Content Warning: dieting, disordered eating, fatphobia
My mother started a new Weight Watchers program recently and it’s been bringing up a lot of feelings for me. To start, it’s always weird when you see exactly where some of your problem behaviors come from. My mother has been dieting, cleansing, counting calories for the ultimate goal of losing weight my whole life. Naturally I picked up on these behaviors and attitudes towards fatness as a child and carried them with me only until I started learning about fatphobia and toxic diet culture on social media in the past few years. Watching my mother never be satisfied or proud of her body instilled in me deep beliefs that gaining weight and being fat are the worst things that can happen to you and you should avoid it at all costs. Throughout middle and high school, I also was obsessed with dieting and would feel guilty when I ate “too much” food or food that was “unhealthy”. I congratulated myself for making it through the day only eating two meals. If I ever did lose weight, my mother would tell me I looked good. She always told me about her diets and asked if I wanted to do them with her. She would never ask my younger sisters who have always been thin. To this day, I struggle with feeling embarrassed about being the only non-thin sibling. I wonder if my family ever feels ashamed of me or if other people notice when they see us all together and wonder what went wrong with me.
Even though I’m used to my mother dieting and obsessing over losing weight, it’s been especially triggering for me to hear her talk about Weight Watchers now that I’m educated about fatphobia/diet culture and while I’m working on unlearning my disordered eating behaviors. It makes me sad to see her at 46 years old still thinking she needs to fix her weight. It’s hard to hear her decide between “one point” and “two point” foods. It makes me extremely uncomfortable when she praises herself for restricting her eating. Throughout my journey of learning to accept my body at all sizes, I’ve learned that food is not only something that is necessary for your survival, but is also supposed to be a source of pleasure. You should eat what your body tells you it needs. You should eat what you actually enjoy and makes you feel good. It’s draining to hear her reinforce the ideas I’m working so hard to unlearn. I want better for her, but I still have discomfort talking about eating and dieting so I don’t know how to have the conversation with her about it. I usually don’t respond when she talks about it because I don’t want to encourage or reinforce it. Eating alone or in secret is still a behavior I resort to much more often than I think is good for me, so at the beginning of quarantine I even found myself scared to eat around my parents. The messages about eating and gaining weight I internalized from them made me feel like they were judging me or disgusted by me. It makes me wonder if my mother ever feels that way. Listening to her try to talk to me about Weight Watchers also makes me wonder if she’s subtly trying to suggest that I start it. But also that could be me projecting…
It’s wild to think about how something as simple and essentially human as eating can be turned into a basis for making moral judgements about others. We decide who is good or bad based on how much they eat, what they eat, and what size their body is. We do this so much that people actually pay money to have their eating policed. It’s my opinion that diet programs, especially with names like Weight Watchers, are capitalist ventures that train people to develop eating disorders. I’m frustrated that my relationship to eating has always been so troubling, when it should be so simple. I think one thing I’m becoming more aware of in this class is how my perception of my body shapes almost all my behaviors. I remember going to college dining halls and being anxious to put the foods I really wanted on my plate because I thought everyone was looking at me disgusted, thinking “This is why they’re fat.” Sometimes I notice the ways I try to physically shrink myself when I’m around other people, especially people that are smaller than me. Standing next to someone smaller than me has always made me very anxious and still does. But I’ve also just recently started to realize that my body was never actually as big as I thought it was and the way body dysmorphia has really just been playing with me my whole life. And also that my body dysmorphia most likely originated from the fatphobia my mother passed down to me and grew from there. It’s interesting to think about how our bodies are forms of communication, too. We assume that people’s bodies tell us certain things about them. I assume that my body tells people I lack self control and don’t care about myself. But I’m learning that eating is caring for yourself and policing your eating is not.
Unruly Bodies 
*****TW// eating disorders*****
Thank you for sharing. I was immediately drawn to this post because of it’s title and because it hits very close to home for me. My mother, too, had an experience with Weight Watchers. I remember being little and her always eating little Weight Watchers snacks and how obsessive she was over her weight. It made me depressed for her because my mom is gorgeous; at such a young age, it made me question even myself. Over time, I did personally develop an eating disorder myself from about 11-15, where I wouldn’t eat for days, maybe even weeks sometimes. During this time, I was at my thinnest and still thought I was fat, or that I was going to get fat. I eventually grew up and out of that practice, but I still see it’s effects to this day; most days I don’t get hungry and/or I forget to eat until it’s almost time for dinner.
I have fallen victim to these diet programs to help you lose weight. I used Noom for a couple of months at the tail end of summer right before school started. I enjoyed the program but I do not think it was the healthiest for me. I ate around 1200 calories a day, but I did end up consuming more water and fruits which is something my diet has always lack and does now that I am no longer using the program. I live on campus right now and I only have a little face mirror in my room. When I go home on the weekends and actually look at myself in the mirror I realize that, like you, I am not as big as I think I am.
I do want to lose weight but more because I want my clothes that I have to fit and I know I can do it. But I can’t say that it is not related to all the information I am being fed about weight loss. It’s every where and it is scary. With younger people constantly starting social media accounts they become subjected to the fatphobic ideas. We need to start showing that everyone is beautiful in the media and stop advertising dangerous restricting diets and cleanses that not only do not work in the long term but can be damaging to the body as well.
The body, health/normativity, and morality are all tied together by society in a really messed up way… Reading your post felt very familiar to me, I empathize with both you and your mom. I’m personally still struggling with figuring out the line between intuitive eating and (over AND under)eating as self harm. The weight loss industry is completely dystopian to me and promotes to me, this sense of disconnecting yourself from your body… their rhetoric pushes forward the cartesian dualism of mind over body, forcing one’s body rather than listening to it, making unhealthy/overweight bodies into a moral or mental failure first and foremost.
My ideal would be an uncomplicated, simple relationship with food but it feels like an impossibility with the world we live in. Food is given a binary of a healthy option or a tempting bad option. Without the rigidity of calorie-counters, I’m worried I’ll fall back into the black hole of eating as a coping mechanism instead of a way to actually connect with my body.
First off, thank you so much for sharing your story. As someone who has struggled with disordered eating and self-esteem issues, it’s comforting to read that I am not alone when it comes to these negative thoughts and habits. Even though this was a hard one to read, knowing that other people have gone through similar experiences, makes me realize that there is a whole community of people who can relate to one another. This post also opened up my eyes to seeing how damaging weight loss programs can be. Although some might successfully drop a few pounds, the mental toll that it can take on an individual far surpasses any type of weight loss goal. For so long, I obsessed over every number that you could think of when it comes to our bodies. Calories, carbs, fat, protein, pounds, grams, ounces, you name it, I was obsessed with it. I spent so much energy focusing on numbers that I thought defined me. But I finally realized that the problem didn’t lie in the numbers. It lied in my fears of not “meeting the health, fitness, and beauty standards” that were set in our society. It sounds like you’ve figured out too that these “standards” are unrealistic and not a true determinant of our worth.
I was able to really relate to this post. I have a twin sister that has been smaller than me my whole life. I have compared myself to her so many times as we were growing. Having a larger physique than my twin sister really pushed me towards weight loss and dieting. It made me believe that I needed to look like her and fit into the clothes that she did. Loving my body has been a long journey that I have struggled with and am continuing to struggle with. I have tried numerous times to count calories, watch my weight, strenuous exercises, etc and as I did all those things I realized that it was not making me happy. I felt like I was trading my happiness for potential weight loss. I just recently came to terms with the fact that it is not a trade I am willing to make.
This post really resonated with me, because like you, my mother has been trying different diet programs on and off for my whole life, and putting herself down for her weight. It was especially strange for me growing up because everyone including her always emphasized how much I looked like her “when she was my age,” or “before she had kids,” before she gained weight. I won’t pretend I had it bad, because I was always thin and i recognize that my experiences were strange but not at all comparable to the trauma I would have had from her if I’d been anything but. But it was definitely strange to know that my mother, who I thought was perfect, was judging herself against me, a literal child (and a child who was thin due largely to health issues at that). It makes me sad and extremely concerned to notice that my brother is starting to pick up her attitudes about weight and dieting. He’s only 18 and he’s been counting calories and trying diets, thinking of himself as overweight when he’s not, and I’m really worried that he’s developing an eating disorder as a result of watching our mother’s relationship with food and weight. I’ve brought up my concerns with her and told her to stop encouraging him in this and stop engaging in weight talk around him, but it’s like she can’t help herself and she ends up doing so anyway. I can only hope that his time away from her while at school will help him unlearn what he picked up from her.
This post hits home a little bit. Growing up, my family was obsessed with quick diets or easy diets or exercise regimens. I internalized all of it in the same way you talk about in this post. Breaking that cycle (because it definitely came from my grandmother as well) is a longgg process. It definitely does not help when the person who basically exposed you to these ideas is still there, seemingly in your ear, verbalizing all of your triggers. I had to have a long talk with my parent like a few years ago to break her out of constantly talking about weight, even if it wasn’t even my own, because of how triggering, and problematic, that rhetoric is. Thank you for talking about this, it clearly seems to relate to a lot of us