Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

by Emily Nagoski

And yet by the age of six, about half of girls are worried about being “too fat.”1 By age eleven, it’s up to two-thirds, and by full adolescence almost all girls will have engaged in some kind of “weight control” behavior.2 One recent study of more than 4,500 adolescents found that nearly all of them (92 percent) engaged in some kind of weight-control behavior, and almost half (44 percent) of girls engaged in unhealthy weight-control behaviors.3 It hasn’t always been like this, and it isn’t like this everywhere; it happens because our culture makes it happen.

In 1994, there was no television on the island of Fiji; there were also no eating disorders. British and American television were brought to the island in 1995. By 1998, 29 percent of the girls had developed severe eating disorder symptoms. Thirteen percent develop...

But imagine what it would be like to live in a culture where that feeling we had on the day we were born stayed the same all through our childhood and into adolescence, a culture that didn’t constantly reinforce the idea that a girl’s or woman’s body is supposed to be one specific shape and size, and if it’s not she must, at all costs, try to make it that shape and size. What if the shape we grew into was just accepted as the natural shape of our bodies, as lovable each new day as it was on the day we were born? What if the body we aged into—those of us lucky enough to grow old—was as beautiful in our own eyes, when we looked in the mirror, as worthy of love and protection, as the body we had on the day we were born? What if the shape of our bodies was peripheral to our relationship with our bodies, and we could pay compassionate attention to our body’s needs without assessing whether it “deserves” food or love?

The Bikini Industrial Complex This is our name for the hundred-billion-dollar cluster of businesses that profit by setting an unachievable “aspirational ideal” for us, convincing us that we both can and should—indeed we must—conform with the ideal, and then selling us ineffective but plausible strategies for achieving that ideal.7

it’s not just magazine covers and other fictions that get it wrong. Even your high school health class had it wrong. Your doctor had it wrong, because her medical textbooks had it wrong, because the federal government had it wrong. Like “Big Oil” and “Big Tobacco,” “Big Bikini” has lobbied government agencies to make sure their products have the support of Congress. The body mass index (BMI) chart and its labels—underweight, overweight, obese, etc.—were created by a panel of nine individuals, seven of whom were “employed by weight-loss clinics and thus have an economic interest in encouraging use of their facilities.”8

You’ve been lied to about the relationship between weight and health so that you will perpetually try to change your weight.

It can be healthier to be seventy or more pounds over your medically defined “healthy weight” than just five pounds under it. A 2016 meta-analysis published in The Lancet examined 189 studies, encompassing nearly four million people who never smoked and had no diagnosed medical issues. It found that people labeled “obese” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have lower health risk than those the CDC categorized as “underweight.” The study also found that being “overweight” according to the CDC is lower ri...

Another meta-analysis even found that people in the BMI category labeled “overweight” may live longer than people in any other category, and the highest predictable mortality rate might be among those labeled “underweight.”10

increasingly well-established dangers of fluctuations in weight outweigh any risk associated with a high but stable weight.12

weight stigma is so deeply entrenched that even the researchers who study health and weight are prone to “scientific weightism,” the empirically unsound assumption that thin is good and fat is bad.13 It leads physicians and scientists to write sentences like “It is well established that weight loss, by any method, is beneficial for individuals with diabetes.”14

Weight and health. Not the same thing.

BMI is nonsense as a measure of personal health. It’s literally just a ratio of height to weight,

And we all believe it, because our culture has primed us to judge fat people as lazy and selfish.

financial cost: the aforementioned hundred-billion-dollar global industry thrives on our body dissatisfaction, and the less effective it is at making our bodies “fit,” the more money it makes, as we try product after product, trend after trend.

opportunity cost: With the time and money we spend on worrying about the shape of our bodies and attempting to make them “fit,” what else might we accomplish? Along with that comes “self-regulatory fatigue”; if you’re using up decision-making and attention-focusing cognitive resources on choices about food, clothes, exercise, makeup, body hair, “toxins,” and fretting about your body’s failures, what are you too exhausted to care about, that you would otherwise prioritize?

also the chronic, low-level stress—like the rats with tilted cages and flashing lights—of navigating an environment filled with images of the ideal and people who believe in it. Even if you don’t buy in, they’ll be there to say, “How nice for you that you don’t care,” or “No, don’t give up on yourself!” or “Aren’t you worried about your health? What about your (my) insurance premiums?” What they’re really saying is, “How dare you? If I have to follow the rules, then so do you. Get back in line.”

discrimination. People of size are paid less at work, experience more bullying at school—not just from other kids, but from teachers—and have their symptoms dismissed or ignored by doctors, and thus go longer without appropriate diagnosis and treatment when they have actual medical problems.

the cost in human health and life: Dieting—especially “yo-yo dieting,” repeatedly gaining and losing weight—ultimately causes changes in brain functioning that increase insulin and leptin resistance (causing weight gain, which leads to dieting, and so on), which leads to actual disease. And eating disorders have the highest mortality of any mental illness—higher even than depression—killing 250,000 people a year.21 The thin ideal makes us sick. And it kills some of us.

It is women’s time, money, mental energy, opportunity, health, and lives that are being drained away in the endless pursuit of a “better” body, and it starts as soon as we “gender” a child’s toys. Very young girls’ exposure to dolls with unrealistic body types increases their desire to be thin.23 This despite the fact that the Lancet meta-analysis found that the health risk associated with low or high BMI was “far greater”—quoting the researchers—for men than for women. And yet who gets more flak from their culture and even, yes, from their doctors about their weight? Women, of course—twice as much as men.24 Why? Because we’re the “human givers”; we’re the ones with a moral obligation to be pretty—that is, to conform to the aspirational ideal.

The body ideal is built into the physical infrastructure of society, from the size and shape of airplane seats to the weight-bearing capacity of medical tables. One friend of ours couldn’t get a mammogram because the machine at the doctor’s office didn’t hold over 250 pounds—outrageously inexcusable, when 5 to 10 percent of American women over the age of forty weigh more than 250 pounds.25

Despite the accumulating evidence that people of different shapes and sizes can be healthy, the stigma around body shape pervades every domain of our lives, and the prejudice, bias, false beliefs, and stigma against fat and fat people can literally kill you.27 And this form of discrimination is not just legal but normalized, rationalized, by the incorrect idea that fat is a disease.

So yes indeed, it would be nice to be thin, because it would privilege us with the gift of being treated like actual people, no matter what. Thin privilege is as real as privilege associated with race, gender, and class. Women of color would face less adversity if they were white. Trans folks would face less adversity if they were cisgender. People on the autism spectrum would face less adversity if they were neurotypical. And, yes, fat people would face less adversity if they were thin.

none of those folks chose to be who they are. They can only choose to embrace who they are and try to tolerate living in ...

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.

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.)

Your New “Weight Loss Goal”

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

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.

Strategy 1: Mess Acceptance

Though the approaches vary, they also have a lot in common: they all encourage you to (1) practice body acceptance, (2) embrace body diversity, and (3) listen to your body.

It’s difficult to maintain body acceptance in the midst of the BIC, where you’re surrounded by images of the ideal and by loved ones who say, “But you’re going to lose the weight, right?”

rather than aiming for “body acceptance,” practice “mess acceptance.”

When you engage in physical activity, you know it’s good for you, because: completing the cycle and also: doing a thing. You also know that most people probably assume you’re trying to “lose weight” or “get in shape,” and part of you might still actively want to change the shape of your body. That’s all perfectly normal. Move your body anyway—because it really is good for you—and smile benevolently at the mess. Some days it will be messy as hell, other days it will be calm and clear, and every day is just part of the intensely body-neurotic world you happen to live in.

Strategy 2: You Are the New Hotness

When we reconstruct our own standard of beauty with a definition that comes from our own hearts and includes our bodies as they are right now, we can turn toward our bodies with kindness and compassion.

“New Hotness” game, a strategy for teaching ourselves to let go of body self-criticism and shift to self-kindness.

“new hotness” is our texting shorthand for looking fabulous without reference to the socially constructed ideal.

you define and redefine your body’s worth, on your own terms. Again and again, you turn toward your body with kindness and compassion.

We’re not saying that “beautiful” is what your body should be; we’re saying beautiful is what your body already is.

Lindy West discovered her new hotness from exposure to positive images of fat bodies, and recommends that other women “look at pictures of fat women on the Internet until they don’t make you uncomfortable anymore.”

Leonard Nimoy’s The Full Body Project

“What if I could just decide I was valuable and it would be true?”

She later discovered the research that demonstrates that mere exposure to certain body types makes people prefer those body types.

tears and an astonished awareness of how uncomfortable it is, at first, to view non-“ideal” bodies without judgment…and of how quickly it becomes a source of joy.

You will finish this chapter and go out into the world and notice the diversity of bodies around you…and you will still have these reflexive, judgmental thoughts about the people who don’t conform to the aspirational ideal, or those envious, contemptuous thoughts about the people who do, or those self-critical, scolding thoughts about the ways the world tells you you fall short.

You’ll notice other people’s bodies, and you’ll have an emotional reaction to them. And then you might even have emotional reactions to your emotional reactions—“Darn it, I shouldn’t think that!”

Your brain has been soaking in the BIC for decades; and any time you step outside your door, you’re back in it; any time you turn on a television, you’re back in it; any time you put clothes on or take clothes off, you’re back in it. Just notice it, as you’d notice a fleck of dust floating through the air. Utterly neutral. No need to do anything about it. Smile kindly at the mess. And know what’s true: Everyone is the new hotness. You are the new hotness. So is she. So are they. So are we.

Strategy 4: “Hi Body, What Do You Need?”

Finally, turn your attention away from the mirror and other people’s bodies, and notice what it feels like inside your body. Greet your internal sensations with the same kindness and compassion you practiced when you thought about the shape of your body.

Even before she can read or speak, she watches commercials and sees the magazine covers at the grocery store, and though she may never talk about it with any of the people in her life, she is absorbing the idea that her body is not already beautiful and that if she doesn’t make it beautiful, she doesn’t automatically deserve food or love or rest or health. And as a budding “human giver,” she learns that her body isn’t for her, it’s for other people. Other people’s pleasure, other people’s desire, other people’s acceptance or rejection.