, cool as ice, “You want the fat bitch to shut up,” and struts out of the spotlight and off the stage.
Gareth is beautiful, especially tonight. She’s dressed in a knee-length black skirt, cut in uneven triangles on the bottom. Her shirt is a rainbow of reds, oranges, and yellows—as fiery as her monologue— cut low, revealing the tops of her breasts, freckled with beauty marks. Her eyes are outlined in dark pencil, making them seem even bigger, even more striking. The spotlight bathes her in an ethereal light.
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body Page 24
