Several times a year, usually after a particularly good run of parties, dinners and travel, I look down at the number on the scale and realize it’s about five pounds more than the 15 pounds I already want to lose. I recognize that eating and drinking whatever I want has gone on for too long. It’s time for austerity.
It’s time to diet.
And yet, when I admit this out loud, that my body is taking on a shape I’d like to fight against, I get an odd sort of pushback from other women. “Don’t do that, it’s just patriarchal pressure” or “You’re beautiful as is” I’m told, and not to buy into our culture’s body-shaming.
Who said anything about the patriarchy? I really like these pants, and they’ve gotten too tight. I don’t want to be out of breath when I chase my 2-year-old up the block. And I’d like to stop wanting to avoid being in pictures because I don’t like how I look. More than anything, it’s about being honest about the fact that having the body I want to have requires effort.
I’m far from alone in feeling like society has done a flip, from everyone openly sharing that they are trying to lose weight, to dieting becoming a shameful secret not to be spoken out loud. People are still dieting, of course, but women now aren’t supposed to admit it.
In August, Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine titled “Losing It in the Anti-Dieting Age.” In it, she recounted all her various dieting ordeals as well as the language change that diet companies like Weight Watchers had to undergo to fit in with our non-dieting-but-actually-still-dieting world.
“Dieting,” Brodesser-Akner wrote “was now considered tacky. It was anti-feminist. It was arcane. In the new millennium, all bodies should be accepted, and any inclination to change a body was proof of a lack of acceptance of it.”
Last March Allison Aubrey at NPR highlighted a study from the Journal of the American Medical Association that found fewer overweight people were trying to lose weight. Since 1990 there has been a 7 percent drop in overweight people who report that they are dieting. Aubrey wrote, “This may not seem like a big decline. But given that about 2 out of every 3 Americans are either overweight or obese, a decline of 7 percent means millions more people may have given up on dieting.”
In a 2013 Elle magazine piece, Marisa Meltzer wrote about the shame she felt dieting as a feminist. She had lost 60 pounds but hoped none of her friends would mention it. “Good feminists, in short, do not diet. Or if they do, they don’t talk about it.”
But the idea that weight magically comes off is damaging, too. For all the criticism the Kardashian women get in our culture, it’s rare to turn on their reality show and not see them eating salad and working out. There’s something endearing about their honesty that their bodies take a lot of work.
With all the other pressures women have, it’s annoying that they also have to worry if they’re feministing correctly as they work to better themselves through healthier eating. There’s too much “supposed to” in modern female life. The kind of man you’re supposed to want, the opinions you’re supposed to hold, the body you’re supposed to love but actually, secretly, don’t.
Aubrey wrote that the drop in dieting can be attributed to “a growing acceptance of bigger body sizes.” The current buzzword is “body positive” to describe rejecting societal pressure to look like the unrealistic models in magazines. It’s a worthy goal, but why does it necessarily have to leave out women who work to like themselves a bit more?
The fact, is I am actually “body positive” — I generally feel really good about how I look even though I’d love to be thinner. These things can go hand in hand. When I’m feeling less positive, I diet, and that makes me feel more positive.
I’m also realistic. I do want a “beach body” but my body on the beach will be one of someone who did her best but really loves pizza, cake and Manhattans and also had three children. I don’t have insane expectations to wake up one day and be a size zero; I don’t even want that. I just want to lose a few pounds a couple of times a year without feeling like I’ve failed womanhood.
Fat-shaming is not OK — but neither is trying-to-be-thinner-shaming. We’re all just trying to look and feel our best, and we’ll have different ways of trying to achieve that.
A woman’s agency is in the choices she gets to make for herself. If she’s being held back by pressure to conform, where’s the empowerment in that?