According to surveys, about half of American households have at least one person on a diet at any given time. Dieting is normal — more normal than eating what you want to eat. How many of us now live on various versions of Lean Cuisine during the workweek and pay premium for a plate of swordfish and greens on Saturday night? (We have the sauce and dressing on the side— of course.) Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine (now a Nestlé product) is little more than smaller portions for a higher price; the consumer pays for the corporate mother to dole out the proper foods in their proper amounts. A man told me he’s never had to worry about his weight; he can eat whatever he wants. “People resent me,” he said. “They don’t want to go out to eat with me.” He paused. “It’s lonely.”
If an alien landed here, it would see a strange world — a world with much food and many starving people. Most of the starvation is forced on whole populations by power brokers and distant agendas. But what could visitors from afar think of the hundreds of thousands, the millions of healthy, wealthy people who starve voluntarily? Who go at least a little hungry all the time? They take on the mantle of hunger with pride and self-satisfaction, complaining of the deprivation, seeking sympathy.
The marriage of desires — between sensual pleasure and the pleasure of denial — is a tense marriage. We buy asceticism at a decadent price, spend thousands of dollars a week to be supervised eating fewer than a thousand calories a day, hands slapped if we stray. Starvation, paid for with hard work. But both indulgence and sacrifice are limited to the privileged few who can afford to throw away what others literally die to have. If I take any comfort in the painful dead end in which we find ourselves, it is the rather petty one that very thin people with reduced body fat are people who have been in a self-induced famine for a long time. And they didn’t have to do this — there is no reason to do this. The next time a real famine comes along, dieters are going to lose. They have nothing left to give.
My own life has been marked by a perilous and disturbing terror of my body — a pendulum swinging, inexorably, forward and back. I ate too much, I ate too little, I dieted for dieting’s sake — simply to resist, to conquer food. I dieted because I did not deserve not to be hungry, to hunger, to yearn. I made food both fetish and taboo; I felt secret appetites and attended to them in private, with shame, while the words of television commercials and magazine headlines echoed in the shadows.
To the extent that my mother disliked cooking, she was fond of eating sweets. She was perpetually dieting in a casual, random way, though she wasn’t heavy. She made no sense of it and didn’t seem to mind even that, relishing her Mounds bar after the Saturday grocery shopping was done and eating a bowl of ice cream every night. “It’s really ice milk,” she would say. “Not so fattening.” She bought box upon box of AYDS diet candy (I’d eat half a dozen at a time when she wasn’t looking) and diet breakfast milkshakes and Hershey’s chocolate syrup to pour on top of her ice milk while she watched television.
I didn’t diet like that. In my twenties I starved, I took pills, I picked at tiny portions of dreadful, frozen, reconstituted diet food. I fasted. In my thirties I mostly worried at food, skipping meals and snacking when no one saw. Dieting is credit and debt. For many years I caught myself wondering if I could “afford” to eat something, if I’d “earned” it through activity or earlier deprivation, if I “owed” more denial. When I was dieting I would haunt the kitchen hour by hour, gazing, grazing, tracking, noting — keeping the books. Now that I no longer diet, I sometimes forget to eat, look up from work or play surprised by the clock. When I eat, I try to eat with relish and attention. But I can’t always do that; eating became more than sustenance and less than nourishment the longer I worried this way about eating. It became something else, not quite metaphor. More symptom. I still tend to eat certain “bad” foods with half-averted eyes, flinching, haunted.
I write today as a woman who dieted “successfully.” I lost quite a lot of weight and kept it off for several years. I was thinner at twenty-eight than I was at puberty. I look at photographs of myself from that time — I see the cheekbones, the collarbone, the apricot-sized breasts, the tight jeans. The tight smile. The dead eyes. What I remember (besides the counting, besides the scales and measuring cups and careful, constant planning, and the hunger) is sadness. I had come to believe that I was unhappy because I was too big, and when I was smaller and still unhappy, I could not for a long time figure out what was wrong. When I finally started to relax, and the weight gradually, inevitably returned to my body, another kind of weight slowly rose off me and disappeared.
Dieting utterly disrupts one’s relationship to food, to all food at all times. Eating takes on a sinister power and food an animate spirit — mostly malevolent. The way one thinks on a diet is the way people in famine think about food — obsessively, with great care — but turned upside down. Instead of being desired and out of reach, food is desired and within reach, but just as potently remains a fantasy.
Dieting is about being good and bad; the eater is either obedient or naughty, compliant or resistant. (Dieting was once considered a sin simply because it is rooted in vanity.) Food is good or bad for you — but, more important, in eating any given food, you are good or bad. When I dieted a lot, I liked being hungry because it meant I was being good. A childish dichotomy, but one that can take up the whole world for a time.
Dieting is control. The word anorexia is rooted in the Greek orex, meaning “appetite, desire, to reach after.” Anorexia means literally not to do so — not to long for, not to stretch out in need for, not to reach, not to want. And when we finally can’t control our desires, we can control what our body does with food — we can vomit, take laxatives, have surgery, swallow pills, exercise ourselves into oblivion. We can always find another way to say no.
Processed diet food is successful because it allows us to relinquish control for a moment, to be, in a tiny way, uncontrolled. It doesn’t matter that a frozen diet dinner doesn’t taste good, doesn’t satisfy hunger, and lacks any nutrients to speak of — we eat them because they allow us to eat without thinking, without planning, without keeping the books. Michelle Stacey, in Consumed, her book on modern American food, says they let us be children. “To talk about simple moderation — good, satisfying food in normal amounts — is to talk like an adult, a parent.”
In the thin joke of chronic dieting, people conspire to pretend that what they are eating is actually delicious. (Spas advertise their hedonism without a wink. The Golden Door recipes are “sybaritic” and “sumptuous,” the Rancho La Puerta meals “flavor-packed.”) If you diet all the time, like many women do, dieting is often vaguely masked as a sensible approach to health. The customer nods and smiles and says, Oh, it’s good, isn’t it good? Of course it’s dreadful; no one can make eight hundred calories taste like two thousand, and even if the miracle of modern chemistry breaks through with the final equation, no one can make eight hundred calories and fifteen grams of fat feel like two thousand calories and forty grams of fat. The body isn’t fooled.
Robert Farrar Capon, an Episcopal priest, remembers his big uncles as “sacred groves, as places in my history.” The “diet-mongers” who force such uncles to slim “dwell only upon what they would like a man to conform to; they never come within a hundred miles of knowing what a man is. . . . Dieting is wrong because it is not priestly. It is a way of using food without using it, bringing it into your history without letting it get involved with your history.”
In such a way does dieting become a profound reduction of selfhood. When we shrink the body from shame at its size, we are literally reduced — encaged by our failure. Anger, demands, selfish insistence on personal freedom, escape, resistance — all lost, put aside, inside. Our bigness disappears not only in fact but from sight, disappears inside, and we become inside-out people. All our weight and shape and meaning are withheld — all that anger, that insistence, those demands. When I was thin, the emptiness in me felt bottomless. I don’t mean the hunger. I stopped being hungry, or stopped minding. The emptiness I felt, the hollowness, was psychic, spiritual — it was the opposite of feeling big, strong, safe. I had gotten hungry for the sake of others, for their opinion of me, and so the hunger I felt was a bottomless hunger, one that could never be satisfied.
Recently, a new fashion in soap has appeared: Great chunks of translucent, perfumed soap made to look like food. Peach bars filled with candied “fruit” and chocolate bars and coconut-cream bars, aromatic of the grocer’s. They are sold by weight, like good cheese. Instead of real food, we buy false food, products to soothe and pamper the “self” — that is, the body, in its long days of hunger.
Dieting is hatred — of self and others. Women, fat and thin both, hate fat women. We hate one another, say cruel things to and about one another, judge, cut apart. We sympathize with one another, but the battle is about survival. In such a world, as Sally Cline says, eating disorders are an “extreme but orderly response.”
I catch myself thinking, I should lose a little weight. I catch myself spiraling downward; I catch myself turning toward an ill-tasting frozen dinner because it promises “under three hundred calories”; I catch myself denigrating my own experience of happiness. I remember that I actually am happy and that I do not need to turn helplessly through this spiral; I remember that there could hardly be anything less important in the world than whether or not I lose a few pounds, and I feel like I’ve caught my breath after being held underwater, pleading for air.
It is a chronic disease, though: to this day, there are certain foods I do not allow myself. Such divisions down the middle of the world are the core truth of dieting. There are foods I like and almost never touch — good, fun food like doughnuts and milkshakes and onion rings. Most of the food I don’t allow myself to eat is the sort of thing one might say has “no redeeming value.” But there’s nothing consistent about it. I cheerfully make and eat brownies, pies, pizza, rich and creamy sauces. I find myself contemplating doughnuts, looking at one single doughnut on a plate, and I hear shrill voices chorus together in my head, voices crying out, Calories, fat, nasty, bad. Bad girl; mustn’t touch.
Other voices tell me what to do at restaurants, at parties, at the grocery store. Go ahead, laugh — if you don’t recognize this. I go to the grocery store. I buy all kinds of things — vegetables, juice, toilet paper, bread. But what I want are potato chips. Will I buy them? Won’t I? Yes. No. Yes. I grab them on the fly as I approach the register, refusing to think clearly, not looking, and then, back home, I don’t eat them. I just keep the unopened bag in the cupboard. This is grotesque behavior. But even this behavior isn’t what I think of as the real sickness — it’s not the eating or not-eating, the buying or not-buying, the wanting or not-wanting that matters. It’s not even the shame about eating or the shame about being ashamed. The sickness I want to be shed of for good is the continual thinking about food in all these joyless ways. I want back the room dieting has made food take up in my life without regard for pleasure — the terrible space this grotesqueness fills.
Several years ago, I consciously stopped dieting — and sometimes not dieting was as hard as the dieting had been, or harder. The entire question of whether a person is too big (or too small) is rarely asked in objective terms — objective measures for such things simply don’t exist. Some very big (and very small) people defy the apparently objective medical criteria behind which judgment often resides. Even these criteria change frequently. To ask such a question — am I the “right” size? — of oneself or another is to ask only whether one is too big or too small, too tall, thin, dark, or light, to meet another person’s standard. I weigh myself only once or twice a year, and my weight has been the same for many years: about eight pounds more than I weighed in high school. This is, in the general scheme of female physiology, normal, healthy, nothing to worry about. My weight stays the same through illness and holidays, vacations and surgery, in happiness and sadness. And still — still — I think, If I just cut back a little, I could probably lose a little weight.
The act of dieting is the act of creating a mental world of struggle, a struggle most people expect to lose even as they begin. In the last few years, an antidieting movement has slowly gained strength, empowered by a great deal of careful research showing that almost everything we think about dieting and food attitudes and weight is wrong. The journalist Laura Fraser, in Losing It, a tour through the dieting industry, describes a world clearly outside logic and ordinary human experience. By the time the reader passes through the strange environments inhabited by Weight Watchers, Susan Powter, and a host of self-styled thinness gurus, the world of dieting has ceased to make sense. Fraser ends with a discussion of what it means not to diet — new gurus giving power back. Viewed in the whole context of obsession with ounces and inches, antidieting becomes the truest pro-life philosophy I know.
Some of the most important research has been done by Janet Polivy and Peter Herman, who have carefully studied the mental world of the dieter for more than twenty years. The dieter, Polivy and Herman write, is occupied continually with food and meals and lives in an “entrenchment of dichotomous thinking.” In their article “Dieting and Bingeing: A Causal Analysis,” they propose that “dieting causes bingeing by promoting the adoption of a cognitively regulated eating style.” In other words, dieting makes you so obsessed with food that you eat too much. Polivy and Herman have found that “nondieters eat less when they are anxious than when they are calm. . . . Dieters, however, eat small, diet-maintaining amounts when calm, but eat somewhat more when distressed.” Nondieters lose weight when depressed; dieters gain. Nondieters eat less when drinking alcohol; dieters eat more. Depression and alcohol are “disinhibitors” for dieters — these and other factors interrupt the fragile mental control dieters must constantly exert upon themselves.
Polivy and Herman did an experiment wherein several men starved themselves down to 74 percent of their starting weight on a very-low-calorie diet. “When food was later made available in unlimited quantities and the men had returned to their initial weights, they exhibited a persistent tendency to binge, gorging at meals to the limit of their physical capacity. Such behavior was never observed in these men prior to their ‘diet’ experience.” Not only that, the men weren’t overweight to begin with; they didn’t “need” to lose weight. They were part of an experiment and under no social pressure of any kind. This is what Polivy and Herman call “counter-regulation.” Dieters diet until the diet is interrupted, and then they give up completely and overeat.
In another experiment, the researchers gave people “preload” milkshakes. Some shakes were low in calories and fat grams; some were rich. The subjects were sometimes told the truth about what they were drinking and sometimes not. Only their bodies knew for sure if the milkshake they’d had was a “diet” drink or a real dessert.
When a self-declared dieter thought she’d had a diet shake, she ate little of the rich treats offered later. When she thought — correctly or not — that she’d drunk a rich milkshake, she gorged on the treats. This happened again and again. The sense of having “blown” the diet for the day was followed by “lusty eating,” say the researchers. Dieters responded to the food psychologically. On the other hand, people who said they didn’t diet responded physiologically — their bodies balanced the fat in their diets by regulating their appetite for it.
Much research supports the conclusion that many, perhaps most, people can’t wholly regulate their eating. The body insistently regulates itself. Secretly fed low-fat diets, people unconsciously seek out fatty foods later, in one study after another. There may be a purely biological response to dieting involving a disrupted sympathomimetic and endocrinological system. Polivy points out that “restrained eaters salivate more than do unrestrained eaters in the presence of attractive food cues.”
This research reveals a world already quite familiar to me, one I am nevertheless glad to see validated this way. It is so hard to explain, and its distorted logic is so often displayed as the prevailing point of view. Physiological reactions aside, Polivy and Herman believe most of the behavior is cognitive. Dieters respond to their perceptions; nondieters to the facts. Moreover, the crash of cognitive control is socially specific. Dieters binged more when they thought they were unobserved. If they had an official observer, dieters acted much like nondieters did all the time, neither restricting nor indulging. “Unfortunately, such socially induced ‘sensible’ eating lasted only as long as the observer was present,” note the researchers. When the observer pretended to be another experimental subject, the dieters followed her carefully, eating more only if she did first. Dieters ate least of all if their companion claimed to be on a diet, too.
A few years after this experiment, Polivy and Herman published a survey article called “Diagnosis and Treatment of Normal Eating.” Their deliberately paradoxical title was the point: Chronic, often obsessive dieting is now the normal way for many people to eat; in certain segments of the population, far more people are actively dieting to lose weight than are not. “It is now ‘normal’ for individuals in our society to express concern about their weight and to engage in fitful attempts to change it,” and so “the meaning of a phrase such as ‘normal eating’ is no longer obvious.” This is only a rumor, but I’m told by a good source that there’s a sign in the women’s bathroom of a leading fashion magazine that reads, PLEASE DON’T VOMIT HERE.
Polivy and Herman propose the possibility of a continuum of disordered thinking. Based on their own and others’ research, they believe that dieters lose the ability to understand both hunger and satisfaction. Normal boundaries between cognitive, social, and bodily desires exist only in the “undisturbed organism” — not in the overeater, who is unusually sensitive to external cues, and especially not in the dieter, who has created an artificial boundary closer to hunger than satiety. That boundary is a painful one, almost constantly present, and it is frail, requiring continual vigilance. “In fact, the sorts of disinhibited eating that the dieter fears actually arise from dieting itself.”
When one exercises a continual (as opposed to occasional) restriction on any natural desire, one loses the ability to make rational decisions about that desire. This is one of the paradoxes of living in a human body, this need to give up control at some point and trust in an invisible and immeasurable wisdom — part biology, part something rather more ethereal, perhaps. Constant conscious control makes us the puppet of physiological systems we barely understand. The only way out of the downward spiral is to stop basing one’s hungers entirely on nutrient dosages, calorie counts, and what the person next to you will think. I needed to learn, and continue to learn, to listen to my own appetite for food, and I am always surprised. There is newness here, curiosity, the unexpected. I am still learning what satisfaction is. I am still learning that trusting in the often irrational pleasures of the body is not only normal but wise.
A few years ago, in New York City, I ate dinner with three women I know there. It was a lot like a Polivy and Herman experiment. We met in the restaurant of a trendy midtown hotel. All three of my friends came from work, and they all were wearing black — short black skirts, black tops, sheer black stockings, and black shoes. Their hair was neat and carefully combed and pulled back. They all were thin. I was the contrast, the out-of-towner, out of touch — my unruly plumpness, my loose, long hair, my pink blazer and bluejeans. We talked throughout the meal about their pressured lives, the impossibility of it all, their stressful jobs, the crazy city full of noise and tension. “Oh, if I don’t get out of town on the weekends, I go out of my mind!” said one.
Anyone who looks at so-called women’s magazines now knows how to order in restaurants so as to protect one’s special dietary needs: no oil, no sauces, dressing on the side, steamed vegetables, grilled everything. We used to go out to a good restaurant in order to enjoy a chef’s unique creations; now we go out and try to avoid them. That night, we ate up-to-date eclectic cuisine of some kind or other, all shellfish and portobellos and bits of pasta — I ate, they dabbled. Everyone oohed and aahed at the dessert tray, and each of us ordered something off it. But when the desserts came, I was the only one who ate. The other women poked and sipped and stared, and stole a few bites of my crème caramel. Their reward was the virtue of resistance, the tight spring’s long-held tension still holding. Denial is what some women have come to desire most, and that’s nothing new. Certain emotions are dangerous to people who live by denial, by need and hunger. The relaxed happiness of a good table is one. Another is gratitude, in any form.
I find it difficult to explain the twin position I seem to occupy in this scene. I am inside and outside at once. I am outside watching four women around a table, three of this world and a visitor from another — so clearly foreign, so unable to fit in. I am watching the strangeness of a rich, noisy, seductively vibrant city I love, which demands so much of people, and the smaller worlds within it where codes of dress and conduct and appearance are strictly, harshly enforced. And I am inside, nervous, aware of my differences, my inability to meet the standard these other women meet every day. And we all are living in times so detached that “lighten up” is used when people are more thoughtful than their fellows want them to be. There is no way to point out these self-contained contradictions and not be guilty of something or other.
I ate my dessert, all of it, and I ate in a glaring spotlight, a complex concoction of feelings. I ate my dessert because I had wanted it, but it went down hard. I didn’t feel guilty about their hunger; I resented it. But what I felt besides resentment was shame. Shame at my bigness, the big space I took up in my chair, the lack of restraint in my hair and my clothes and my desire. I felt shame not that I ate dessert but that I failed at not eating. I failed not to want too much.
“Mean Cuisine” is excerpted from The Best Thing I Ever Tasted, by Sallie Tisdale. © 2000 by Sallie Tisdale. It appears here by permission of Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc.
