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CHRONICLE
Weight Watchers
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Which is the more expedient solution, the one that will produce greater happiness -- becoming thin; or deciding, through rarefied cultural perspective, that being thin doesn't matter? A dozen recent ruminations about human body weight -- memoirs, science, self-help -- trip grievously on this dilemma, stumbling between the options, getting lost even while pretending to reach certainty and, furthermore, victory. Whether viewed as an affliction of the body or the mind, fat is apparently an intractable problem. ''We still have no idea how to make fat people thin,'' Paul Campos writes in THE OBESITY MYTH: Why America's Obsession With Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health (Gotham, $25), pronouncing heraldically that ''tolerance toward an almost wholly benign form of human diversity is the least we should expect of ourselves.''
We don't tolerate it, however, if this new shelf of books can be believed. We can't be fat; we must be fat. This pathos of American abundance works wonderfully in memoir, and some of these falsely triumphant books are stirring and even enlightening, bad faith being of course a central element of weight control, with all its cheating and black-is-slimming and cloaking of vanity in moral terms.
But consider the real possibility of becoming thin. You might yet do it. Only know first that weight control -- if we're facing facts -- is a grueling business, requiring far more corporeal sacrifice than jumping jacks and skim milk. In fact, the physical details of the loss-gain narratives can turn your stomach, built as they are not on images of sunshine and modest portions but on scenes of digestive madness: strange dissections of food, fantasies about food, storage of food. The gain is nauseating, and then the gears reverse: retching, diarrhea, torturous exercise, livid emaciation, gore.
Even to think of thinness, we must first have our noses rubbed in the ignominy of gluttony; a set piece to this effect appears in all the weight memoirs. These scenes of voracity recall Balzac or Belushi, frenzies in which ''eating'' is shoving, gorging, devouring, cramming. In THE FAT GIRL'S GUIDE TO LIFE (Bloomsbury, $23.95), Wendy Shanker consumes cookies by the boxful and bread by the loaf. In IT WAS FOOD VERSUS ME . . . AND I WON (Viking, $21.95), Nancy Goodman gobbles a dusty, gnawed bagel from the floor of her car. Betsy Lerner in FOOD AND LOATHING: A Life Measured Out in Calories (Simon & Schuster, paper, $12) stuffs herself until she's ''bloated, drugged, transported.'' In PASSING FOR THIN: Losing Half My Weight and Finding Myself (Broadway, $24), Frances Kuffel, for whom eating is a stinging, gum-tearing orgy, sits on a toilet, sucking on Wheat Thins until they ''soften into goo,'' eating a whole box and stuffing more food in her underwear for safekeeping. She envisions herself, always, a ''colostomy bag overflowing.''
But then everything changes. And what follows for the deranged eater-memoirists -- fat or thin -- is penance, revulsion, fasting, enemas, amphetamines, laxatives, emetics, Weight Watchers, Optifast, residential hospitals and Overeaters Anonymous. Overeaters Anonymous, following Alcoholics Anonymous, preaches an ethic of abstinence, though abstaining from food is of course suicide, so the plan amounts to controlled semisuicide, during which only the fat part of the body is rubbed out. If abstinence fails, if you (say) get hungry again, there's always liposuction and stomach-stapling (which critics describe as enforced bulimia, and which recent reports still say fails up to a quarter of those who undergo it.)
Overeaters Anonymous works for Kuffel: she loses 180 pounds and, remarkably, keeps two-thirds of it off, though she makes it clear that she does ''not have a pretty body'' because ''the residual damage is extensive.'' (By not divulging the secrets of her food plan, Kuffel, who has an elegant macabre style, comes off as a sci-fi hero; we can never do as she has done.) Abstinence doesn't suit Lerner or Shanker, who have embraced cynicism and wit and renounced fat panic; they savage the program as maddening and dangerous.
What does work for everyone who sticks with it is ketosis-starving -- which slims you down straightaway but can be terminal. Jennifer Hendricks, who began fasting at 14, shrank to 45 pounds, which brought on kidney failure, hair loss, gum disease and partial blindness, among other ailments. SLIM TO NONE: A Journey Through the Wasteland of Anorexia Treatment (McGraw-Hill, paper, $14.95) is a posthumous publication, based on her journals. Having been told she wouldn't survive, Hendricks's parents -- her father, Gordon, aggressively edited the journals -- consigned her to a hospice, where she wrote her will and died at 25.
Bulimia comes as a revelation to many who revile fat, though bingeing and purging -- something tried by nearly all the memoirists, and sustained by Jenny Lauren in HOMESICK: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Finding Hope (Atria, $24) -- is of course a fast track to crippling digestive problems. After a period of ipecac dependency, Lauren, a niece of the designer Ralph Lauren, is left with an anus that twitches violently and a racked small intestine that almost falls through her vagina. An unusual and possibly actionable operation does not cure her troubles. In the end, none of this is nearly enough to produce the sleek abstraction of the body enjoyed by the naturally thin, who don't write about their weight.
Now consider the high road: keeping aloof from the fray, wearing your 140 or 180 or 215 with repose, eating whenever, exercising or not in the way of the blithe beasts of the forest. Not starving; your intestines in place; your mind oblivious to their functioning. This would seem infinitely preferable -- and easier. You have changed your mind about greater matters (the Geneva Convention, toile, estrogen therapy); surely, with your life at stake, you can adjust your aesthetic hierarchy of human forms. With all we now know about cultural constructions from Rubens to Lara Flynn Boyle, our sense of human beauty can't be immutable, can it?
You might begin by embracing the findings of Kelly D. Brownell and Katherine Battle Horgen in FOOD FIGHT: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It (Contemporary/McGraw-Hill, $24.95). The authors grant that obesity is piteous, but demonstrate that it's not your problem, a shortcoming of your metabolism or your appetite. Rather, it's a public-health issue, and to fight fat you must lobby Congress and agitate against Big Food. Of course that doesn't mean you'll be thin. Serenity itself comes from Campos, who argues simply that American standards for healthy weight are set far too low. We're not even fat, it turns out. (Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller University, recently seconded this view, asserting that average weights haven't changed much in the past decade.) Those respectable weights on the body mass index charts -- the ones devised though unaccountably not used by the insurance companies -- do not extend your life, and may, compared to weighing more, even shorten it. Campos contends that this is a scandal, and a boon only to the anorexic freaks in the diet industry. He goes on to suggest, provocatively, that the American middle class projects its anxieties about overconsumption onto an underclass, which it then vilifies for obesity. They can never be too poor or too fat. An element of racism might play into fat-hatred, too.
Now that you have righteously set aside your diet, you might read along (with a snack), savoring the ever-convincing invocations of class and ''projecting'' and inversions of orthodoxies and insurance scandals. It's heartening. If only learning about obesity burned calories. Still, enlightened, you can now look up, try to change your eyes, to slant your vision so that fat looks all right, chubbiness looks great and thin looks hateful. Try to think of your quads as gorgeous and that spindly girl in low Sevens as hideous, and wonder why she's opting for social death and why she can't take hold of her life and just fatten up.
Aha! You can't do it. And, to come clean, because he does, neither could Paul Campos. He dieted and dieted while he wrote his book condemning dieting; he acquired a nasty distance-running habit. He's now thin as a rail, and they love him at work for it. Women fawn over him, and his marriage is better than ever. Now that is the best of both worlds -- to be too good to worry about being thin, and too thin to have to worry about it. It's as if Campos is trying to fatten us up so we won't give him competition.
I see the good; I follow the bad. Wasn't that Ovid's summary of our everyday moral bind? We cannot reconcile body and soul with a diet or an argument. Instead, fat will have to rest for now in the usual balance, the one we have for lying and cheating. Video meliora, proboque; deteriora sequor. Why isn't it possible to think of fat like that? It's bad, it's ugly, we have great respect for thinness, it's becoming and noble but we're sinners, and we eat and lounge around, and for that our co-workers don't compliment us and guys on the street don't whistle at us and we are very, very sorry but that's the way it is.
Virginia Heffernan is a television critic for The Times.
CHRONICLE
Weight Watchers
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Which is the more expedient solution, the one that will produce greater happiness -- becoming thin; or deciding, through rarefied cultural perspective, that being thin doesn't matter? A dozen recent ruminations about human body weight -- memoirs, science, self-help -- trip grievously on this dilemma, stumbling between the options, getting lost even while pretending to reach certainty and, furthermore, victory. Whether viewed as an affliction of the body or the mind, fat is apparently an intractable problem. ''We still have no idea how to make fat people thin,'' Paul Campos writes in THE OBESITY MYTH: Why America's Obsession With Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health (Gotham, $25), pronouncing heraldically that ''tolerance toward an almost wholly benign form of human diversity is the least we should expect of ourselves.''
We don't tolerate it, however, if this new shelf of books can be believed. We can't be fat; we must be fat. This pathos of American abundance works wonderfully in memoir, and some of these falsely triumphant books are stirring and even enlightening, bad faith being of course a central element of weight control, with all its cheating and black-is-slimming and cloaking of vanity in moral terms.
But consider the real possibility of becoming thin. You might yet do it. Only know first that weight control -- if we're facing facts -- is a grueling business, requiring far more corporeal sacrifice than jumping jacks and skim milk. In fact, the physical details of the loss-gain narratives can turn your stomach, built as they are not on images of sunshine and modest portions but on scenes of digestive madness: strange dissections of food, fantasies about food, storage of food. The gain is nauseating, and then the gears reverse: retching, diarrhea, torturous exercise, livid emaciation, gore.
Even to think of thinness, we must first have our noses rubbed in the ignominy of gluttony; a set piece to this effect appears in all the weight memoirs. These scenes of voracity recall Balzac or Belushi, frenzies in which ''eating'' is shoving, gorging, devouring, cramming. In THE FAT GIRL'S GUIDE TO LIFE (Bloomsbury, $23.95), Wendy Shanker consumes cookies by the boxful and bread by the loaf. In IT WAS FOOD VERSUS ME . . . AND I WON (Viking, $21.95), Nancy Goodman gobbles a dusty, gnawed bagel from the floor of her car. Betsy Lerner in FOOD AND LOATHING: A Life Measured Out in Calories (Simon & Schuster, paper, $12) stuffs herself until she's ''bloated, drugged, transported.'' In PASSING FOR THIN: Losing Half My Weight and Finding Myself (Broadway, $24), Frances Kuffel, for whom eating is a stinging, gum-tearing orgy, sits on a toilet, sucking on Wheat Thins until they ''soften into goo,'' eating a whole box and stuffing more food in her underwear for safekeeping. She envisions herself, always, a ''colostomy bag overflowing.''
But then everything changes. And what follows for the deranged eater-memoirists -- fat or thin -- is penance, revulsion, fasting, enemas, amphetamines, laxatives, emetics, Weight Watchers, Optifast, residential hospitals and Overeaters Anonymous. Overeaters Anonymous, following Alcoholics Anonymous, preaches an ethic of abstinence, though abstaining from food is of course suicide, so the plan amounts to controlled semisuicide, during which only the fat part of the body is rubbed out. If abstinence fails, if you (say) get hungry again, there's always liposuction and stomach-stapling (which critics describe as enforced bulimia, and which recent reports still say fails up to a quarter of those who undergo it.)
Overeaters Anonymous works for Kuffel: she loses 180 pounds and, remarkably, keeps two-thirds of it off, though she makes it clear that she does ''not have a pretty body'' because ''the residual damage is extensive.'' (By not divulging the secrets of her food plan, Kuffel, who has an elegant macabre style, comes off as a sci-fi hero; we can never do as she has done.) Abstinence doesn't suit Lerner or Shanker, who have embraced cynicism and wit and renounced fat panic; they savage the program as maddening and dangerous.
What does work for everyone who sticks with it is ketosis-starving -- which slims you down straightaway but can be terminal. Jennifer Hendricks, who began fasting at 14, shrank to 45 pounds, which brought on kidney failure, hair loss, gum disease and partial blindness, among other ailments. SLIM TO NONE: A Journey Through the Wasteland of Anorexia Treatment (McGraw-Hill, paper, $14.95) is a posthumous publication, based on her journals. Having been told she wouldn't survive, Hendricks's parents -- her father, Gordon, aggressively edited the journals -- consigned her to a hospice, where she wrote her will and died at 25.
Bulimia comes as a revelation to many who revile fat, though bingeing and purging -- something tried by nearly all the memoirists, and sustained by Jenny Lauren in HOMESICK: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Finding Hope (Atria, $24) -- is of course a fast track to crippling digestive problems. After a period of ipecac dependency, Lauren, a niece of the designer Ralph Lauren, is left with an anus that twitches violently and a racked small intestine that almost falls through her vagina. An unusual and possibly actionable operation does not cure her troubles. In the end, none of this is nearly enough to produce the sleek abstraction of the body enjoyed by the naturally thin, who don't write about their weight.
Now consider the high road: keeping aloof from the fray, wearing your 140 or 180 or 215 with repose, eating whenever, exercising or not in the way of the blithe beasts of the forest. Not starving; your intestines in place; your mind oblivious to their functioning. This would seem infinitely preferable -- and easier. You have changed your mind about greater matters (the Geneva Convention, toile, estrogen therapy); surely, with your life at stake, you can adjust your aesthetic hierarchy of human forms. With all we now know about cultural constructions from Rubens to Lara Flynn Boyle, our sense of human beauty can't be immutable, can it?
You might begin by embracing the findings of Kelly D. Brownell and Katherine Battle Horgen in FOOD FIGHT: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It (Contemporary/McGraw-Hill, $24.95). The authors grant that obesity is piteous, but demonstrate that it's not your problem, a shortcoming of your metabolism or your appetite. Rather, it's a public-health issue, and to fight fat you must lobby Congress and agitate against Big Food. Of course that doesn't mean you'll be thin. Serenity itself comes from Campos, who argues simply that American standards for healthy weight are set far too low. We're not even fat, it turns out. (Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller University, recently seconded this view, asserting that average weights haven't changed much in the past decade.) Those respectable weights on the body mass index charts -- the ones devised though unaccountably not used by the insurance companies -- do not extend your life, and may, compared to weighing more, even shorten it. Campos contends that this is a scandal, and a boon only to the anorexic freaks in the diet industry. He goes on to suggest, provocatively, that the American middle class projects its anxieties about overconsumption onto an underclass, which it then vilifies for obesity. They can never be too poor or too fat. An element of racism might play into fat-hatred, too.
Now that you have righteously set aside your diet, you might read along (with a snack), savoring the ever-convincing invocations of class and ''projecting'' and inversions of orthodoxies and insurance scandals. It's heartening. If only learning about obesity burned calories. Still, enlightened, you can now look up, try to change your eyes, to slant your vision so that fat looks all right, chubbiness looks great and thin looks hateful. Try to think of your quads as gorgeous and that spindly girl in low Sevens as hideous, and wonder why she's opting for social death and why she can't take hold of her life and just fatten up.
Aha! You can't do it. And, to come clean, because he does, neither could Paul Campos. He dieted and dieted while he wrote his book condemning dieting; he acquired a nasty distance-running habit. He's now thin as a rail, and they love him at work for it. Women fawn over him, and his marriage is better than ever. Now that is the best of both worlds -- to be too good to worry about being thin, and too thin to have to worry about it. It's as if Campos is trying to fatten us up so we won't give him competition.
I see the good; I follow the bad. Wasn't that Ovid's summary of our everyday moral bind? We cannot reconcile body and soul with a diet or an argument. Instead, fat will have to rest for now in the usual balance, the one we have for lying and cheating. Video meliora, proboque; deteriora sequor. Why isn't it possible to think of fat like that? It's bad, it's ugly, we have great respect for thinness, it's becoming and noble but we're sinners, and we eat and lounge around, and for that our co-workers don't compliment us and guys on the street don't whistle at us and we are very, very sorry but that's the way it is.
Virginia Heffernan is a television critic for The Times.
