Thin Is the New Miserable

By Stephanie Losee, AlterNet. Posted November 19, 2008.

So I got the approval I was looking for and not getting when I was 10 pounds heavier. I liked that a lot. I still liked food though, and I started eating again, and guess what, the weight came back on. It was a choice between food and approval, and I realized I can’t have both. When you’re 11 years old, and you realize you can have the approval from friends and strangers, or you can eat what you want, that’s not the kind of quandary that an 11-year-old should have to face.

SL: I had a hard time reading about your mother forcing you onto the scale and weighing you, since my mother did the same thing to me. Do you think those episodes have shaped our generation?

VF: Certainly. Whoever had to endure that has been permanently affected by it. I quote a statistic in the book that 80 or 90 percent of kids who were criticized about their weight end up with permanent issues with it. It wires insecurity into your hard drive. Criticism from your mother turns into self-criticism; anything your mother says sticks. The gray matter is shaped around that. So instead of learning to play piano when you’re an adolescent, you learn to hate your body. The women of our generation can get over it; we just have to be willing to face those memories.

SL: Throughout the book you try to get your mother to see the hurt she caused you by obsessing about your weight, but she won’t admit she was wrong. Why do you think that is?

VF: It wasn’t just my mother -- it was a generational thing. Most women of her generation didn’t work. So instead of obsessing about their job or their ambition, they put their focus on their children, especially their girl children, to be good representations of their family out there. It’s the children-as-accessory idea. My mother totally admits this. "Yes, I didn’t want a fat kid; I think that’s unattractive. I wanted you to have everything, I wanted you to enjoy the advantages of being thin."

But her criticism was relentless. She could have helped me get more exercise. She could have bought me flattering clothes. Instead, she got me the clothes she wanted me to wear, and if they looked terrible on me, my needs were just thrown out the window. I have one daughter who is skinny and one who is normal size. I don’t push her toward the skinny jeans, I push her toward the clothes that will flatter her -- boot-cut jeans and trapeze tops, things like that. She puts them on, and she looks great and she feels great. Mothers should help their daughters, not hurt them. It seems elementary to me.

SL: You call dieting "the family tradition," but isn’t it an American tradition?

VF: Absolutely. I went on a talk show about eating disorders, and I went out there and said that the most pervasive eating disorder in America is chronic dieting. Other eating disorders affect a relatively small percentage of the population. Binge eating is about 5 percent, and anorexia is 1 percent, bulimia about 1 percent, too, but how many people do you know who are dieting? Everybody.

SL: Dieting gave you "something to think about when all other thoughts were bleak," even during your first husband’s diagnosis and death from lung cancer at 34. During 9/11, during the recent stock market crash, friends I know -- myself included -- were still obsessing about the number on the scale. Why can’t we change the mental station, even during crisis?

VF: It’s easier to think about your weight than about death or taxes. It’s a convenient distraction from real problems, real issues. So instead of thinking about huge threats like the economy right now, or death, or losing a job, you think about what you ate, or whether your pants fit, or whether you got to the gym today, which are controllable things. It does take a lot of mental thought, time and energy to diet. It’s a huge time suck.

See more stories tagged with: gender, body image, dieting

Stephanie Losee is co-author of the book Office Mate: The Employee Handbook for Finding -- and Managing -- Romance on the Job.

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