Thin Is the New Miserable

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

SL: In the course of the book, you conquer your diet demons by confronting the people who handed them to you, beginning with your mother and ending with a boy from your childhood who taunted you about your weight. But the encounter was quite different from what you expected. What happened?

VF: I was so terrified of him that my heart pounded when I picked up the phone, but I didn’t even end up asking him why he tormented me, because when I called him it turned out he was a really boring, uninteresting Joe Blow that I had built up in my mind all these years. In junior high, he was this charismatic leader, sports star, girls-liked-him kind of guy. I found that as an adult, he hadn’t done anything extraordinary, or even interesting, with his life: He was just some boring guy. My sister referred to it as the banality of evil. He just wanted to retire and play golf. He said he had never had dreams for himself, he had never had any goals, he just wanted to be a good dad. I had this plan to say, well, how would you feel if someone bullied your kid like you bullied me? But it became irrelevant, because I realized that we had this bad history, our paths crossed because we lived in the same town, but there’s nothing he could say that would undo what he did.

I think if I saw this guy on the street now, my heart would not start beating faster. Talking to him erased the terror. Facing your fears serves that purpose.

SL: You eventually started following something you call the Not-Diet. Let’s say you’re sitting down to an expense-account lunch at a buzzed-about restaurant. What goes through your head?

VF: If I were going to a five-star restaurant, I would order the best thing they had, and I would eat it and enjoy it. Unlike before, when I would probably order it and have guilt and feel like shit about it. If I were full, I would take the rest home to eat later. On the chronic dieting thing, you give yourself permission to eat and then stuff yourself until you’re sick.

Now, I’ll order the same thing, enjoy every bite of it and save some of it to enjoy next day. I have emotional goals -- I don’t have weight-loss goals anymore. What happened is I ended up losing weight anyway. If you’re feeling good about everything, you do recognize when you’re full and stop eating, which doesn’t happen when you’re shoving food into your mouth because you’re so conflicted about eating it in the first place. You stop saying any food is evil or bad.

SL: This reminds me of Geneen Roth’s books about learning to stop abusing food by trusting your hunger.

VF: That’s it: Eat when hungry, stop when full. I think the cavemen did that. It’s not revolutionary, but when you’ve been a chronic dieter for 30 years -- eating what you’re told to eat, following eating plans -- eating what you want and stopping when full takes an adjustment. You have to unlearn. Even now, it’s been two years of not-dieting, and I still have little flare-ups of shouldn’t, couldn’t, but then I say, 'no, that’s dieting mentality, that’s not what I do anymore.' My weight is stable. It’s not as low as it’s been when you get to the low weight you get to on a diet before you gain it all back. But I would rather not chase that weight and be comfortable with the weight I am. I’m sort of letting that go.

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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