Living in a body that is outside the “norm” can be a hassle when you’re clothes shopping, frustrating when you’re navigating public transportation, and exhausting when you’re just trying to buy groceries without people offering their opinions—silently or otherwise. It is experienced as another “chronic stressor,” like the rats who come home to find water poured all over their nests. And that stress accumulates.
The urge to conform is perfectly rational. And the BIC lies to you, tells you you could conform if you worked harder, had more discipline, on and on, bullshitbullshit, and the stress works its way from the outside to the inside. Even people who conform, more or less, to the aspirational ideal experience this stress. When they can’t credibly be told they have to be thinner, thin people are told they should “sculpt” or “tone” their abs or arms or butt or thighs. And everyone, regardless of size, is supposed to fret over food choices and exercise and clothes that make you “look fat” in an effort to fit the precisely molded aspirational ideal. We’ve been taught that our bodies reflect our morality and indeed our very worth as human beings. Fat people are viewed as “lazy, glutinous [sic], greedy, immoral, uncontrolled, stupid, ugly, lacking in will power, primitive.”28 Thin people, by contrast, are self-controlled and nice and clean and smart. The stakes for conforming feel excruciatingly high.
People who tell you they’re worried about your fat may say—they may even believe—they’re worried about your health. But since fat isn’t a disease, what they’re really worried about is your social life. Being accepted by your culture. It would be nice to be thin.
WHY THINNESS?
As Naomi Wolf puts it, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience.” Thin bodies are the bodies of women who behave themselves.
Like so many toxic norms of the twenty-first century, the thin ideal is a by-product of the Industrial Revolution. Before that, a softer, rounder, plumper female was the beauty standard, because it was only the rich women who could afford the luxurious food and freedom from manual labor that allowed them to accumulate the abundant curves of the women in Rubens’s paintings. But in the nineteenth century, with the rise of the middle class, it became fashionable for a man to be able to afford a wife who was too weak to work. It was a status symbol, an advertisement of wealth, for a man to have a wife who not only didn’t but couldn’t contribute to the household income. “Delicate” and “fragile” became feminine virtues.
This is in contradiction of everything evolution would have a woman be: robust, strong, able healthfully to conceive, gestate, birth, breastfeed, and carry multiple offspring.
So that, friends, is where the thin ideal originates—in the basic assumption that a woman is a man’s property, his status symbol. Because: patriarchy. (Ugh.)
Sophie has two sets of clothes—three if you count the Uhura cosplay. She has a work wardrobe, full of the kinds of things people expect a professional to wear, which she considers just as much a costume as the Uhura dress. And she has the leggings and screen-printed T-shirts that say things like “Joss Is My Master Now” and “What Would Geordi Do?”
So when the academic department for which she was consulting invited her out to dinner at the start of her gig, we went shopping with her.
Not many women make it to adulthood with as solid a sense of their own beauty as Sophie. She is a confident, body-positive woman of size. But then she has to go out in the world and try on dresses. This time she went to a fancy-pants department store, with valet parking and complimentary glasses of sparkling water. She chose a few things and went to try them on. She showed us a few options, including one truly outstandingly hot one, then went to try on the next dress.
Which is when we overheard two other women just outside the dressing room. They were talking in hushed voices, but still plainly audible.
The first lady said, “It’s like she doesn’t even care! I’m sorry, I get up at five-thirty every morning and sweat my butt off on the treadmill. If she’s too lazy or doesn’t even respect herself enough to—” and at that point Emily’s ears filled with the white noise of rageful blood pounding in her head.
Through the roar, she heard the other lady say, “I’m just genuinely worried about her health, you know? Like, she’s a walking heart attack!”
“And now our taxes are subsidizing her slow death by Twinkies! Hashtag thanks, Obama!”
Tittering laughter.
We looked at each other. Emily looked at the door of Sophie’s dressing room. Amelia went over to the ladies, because she’s the one who goes over to people.
“We can hear you,” she said.
They looked at her, uncomprehending.
“That’s our friend you’re talking about,” Amelia said, and the penny dropped. They stammered and looked abashed, but also unimpressed—Amelia is herself not thin, which makes her lazy and a walking heart attack, too, so why would they care about her opinion? Still, Amelia continued on an angry tirade, explaining Health at Every Size and that size discrimination is the last haven of sanctioned prejudice, and Emily just stood there, struggling to believe this kind of thing actually happens.
As Amelia’s voice was starting to get to making-a-scene volume, Sophie came out of the dressing room wearing her own clothes, with the totally hot dress slung over one arm.
“Should we leave?” Emily asked her.
“Oh, we’re leaving,” Sophie said, loud enough for the ladies to hear, then winked at Emily. “But first I’m buying this hot dress.”
Three slow deep breaths later, Sophie was signing the sales slip with us right behind her, and the uncomfortable ladies in a clutch by the dressing room.
Emily said, “This is going to be a really funny story, a few months from now.”
“It’s already funny,” Sophie said.
And she wore that totally hot dress to the dinner, where she would meet the love of her life.
Your New “Weight Loss Goal”
“Just give me a number! What should I weigh????” you ask.
Wouldn’t it be great if it were that simple?
On top of all the individual variability we discussed, another major reason why it’s not that simple is something called “defended weight.” Just as some people are night owls and others are larks and our body rhythms change across our life-span, so some people are big and others are small, and our bodies change across our life-span. The basic shape and size of your adult body has what neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt calls a “defended weight” that it will protect. Eat a little extra one day, your appetite will be smaller the next day. Starve yourself for three months to fit the bridesmaid dress your best friend got you…then eat like you’ve been starving for three months, until your body returns to its defended weight. Defended weight tends to go up as we age and almost never goes down. Only a very small fraction of the population can lose weight and sustain that weight loss through diet and exercise, establishing a new defended weight.29
How frustrating is this information? Is part of you still certain there’s a different weight you ought to be, and could be if only you had the discipline?
Back in chapter 2, we talked about “when to quit.” We suggested you make a grid—short-and long-term benefits of keeping this goal, and short-and long-term benefits of letting go of this goal. Try that with whatever your current body goal is.
Or you can listen to your inner voice, which has probably been begging for mercy for years.
You might choose to keep trying to change your body. It’s your body and your decision. At least now you can adjust your expectations about just how difficult and long the effort will be.
You might choose to let go of trying to conform to the culturally constructed aspirational beauty ideal—again, your body, your choice. Then comes the hard part. An hour later, the BIC will be arguing with you, blaming and judging you, pressuring you to get back in line.
You’re going to have to meet the BIC in daily combat, for your individual and our collective well-being. So let’s look at four real-life strategies for making it through the fray.
Strategy 1: Mess Acceptance