As with Roberts’s film, this focus on the female experience is no accident. As Nieto explains, although men are subject to some of the same sorts of cultural standards as women, women “seem to more easily internalize these messages as something they are supposed to reflect in order to feel validated and worthy of love and happiness.” (Nieto adds that the men in her life, including her husband, didn’t really get the point of the book at first. Women, on the other hand, reacted with immediate enthusiasm.)
The effect of “How Much Do You Weigh?” in addition to confronting the taboo against publicly announcing/broadcasting the particulars of one’s weight, is that it recalibrates our ideas of what certain numbers on the scale are supposed to look like. If 180 pounds sounds “fat” in theory, it doesn’t necessarily look it in reality, which makes the whole enterprise of weight measurement — and, by extension, BMI — rather meaningless. “People come away very surprised by the numbers,” says Nieto, who adds that she did not include height or age in order to discourage readers from comparing themselves too closely and playing into a cycle of shame. “That was really my aim, just to point an arrow right at that taboo, because its existence not only doesn’t serve women, but it makes us vulnerable to the multitude of pitches we get from the diet industry that disconnect ourselves from our own bodies.”
* * *
Late last week, I was riding north on an Indiana interstate when word came over the radio that Congress had declared pizza a vegetable. (Turns out that that wasn’t exactly true.) “That’s great!” I exclaimed to my friend Kate and her husband, who were driving me from Louisville to Chicago, where we would splurge on a cheese and sausage-stuffed pie from a famed Windy City pizzeria called Giordano’s. “Now I won’t feel guilty about tonight’s dinner.”
A few minutes later, Kate — co-author of 2009’s “Lessons From the Fat-o-sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body” — groaned from the back seat. Reading the news on her smartphone, she had just come across a story on a Wisconsin couple arrested on charges of felony child neglect after starving their 14-month-old baby girl because they feared she would get fat. The father, a 35-year-old who was released on bail and ordered to have no contact with the child, told authorities he didn’t want obese children. I gasped and muttered obscenities under my breath.
Those stories, or rather, my reaction to them, helped underscore the complexity and dysfunction of America’s relationship with food: The guilt and shame we feel when enjoying delicious food, and the ways those feelings of guilt and shame make us — and those around us — literally sick. We cannot, it seems, have our pie and eat it, too.
When Jen Shroyer, the Sacramento-area anorexic featured in “The Thin Commandments,” first appeared on-screen in a tight white tee, I winced. Shroyer began dieting as a teen, using Slim-Fast and other calorie-restricting products to emulate Kate Moss and the other waiflike models so popular in the late ’90s. Shroyer’s facial features were drawn and haggard, and her skin and hair looked brittle and dry. It was difficult to tell if she was 25 or 45. But her arms? I’m ashamed to say this, but my initial reaction was that her arms — defined and sinewy and devoid of any body fat — looked sort of amazing. Some habits — even those we thought we were above indulging in — die hard.
Kate, my Chicago friend, recounts the time that she was 11 or 12 years old and reading an advice column in a teen magazine. The columnist, a famous TV actress, was giving counsel to a young female reader who wanted to know how much she should weigh. The actress explained to the reader that, in order to calculate her perfect weight, she should start at 100 and add five pounds for every inch she stood above five feet. That actress was Tracey Gold.
_1337038921.jpg)
Loading...
Comments