Quote of the Day

You don't lose weight by tough love, whether from your mother or your local clothing store. It's a personal choice, and a difficult choice -- and if I can't do it for myself, I'm not going to do it for the Gap."

...from an article in Salon today about Torrid, the plus-size clothing store aimed at teen girls.

Many years ago, I was co-founder of a short-lived local support group designed around a then-revolutionary concept: That self-loathing was not a motivating factor in weight loss, and that while many women were never going to be as thin as we wanted to, if stopped defining our worth solely in terms of what we ate, our weight would find the right point for us. Our first few meetings were a rip-roaring success, we were written up in the New York Times, but as women realized that we weren't offering model-like bodies or magic weight loss solutions, little by little they returned to Jenny Craig or Slim-Fast or Nutri-System or whatever plan promised easy weight loss with very little effort.

There is no more dysfunctional relationship that women have in their lives than the one with food. We live in a culture that says "eat, eat, eat -- but don't you DARE get fat." If we eat a candy bar, we are "bad". If we eat lettuce, we are "good." How many times have you heard a woman say "I was really good today" and have it mean that she was patient with her child, or helped someone in need, or did a really good job on a project. No, if she says she was good, it means she didn't eat "junk", and it usually means that she ate nothing at all satisfying. Feeling deprived makes us feel virtuous.

What a crock.

I've struggled with weight my entire life. I look back at photos of myself in my teens and what I see looks nothing like a fat girl. But because I wasn't tall, blonde, and willowy, I felt like a fat girl, I saw myself as a fat girl, and I therefore carried myself as a fat girl. Fat was the worst thing you could be. You could be obnoxious, cruel, and vicious, but if you were fat, that was just the pits.

To this day, people still think that negativism is a motivating factor towards losing weight; that if we just get to despise ourselves enough, we'll do something about it. Well, anyone who's ever been in this cycle will tell you that the minute you get into THAT mindset, that's when you go to the A&P, buy a container of chocolate frosting, and eat the whole mess with a spoon -- even if you don't even LIKE chocolate frosting. Did you have a piece of chocolate from the basket in the cubicle next door? You're a BAD PERSON -- might as well eat twenty of them.

In a way, this kind of behavior is a sign of something healthy -- a rebellion against the notion that we have to deprive ourselves in order to be socially acceptable. It means there's a little kernel of self-acceptance in there, screaming to get out.

No one ever lost weight permanently when she hated herself. Wearing too-tight, uncomfortable clothes don't arm you against eating candy bars. They just make you feel rotten.

I'm 4'10" tall. I'm a size 16. I was bordering on a size 18 for a while, and was starting to get winded just walking out to my car after work. For a compulsively busy person like me, that was a drag. But my cholesterol is OK if I watch the saturated fats (and yes, that means chocolate too, alas). My blood pressure is 120/80 -- perfectly fine. I have taken exactly four sick days in the last four years. I work out 5 days a week at home using a video-based program involving weight-bearing, muscle-building exercise and aerobics. It's varied, it's not boring, it's challenging without being impossible. I'm just shy of 50 and both my parents are alive and well, so I have good genes. And now I'm starting to have muscle where I never did, and while I haven't lost any significant weight, I look and feel better.

I think stores like Torrid for teens, and Avenue for more "mature" women, and the like are a terrific idea. It's hard enough to not be a size 2 in a culture where the ideal woman has the body of a 12-year-old boy, only with huge bags of liquid surgically implanted in her chest. It's even harder to not be a size 2 when you're a teenager. If stores like Torrid help plus-size teens to feel better about themselves, and as a result they don't need the comfort that junk food provides, I'm all for it.