What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety

by Cole Kazdin

“There is a mental shift away from exercise is an obligation to exercise is a vehicle for my joy,”

In the real world—the one outside of this book and the communities we build for ourselves—no matter how solid we feel, it’s easy to fall back into diet culture because we speak the language. Fluently. It’s in the air. A news story on minor league baseball where the reporter made a joke asking if players gained weight during the off-season. An obituary in The New York Times for a famous actress: From an early age she aspired to be a ballet dancer, and, though never the sveltest girl en pointe … 2 Fuck. You. (The actress was Valerie Harper. The reporter was Bruce Weber, in case you would like to talk to him. Later in the piece he wrote: though it should be said that she—that is, Ms. Harper—was never terribly overweight. STOP TALKING ABOUT WOMEN’S BODIES.)

Hill uses the word “energy” to replace “calories,” “strength” for “weight” (good one—who would want to “lose strength”?), and “movement” instead of “exercise.” She recommends I do the same. It’s a hard habit to break. She reminds me how much energy the body needs to sustain biological functions, that digesting a meal burns energy, and so does thinking thoughts. The energy we get from food helps regulate our emotions. Caloric deficits “chemically keep you from feeling better,” as she put it. Movement includes: standing up, brushing your teeth, cleaning your house.

“nutrient-rich” instead of “healthy.” I can’t believe that a word as innocent as “health” or “healthy” has so much fucking baggage, but here we are. Now, in thinking about how I feed my body, I frame it this new way.

How we talk to ourselves in the quiet moments may be the most challenging of all. “We can always have the thoughts,” Zeynep told me. “Like, you will never have a thought-free life. So I started telling myself sentences, really fixed ones. When I get hungry, I tell myself, My body really needs food now

we can practice talking differently to each other. Like if your mother says, “This is so much food!” when you serve something, you can respond, “Actually this is a regular portion and I’m pretty hungry; let’s see what we end up eating.” If a friend is going on about her diet, you could shift the topic to something non–body related—like literally fucking anything.

I’m used to who I am now is the greatest, most accessible phrasing of self-acceptance I’ve heard yet. To say to myself: OK. I have this eating disorder history, brain stuff, family stuff, trauma stuff. (Kaye told me that many anorexics exhibit a higher-than-average sensitivity to trauma, but also, maybe, #allofus?) I move through a world that has a lot of fucked-up values and harmful attitudes about women’s bodies, and that treats different kinds of bodies in distinct and unequal ways. That’s a summit I’m not able to get to on my own. If I don’t feel as steady and recovered as I’d like to, I know why, and it’s another thing to work toward. I