An earlier version of this post appears at the author’s personal blog.
There is a scale in my bathroom. It is not my scale, but it is in my space. Every time I take a shower, I drop my clothes next to it and look at it and feel it look at me. Like it’s challenging me.
I have an interesting history with scales. Although I can remember being dissatisfied with my body from a young age, I can’t ever really remember being dissatisfied with my weight, specifically. I can’t remember a time where I weighed “too much” or even a time where I was aware of what I weighed at all. I was aware that I was fatter than the other girls, but there was no number attached to it. It was an idea, a notion. But it was strong enough, even without a specific number, to affect the way I felt about my body and myself and to keep me locked in disordered eating patterns for years.
Even at the height of my disordered eating habits, I wasn’t weighing myself. It wasn’t because I wasn’t concerned with how fat I was—trust me, I was—but because in everything I had ever read about eating disorders, a preoccupation with scales was one of the biggest symptoms, and I refused to be sick. I refused to be disordered. I stepped on the scale at the doctor’s office and that was it. I told my friends how I didn’t weigh myself, how I didn’t care about some stupid number. I acted like this made my eating behaviors OK, like there was nothing wrong with me or the way I treated myself as long as I wasn’t focused on a number, like nobody would notice how much trouble I was in as long as I wasn’t outwardly obsessed with my body. And for the most part, it worked.
It’s important to note that I have never had an officially diagnosed eating disorder. For a year in high school, I secretly kept a food journal and restricted myself to 900 calories a day. I watched myself turn from a size 18-sometimes-16 to a size 14-sometimes-12 and acted like I had no idea where the weight was going, like it was some natural occurrence that I had no part in.
I was so good at hiding my behavior behind my anti-scale rhetoric. In fact, I was downright body positive, encouraging my friends to throw out their own scales and embrace their figures and ignore the sizes stitched into their jeans even as I obsessively tracked the number of calories going into my body every day. Those behaviors continued into college, where I eventually ended up limiting myself to one meal a day. I was hungry so often that I lost my ability to recognize what hunger felt like. But I fit no diagnostic criteria; I did not weigh myself; I even wrote term papers about fatphobia in feminism: as far as I was concerned, I was nowhere near sick.
Through a lot of struggle and reflection, I eventually recognized that I had a problem and took steps to overcome it. Now I eat well. I count nothing. I focus on how foods make my body feel rather than how they make me look. It’s been a struggle, but I’m the happiest with my body that I have ever been; 99% of the time I think I look fantastic.
So yesterday, I got on that bathroom scale. I got tired of it challenging me, so I stepped onto it, confident that I was finally ready to see what it had to tell me. I wasn’t ready for what came next.
The number that came up was the highest I’d seen on a scale since I was 17. As soon as that realization hit me, I felt sick. As though by reflex, I started considering the possibility of skipping breakfast, thinking about how easy it would be to replace lunch with coffee, imagining myself explaining to my roommates that I was eating a tiny dinner because money was tight.
It took me ten minutes of mental calorie-counting to realize what I was doing. Suddenly, I was angry. I was ashamed at myself for immediately falling into those thoughts, thoughts I hadn’t had in nearly two years. I was furious that something that I thought I had beaten had come back so effortlessly, had reappeared and taken control as though it had never gone away at all.
And that’s the point of this, I suppose: these things don’t just go away. Not after six months or a year or two years. Maybe not at all — I don’t know.
I’m mostly good at fighting off my food demons, good at ignoring or counteracting anti-fat messages, good at loving my body and loving myself. But there are still moments that catch me by surprise, where the voice of my past sneaks in and whispers to me: “Well, you did it once and you turned out alright, didn’t you? What’s the harm in doing it again? You weren’t even sick, really.” Those moments are hard. They are scarce, but they are scary.
I thought facing the scale would be a victory. I thought it would be a sign of my full recovery. I thought I was ready, that I was better. Now I realize that perhaps I’m not, that perhaps facing a scale on a regular basis is not something that I can handle. More importantly, I think, is that it is not something I need to handle. I don’t need to “beat” that scale. I have nothing to prove, except that I am here, and that I am happy, and that I am healthy. And if staying healthy means never stepping on a bathroom scale again, then so be it.
Mauritanian girls forced to gain large amounts of weight so they will be more appealing to men
Some things simply exhaust me. An article in the October 2009 issue of Marie Claire magazine, titled “Forced to be Fat”, is one of them. It also made me sad, angry and horrified. And you know what? It made me a little bit jealous.
In the country of Mauritania, girls and young women are often force-fed up to 16,000 calories a day to make them fat. The article states:
Now big women are back in vogue, and the custom of funneling rich food into young girls like geese farmed for foie gras is once again thriving unchecked…Government figures from before the 2008 coup put the rate at 50 to 60 percent in rural areas and 20 to 30 percent in cities. “The practice is re-emerging because men still find mounds of female flesh comforting and erotic,” explains Seyid Ould Seyid, a Mauritanian male journalist. “The attraction is ingrained from birth.”
Let me be clear: The practice of force-feeding is barbaric and abusive. It’s an invasion of your body no less violent than rape. Picture a young girl in Mauritania sent by her parents to a remote hut where she is force fed gruel and animal fat. She feels sick, scared and alone.
But while you’re at it, also picture a young girl in the United States, laying alone on the bathroom floor after binging on so much food she vomits it all up. She feels sick, scared, and alone. Both are equally painful and unfair. Neither girl is able to have a healthy relationship with their own body.
Here is my disclaimer: I am a fat woman. I weight over 250 pounds and wear a size 22. And I have wrestled the eating disorder monsters most of my life. I have binged to the point of vomiting. I have starved myself dizzy on lemonade and maple syrup fad diets.
This Mauritanian women fits her cultural beauty standards.
Can you blame me for fantasizing about living in a country where men would flock to my “mounds of female flesh”? Ironically, I think I even experienced this cultural difference when I took a cab and was actually proposed to by the Somali cab driver who, upon finding out I was single, replied that he would marry me because I was the “perfect size”.
I am struck by the realization that women’s bodies are considered beautiful only in how they appeal to men. As the article states, Mauritania’s view of beauty is the United State’s obsession with super-thinness in reverse. We are valued in a way that makes our bodies nothing more than fetishes.
What is missing in Mauritania as well as the United States is the idea of choice — the choice we are all entitled to regarding our own bodies. Do any of us really feel we are able to choose what we would like to look like and be okay with our bodies? How much does each of us prescribe to what society is telling us we should look like?
I believe in my own worth and my own beauty whether I’m a size 22 or a size 2; it’s been a hard-fought battle, and I have to renew my commitment every day. I keep thinking about how every time I watch the evening news there is a story about the obesity epidemic. It is drummed into us on a daily basis accompanied by those infamous anonymous headless photos of fat people walking down the street.
Now I can picture the same news story in Mauritania, only the headless photos depict skinny idealized Western images of physical attractiveness. In the end it feels like none of us win and quite frankly, that exhausts me.
For a long time, I have believed in the power of empathizing with a fictional character to transform the way we feel about ourselves. But how does this relationship play out when that character is not human, but cartoon?
Lisa from The Simpsons
In The Simpsons, Lisa Simpson stands out as a character very different to the rest of her family. She is intellectual, self-reflective and idealistic. So it should come as no surprise when she, just like any other real-life female, experiences body image problems.
In the episode “Sleeping With the Enemy”, Lisa is teased at school about her “big butt”, which sends her into a downward spiral of negative body image and unhealthy eating habits. She reads Thin by Third Grade and indulges in retail therapy — only to find a clothing store where a sales assistant planes down the thighs of a mannequin so it conforms to the new skinny standard. She discusses her feelings with Bart, saying, “I know that this obsession with thinness is unhealthy and anti-feminist, but that’s what a fat girl would say!”
Family Guy's Meg Griffin
Lisa is not the only cartoon character to have body image struggles. Family Guy’s Meg Griffin is a socially awkward, self-conscious teenage girl who is generally mistreated by her family, and her appearance is often exploited in the name of humor.
In the episode “Barely Legal”, Meg is depressed about not having a date to her prom, telling the family dog Brian “I’m so fat and gross,” and threatening to kill herself.
Meg's replacement in her family's reality TV show
In other episodes, her brother Chris draws pictures of her with a pig’s body, father Peter farts in her face, she is depicted as a bulldog, and she is replaced by a prettier actress when the family gets their own reality show.
Meg isn’t portrayed as intellectual, like Lisa, and therefore her body image problems are not as complex. While their crises both stem from being made fun of, Lisa has the ability to question it, even as she succumbs to it. On the other hand, Meg is not shown being critical of her own position.
As in real life, neither characters’ struggles are ever fully resolved. At the end of the Simpsons episode, Homer asks Lisa if everything is OK, but she refuses to say that she’s now comfortable with her body. Instead, she acknowledges that, like many women still obsessed by weight, she has a long way to go. The fact that the issue wasn’t neatly resolved meant that it was a little more thought-provoking than a typical cartoon happy ending. In Meg’s case, the jokes just don’t stop coming.
Do you relate to Lisa or Meg? Are cartoon characters an effective means of exploring body image issues?
Girls like Sarah Totonchi (shown here in 1986) were convinced they were fat at age nine
In his recent article for the Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey Zaslow reports recently contacting women from a 1986 study of fourth graders, in which 75% of the girls revealed that they felt like they weighed too much, and more than half claimed to be on diets.
The girls weren’t alone in their concerns about weight: a fourth-grade boy, when interviewed, said “Fat girls aren’t like regular girls. They aren’t attractive.”
But the societal pressure on girls has increased exponentially during the two decades since the first interview. The original girls from the study had reported drinking diet sodas and watching exercise videos. Now one of them, a middle-school teacher, has to fight with her students to get them to take a few bites of their lunches.
There have been several books in recent years that portray the trend towards increasing body image issues in young girls, which include Mary Piper’s Reviving Ophelia and Joan Jacob Brumberg’s The Body Project. But perhaps the most visceral account comes from Marya Hornbacher, in her autobiographical book, Wasted.
Hornbacher relates several incidents from her childhood: arguing with a friend at age five about who could eat food with the least amount of sugar, panicking after eating two slices of pizza at a party, feeling as though the body in the mirror belonged to someone else. She writes:
“At four I stood, a tiny Eve, choked with mortification at my body, the curve and plane of belly and thigh. At four I realized that I simply would not do. My body, being solid, was too much.” (p. 15)
At age nine, Hornbacher began inducing vomiting, and entered the nightmare world of bulimia and anorexia.
What compels girls as young as nine to embark on dangerous diets and eating disorders? To imagine fourth graders conscientiously sipping diet sodas and watching exercise videos is strange enough, but the situation has moved far beyond that. However, when girls grow up surrounded by media images of alarmingly thin women and food advertisements that link weight with worth, is it really so surprising?
Even one voice of sanity in a girl’s life can make a difference. Don’t be afraid to speak to any young girls that you know, and let them know that their value doesn’t depend on their weight. The Dove website has some great resources, including the True You mentoring guide and some excellent films, especially “Onslaught” and “Amy”.
Help combat the messages young women receive: speak out today!
–Elizabeth
Elizabeth Weaver was trained as an artist, and currently writes for an international women’s organization. She is passionate about helping women to understand their own unique beauty, and hopes to be a good self-image role model to her 3-year-old god-daughter.
In 2006, when Lauren Greenfield’s documentary Thin came out, I watched the film on my computer in the single dorm room that had become something of a cave for me. I was in the throes of a life-threatening eating disorder, and, needless to say, the film hit home. A few months later, I saw the documentary again, though in a different context: I watched it at an inpatient eating disorder treatment facility where I would spend the bulk of my 22nd year.
Shelly talks about her feeding tube
I agree with Kate’s thoughts (“‘Thin’ Is Thick With Reality”) that the film touches on something very real, although I think there is a subtlety that may not be apparent to all viewers.
The vast majority of films about addiction and mental illness focus on the “rock bottom”: the shocking and devastating turmoil in the addicts’ lives and all those around him/her. Thin appears to explore something deeper: the painfully difficult yet life-changing process of recovery. However, in truth, it is stuck in the same awestruck stare that other media attention has always been — the skeletal images, the double-digit weights, the tubes and medications and blood.
When I listen to the women in Thin tell their stories, I sadly do not hear the voices of these struggling women; I hear the competitive, proud, sick voices of their eating disorders. One may think I cannot truly know what is going on in their heads — and to a certain extent that is always true — but I assure you that I know an eating disorder voice when I hear one because it makes my heart ache with empathy in a way that no other sound can.
When I watched this documentary while I was sick, I was enthralled. I compared my body and my weight to each image and number on the screen or in the book. If I weighed less, I felt like I was winning. If I was more, if their bones protruded where mine did not — I was a failure. I felt undeserving of treatment because I was not as sick as every single one of those girls. This film was incredibly triggering — a term used in the treatment of addiction to refer to images, events, people, etc. that trigger addictive thoughts or behaviors. We would say that we were “triggered” when something made us feel more compelled to engage in self-destructive behaviors or resist treatment.
Though it is confusing for those on the outside to understand, an eating disorder is more like a parasitic being that slowly takes over more and more control than merely a disease of behavior and health. That voice and personification of the eating disorder is not so much metaphorical as it is an incredibly accurate and useful way of conceptualizing a disease that so often becomes difficult to disentangle from one’s true self. A notable percentage of the psychological community has actually proposed that eating disorders be categorized as psychotic disorders due to the extreme level of disconnection with reality.
“It’s totally disgusting, I know, but I had to get it out of me” says Shelly, when speaking of purging through her feeding tube, yet she smiles coquettishly as she says it. I can see behind her eyes that even as she may be embarrassed, her eating disorder is proud and nostalgic. Greenfield gives these women the opportunity to share their most terrible secrets, and though their honesty may seem brave, I know — from my own experience and from the experiences of other women I have known — that eating disorders crave the opportunity to brag, to compete, to shock, to live in the limelight.
One of the reasons it is so hard for many women to give up their eating disorders and embrace the long and arduous process of recovery is that they have grown up or lived much of their lives getting attention, love, and nourishment (in every sense of the word) as a result of being sick. To feed into that (pun intended), to give them yet another stage on which to dwell in the sickness in the form of being the subjects of this film, is neither service to these women nor help for the viewers. It perpetuates the sensationalized image of eating disorders — the gruesome images that, like a car crash one cannot look away from — instead of focusing on recovery, treatment, and prevention. Yes, it is important to know how bad things can get. But to dwell in numbers and behaviors — in short, to dwell in symptoms — is to miss the point and to reduce these women — much like their eating disorders have — to bodies.
I long for an opportunity to tell the story I now know is my more interesting one — not the story of body hatred, of lifelong depression, of self-destruction and of pushing my body and soul to the limits of life. For a long time I thought that was the most interesting thing about me. But it is not. I have also spent the last few years fighting for my life. Not because I was starving myself or throwing up my food but quite the opposite — I have been fighting because I have stopped doing those things.
Having an eating disorder was easy. But recovery gave me a life.
Brittany started dieting at age 12 because she wanted to look like her classmates.After gaining weight in an eating disorder treatment center, the under 100-pound teen grabs at the skin under her chin, sobbing. She thinks she has a double chin.
Shelly has a tube that runs out of her stomach because she’s so sick, and she’s found a way to push her stomach the right way so the food she’s eaten is sucked out. At just over 80 pounds, Shelly thinks she is “big.”
These women are among those documented in the 2006 film, “Thin,” a powerful and candid documentary I watched for the first time this week. I was immensely moved by it, and recommend every young girl, woman, and woman’s advocate rent it. Director Lauren Greenfield captures the secret lives of those living with this crippling diseases of anorexia and bulimia.
Here is a clip from the documentary with commentary by the director, Lauren Greenfield. Some of the images are graphic.
These women are addicted. They’re addicted to routines. They’re addicted to chewing food as slowly as possible, drinking water between each bite, hoarding away packets of ketchup and mustard to flavor the incredibly small portions of food they do eat. They’re addicted to their under-200-calories-a-day diets, and have panic attacks when presented a birthday cupcake. Seeing triple digits on the scale is the end of the world to them (Shelly says if she reaches 110, she’ll die), but they can’t see that their slow hearts, low blood pressure and damaged livers will be the real death of them. They are prisoners to their eating disorders–the crippling diseases of anorexia and bulimia, which are influenced by genetics but exacerbated by their environment and their insecurities.
As an aspiring documentary filmmaker, I was extremely intrigued by the cinema verité style of this film — where the camera crew act as flies on the wall, capturing everything — and amazed by how comfortable the girls were with the cameras catching them in their most intimate moments — being weighed, crying, even purging. One of the subjects, when interviewed after the film, said she felt misunderstood and wanted to show the world the truth behind her disorder. “Hey, if there is somebody out there who could benefit from this, then I would like to participate,” she said.
These women identify themselves by their ability to lose weight, by their years-long routines of avoiding meals, purging, and shrinking in size. They know they have to gain weight, but it terrifies them. They’re also terrified they’ll lose the part of them they know, the girl who loses more and more weight. It’s sad because I know they have so much to offer to the world besides their low jean size.
Throughout the entire film, I wanted to jump into the screen and yell at the women, tell them they’re beautiful. I wondered how they could hate their lives so much when they have beautiful children, supportive families, and college degrees. I wondered how they can possibly think what stares back in the mirror at them is ugly.
Which made me think… how often do I look in the mirror and criticize what I see? How often am I hard on myself?
While the girls are dealing with hardships in a treatment center that I can’t imagine, I can absolutely relate to their concern of body image. The film was a wake-up call. Look what body obsession can do to you. Look how much these girls have to offer the world and look how they are, literally, wasting away. Be grateful for all the support that surrounds you and be grateful for the beautiful body you have.
Check out the web site for this film and go see this movie.And if you or someone you know is suffering from an eating disorder, it’s time to seek help immediately. Here are some resources.
I am so happy that Scarlett Johansson decided to take action against the media’s obsession with unhealthy, ultra skinny bodies!
Scarlett Johansson just wrote a fantastic article called “The Skinny” for The Huffington Post.Her article responds to media coverage that claims she is on a crash diet to lose 14 pounds for her upcoming film Iron Man 2. Scarlett Johansson supports having a healthy body image and in her article writes:
I’m a petite person to begin with, so the idea of my losing this amount of weight is utter lunacy. If I were to lose 14 pounds, I’d have to part with both arms. And a foot. I’m frustrated with the irresponsibility of tabloid media who sell the public ideas about what we should look like and how we should get there.
Way to go, Scarlett! She is definitely on the team of About-Face winners. Please click here to read the whole article.
I recently found myself disembarking the Macy’s escalator and walking into the world of hip young adults. Once my ears adjusted to the blaring music of Miley Cyrus, my eyes had time to focus on the image standing right before me. Here it is.
Yes, this was at Macy's in Torrance, CA
Four anorexic-looking mannequins, all in “skinny” jeans, and in between them hung six cards, each with one of the following letters imprinted on it: S-K-I-N-N-Y.
Really, Macy’s!?! Really? This is getting kind of old already. I have become accustomed to the waif-thin mannequins sporting bodies that the majority of human beings cannot attain without the help of anorexia. But to focus your display on the word “skinny” is taking the assault on women’s image to a new level.
I know, I get it: Skinny jeans, hence the S-K-I-N-N-Y. I get it. But with the addition of the word “skinny” to the size 2 mannequins, they are communicating to the “non-skinnies” that these pants are not for them. Mainstream advertising is once again reminding the world that to be skinny is glamorous and should be what everyone strives for.
What really infuriated me about this display was the effect it might have on the hundreds of girls who have walked and will walk past the display. Girls who have not been supplied with a proper self-esteem and/or the tools to refuse this image. It made me think of what I would have done if I had a teenage daughter with me at the time. My initial thought was that I would have turned around and left immediately, so that she would never have to experience the image. But wouldn’t it be better if I, in fact, pointed out the display and discussed it? Absolutely.
I encourage anyone who reads this to try and do the same. If you are ever in the company of a young girl — a cousin, niece, sister or daughter — communicate about the images of women around you. Only then, by spreading the idea that these images are unacceptable, can we finally begin to bring some change to advertising.
I will never be S-K-I-N-N-Y. I will always want, in the famous words of Spinal Tap, to keep some “cushion for the pushin’.'” After all, I want the body of a woman, not that of a pre-pubescent boy.
This display was in the young women’s section of the Macy’s at the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, CA. Stop on by and tell a manager what you think, write a letter, or pick up the phone and give a call.
Macy’s Del Amo Fashion Center
21600 Hawthorne Blvd.
Torrance, CA 90503
phone: 310/370-8511
You’re reading the About-Face blog, so I’m gonna guess that you’re interested in the various messed-up ways women and girls are portrayed in media, and how it can really damage our self-esteem and self-respect. Well, now there’s a movie about it! It’s the new documentary “America the Beautiful,” and you should really go see it.
I saw the documentary last night in San Francisco, and I almost lost my s*&# watching the editors of Elle Girl and Seventeen magazines talking about how they need to show the thin body ideal only, or they’re “out of a job.” Really — no care for the fact that you are contributing to eating disorders, self-hatred, and general depression in young women? And the answer: No, really, none at all.
And then there’s Gerren, a 12-year-old model whose mother lets her wear next to nothing on the catwalk, but won’t let her wear a bra to school because she doesn’t think it’s appropriate. Through my work with About-Face, I’ve spoken to more moms than I can count who give their daughters the very same mixed messages.
There are just so many pertinent, poignant bits in this film, one being that the whole thing flows really well and nails the problem of our culture’s beauty obsession in a way that no somewhat-smart woman can deny. And two being that it’s an African-American man who made the film and who includes many other African-Americans who truly have something to say.
If you look carefully, you’ll spot two About-Face posters in the film! (I wish About-Face had been around to be in the movie!)
Really, I could go on and on. But I won’t.
Bring your mom, bring your friends, bring your sister. Hey, bring your brother. Cuz guys need to know this stuff too. (Plus there are quite a few bits about men and their body image too.)
Recently we came across an honest, enlightening account of a mother and daughter’s experience with eating disorders, and we thought you should know about it. Distorted, a book by Lorri Antosz Benson and her daughter Taryn Leigh Benson, chronicles the experiences they respectively shared while Taryn was battling eating disorders as a teenager.
Distorted is an honest and holistic account of what happens when a loved one is struggling with a disease. I’m keen on emphasizing the word disease because this was the first time I deeply understood the fact that an eating disorder is a disease. It may play out differently than alcoholism, but the common link is that both alcoholics and people with eating disorders are consumed by their addiction.
The book is made up of journal entries submitted by the mother and daughter as they live through their experiences. This helps the reader understand the full impact of the disorder and how it affected the lives of everyone involved. Taryn’s entries recount the time of her disorder, and go in depth to explain her battle, the amount of time, energy and focus she put into her disorder, and how she covered it all up to keep it from her parents and her friends. The entries by Lorri, Taryn’s mother, account for the sadness, helplessness, and struggle the family faced and how the family was affected by Taryn’s disease. In great detail, we hear how she, as a mother, did everything possible to research and find solutions to help Taryn and how she coped with watching someone that she loves spiral downward. The reader is able to experience the transformation of both of these women. Through various methods of treatment, therapy, and personal conviction, Taryn finally gets to a place when she realizes she wants to survive and to treat herself well, and Lorri realizes that the only way Taryn will get better is if she wants to. The reader is able to see Lorri struggling with this concept in most of the book.
It was powerful to see the honesties (and dishonesties) of emotions unfold in the book. There is a moment when Taryn returns from her first eating disorder facility. Her parents hope she really is okay and has recovered, and her younger sisters, being more naïve and hopeful, think she is “cured.” However, as the weeks pass, the family begins to see familiar patterns and see Taryn’s drastic mood swings. One entry made by Lorri is particularly powerful for a mother to admit and feel:
“As I a saw my other two girls suffering, it was hard not to feel resentment towards Taryn. Although I intellectually knew she was also hurting, emotionally I hated what her inability to cope was doing for the rest of us. And of course, I couldn’t confront her, although my instincts told me to. I could hear the party line playing in my head. ‘She is harder on herself than we could ever be.’ So I journaled.”
While we have heard of stories in the media about girls with eating disorders, some simply sensationalistic, Taryn and Lorri’s account is real and sincere. This book is great for anyone to read who is recovering from an eating disorder and for those whose loved ones are dealing with one.
To buy the book, click here. Amazon.com gives About-Face a percentage of the proceeds from sales from our web site.
Hornbacher relates several incidents from her childhood: arguing with a friend at age five about who could eat food with the least amount of sugar, panicking after eating two slices of pizza at a party, feeling as though the body in the mirror belonged to someone else. She writes:
