Thin Is the New Miserable

I know better than to diet constantly. Dieting makes you fat. Dieting makes you distracted. Distracted women tend not to make history. And yet here I am. Dieting. Even a global economic meltdown and a historic election could not take my mind off the fact that I have gained nearly 10 pounds and my wardrobe doesn’t fit. And I can’t afford to buy new clothes. Which means not only that I haven’t managed to find a way to take the shortest break from obsessing about my pants size, my dieting isn’t even working. But I don’t know any other way. My mother put me on my first diet when I was in the sixth grade, and I’ve been gaining and losing ever since.

It turns out I’m not alone -- my experience mirrors that of Valerie Frankel, self-help journalist and author of 19 books, including The Accidental Virgin. Thirty years after her mother put her on a diet to lose her baby fat, Frankel was still riding the dieting rollercoaster. She had vowed to keep her own daughters off it, but as they approached puberty, she began to suspect that not sabotaging their body image wouldn’t be enough.

"They had eyes and ears," she writes in her wry and affecting memoir, Thin is the New Happy. "They saw and heard what I put myself through: my dieting cycles, anxiety about food, dread of bathing-suit vacations, rising and falling and rising weight. I was a bad example."

Her efforts to become a good example required nothing less than a head-to-toe exorcism. She confronted her unrepentant mother, who said that if she could go back she wouldn’t act differently, even after Frankel catalogued the damage her mother’s harping had done. Frankel counted the number of negative thoughts she had about herself and her body every day (triple digits). She phoned one of the toughs who had taunted her in junior high. She posed naked in Self magazine. She asked her former Mademoiselle colleague Stacy London, now host of TLC’s "What Not to Wear," to help her throw out her figure-hiding, all-black wardrobe. And finally, she developed the Not-Diet, which had just four rules: Eat what you want. Stop when you’ve had enough. Don’t insist on perfection. Work out four times a week. Within a few months, she had reached a healthy weight and has maintained it, and her sanity, ever since.

Frankel and I were classmates at Dartmouth, where I witnessed several of the events (and diets) in the book. We caught up by phone -- she in Brooklyn, I in San Francisco.

Stephanie Losee: You dedicate your book to The Last Fifteen Pounds with a little poem that reads: "I don’t miss you/Not one tiny bit/You bitches." What did those 15 pounds represent to you?

Valerie Frankel: They represented a lifetime of failure, the measure of what I can’t do, as opposed to being just 15 pounds I just carried around. It was a symbolic unworthiness that a lot of women feel about their extra weight. A symbol of being not deserving of a lot of things -- of love, of sex, of happiness, of success. And of self-love.

SL: Your mother put you on your first diet when you were 11, and your victory over chubbiness and the approval you received from observers turned you into a lifetime dieter. How did that diet affect your mind-set?

VF: There was a conspiracy among the mothers of my friends not to give me snacks, because my mother got everyone involved in this project for me to lose weight when I was, in fact, at a healthy weight for my height and age. So I felt totally on the defensive and persecuted. And I didn’t understand what the problem was. I didn’t feel fat. I also just plain missed food. When you’re a kid, you love candy and cookies and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and I just missed being a kid. I did lose weight on that first diet -- success! And I recognized that I was thin now and that I was getting a lot of compliments and approval -- my mother liked it, the other mothers liked it, even my teachers in sixth grade praised me.