Why I Wrote Bodies to Die For
In January 2020, Jillian Michaels was interviewed on BuzzFeed News. When the subject of Lizzo as a body acceptance role model came up, Jillian said, “Why are we celebrating her body? Why does it matter? Why aren’t we celebrating her music? Cause it isn’t going to be awesome if she gets diabetes.” [1] And social media blew-up.
The Healthy at Every Size (HAES) camp accused Jillian of fat phobia disguised as health concern. The Wellness camp said that we needed to stop normalizing obesity. The amount of vitriol spewed by both sides was staggering. And it was almost all women doing the spewing. As the situation unfolded, an uncomfortableness stirred within me. I wasn’t quite sure what I thought. So, à la Joan Didion, I started to write. And BODIES TO DIE FOR was born.
I was called to write this book.
I first encountered Diet Culture in fourth grade [2], when my dance instructor, B, in an effort to lose weight, had her jaw wired shut. Let me set the stage:
My mom is driving me to dance lessons, when she casually mentions, “By the way, J is going to be teaching for the next few months.” (J is B’s assistant.) “B will still be there. She’ll just be off to the side taking notes and won’t be able to talk to you.”
I’m looking out the window. “Why?”
“Well . . . B had her jaw wired shut.”
I yank my eyes to my mom. “What? Why?”
“B wants to lose some weight.”
“So, she had her jaw wired shut?” Surely, this is insane.
“Yes.”
“But wait, why—”
My mom pulling to the curb. “Out you go.”
“But wait, why–”
She turns to me. “I don’t know. But don’t go in there asking about it. You’ll just make B uncomfortable. Now, get to class.”
So, I’m dumped at the curb, head spinning. Other moms are dropping their daughters off, too. Some are walking them in. And it’s just another day. No one is freaking out.
That’s what really got me. I had good parents. They didn’t leave me with wackos. My friends had seemingly good parents, too. And everyone apparently thought this was okay.
We go inside, and sure enough, there is B in the corner with a notebook. J is in front, having us line up for class.
Over the next several weeks, I watch, spellbound, as B starts to shrink. She sits in her corner taking notes, periodically sucking a shake through a straw, her cheekbones popping.
A few months in, I do something to warrant B’s attention—I was likely misbehaving; I honestly can’t remember—and she points at me, curls her finger, come here. And so I go, click, click, clicking in my tap shoes.
I get up close, and her face is wrinkly, her eyes bright. She looks like a hungry forest creature.
I have to lean in close to hear her (because her jaw is wired shut). I have no memory of what she said, but as she’s talking through gritted teeth, it occurs to me that this is my chance. There are no moms around to rat me out. So, when she’s done, I ask, “Did you really have you jaw wired shut?”
She nods.
“Can you see the wires?”
She nods again.
I hesitate, then go for it. “Can you show me?”
She hooks a finger in the side of her mouth and pulls her lips back. There are metal brackets attached to her upper and lower teeth, with wires zig-zagging between them like jagged robotic fangs.
I’m surprised I didn’t pass out.
That whole ordeal had a huge impact on me. How important was it to be thin? It was that important.
From there, I would go on to have friends with some pretty substantial eating disorders. In high school, one accidently swallowed a small metal spoon while making herself vomit. It had to be cut out of her esophagus, leaving a four-inch scar down the middle of her chest.
Another disappeared one day. Asking the adults where she went produced only cryptic responses. Then one night she called me from an eating disorders treatment center and told me she had bulimia (new word). She asked if I’d like to come see her.
I drove out that weekend. While her roommate was out, she told me not to take it personally if when her roommate returned, she seemed antisocial. That she was anorexic (new word), and that the anorexics looked down on the bulimics for their lack of self-control. Also, her roommate was angry that she was back here. Apparently, she’d been here before, and the treatment didn’t take. Everyone was super worried because she was almost eighteen, at which point her parents wouldn’t be able to make her stay. My friend didn’t seem much worse for wear, and I sympathized with this anorexic roommate. Parents were always overreacting.
Up until that day, I had bought into the eighties thinking that you couldn’t be too thin.
Then her roommate walked in, and my very first thought was: She’s going to die.
Suddenly I understood why all the adults were freaking out. I could see the contours of this girl’s skull through her face. There was a fine, downy fur on her cheeks.
Over the next several years, I would be further steeped in Diet Culture until my body hit the cultural standards and my brain was pliable. Things ratcheted up further when, while in college, I got a job as a stripper. My body was now a commodity, and if I had any illusions about what it looked like, the mighty dollar would let me know the score.
Despite finding success at the clubs I worked at, I probably called out “fat” on Wednesdays about once a month. I remember my very lovely managers (yes, most of the people I worked with were lovely), saying, “Tracey” (my stage name) “I just saw you on Saturday. You can’t possibly have gotten fat in four days.” And I’d insist that I had, beg and plead not to come in.
After which my managers would sigh and say, “Okay, but please come in tomorrow.”
And I would swear that I would.
Then I would be so, so good. Cut my calories way down and crush it at the gym. (Of note, I went to the gym on those previous four days, and I wasn’t a binger. I might have just eaten pizza for dinner one day or been about to start my period.)
At one point, thanks to a connection, I ended up in Playboy’s Book of Lingerie. And hated my pictures.
Eventually, the whole skin game got old, and the broke guy I married became successful. So, I quit stripping and became a stay-at-home mom. I thought that now my fear of gaining weight might finally loosen its grip. I was wrong.
We I lived in the Gold Coast of Chicago, and I ran around with a glamourous group of new moms. There was immense pressure to bounce back. To look the part. I remember getting a terrible bout of stomach flu. When I had finally recovered, one of my friends exclaimed, “You look so great! Here, come breathe on me. Maybe you’re still contagious.”
After a couple years, my family moved to the suburbs, and there didn’t appear to be quite so much pressure. I was relieved that we could all focus on just raising our kids and existing. Then I went to my first neighborhood Christmas party and met two very nice women. I was complementing Woman A’s dress and saying how lovely she looked when she said, “Thank you so much. I almost didn’t come tonight because I’m so fat.” And my mind reeled. We were still doing this? Even now?
Then Woman B said, “Me too!”
After my kids were all in school, I had a midlife crisis of sorts. I had been living my life for everyone else and had nothing to show for it. So, I went back to school and got a masters in engineering and then a job. I also started going to the gym again, except this time I wasn’t trying to hit someone else’s beauty standard. I just wanted to get strong.
And finally, the cage door opened. The desire to get strong was the game changer. There’s nothing arbitrary about squatting one hundred pounds or doing a pull-up. You either hit it or you don’t. Getting physically strong made me mentally strong. I no longer put up with shitty situations, shitty jobs, or shitty people. I expected better. I believed I deserved better.
In an effort to share this epiphany with others, I became a group fitness and Spinning instructor, yoga teacher, and started writing for fitness magazines. (Don’t worry, I kept my engineering job.)
With fresh eyes I looked out at the world. And Diet Culture was everywhere.
A sampling: A fitness instructor I know quit because she gained weight and was too embarrassed to stand in front of the class. An acquaintance on a fitness podcast said, “I don’t know why anyone would go to a fat trainer.” I got into Bikini bodybuilding and found myself surrounded by women with fabulous, hard-earned physiques, who saw nothing but flaws each time they looked the mirror. A very overweight client at the homeless shelter I teach yoga at said, “You don’t have to touch me if you don’t want to.” This one broke my heart.
But it’s not just Diet Culture picking apart our bodies. Recently, the HAES camp has gotten into the game. In May 2020, Adele posted a birthday picture of herself to Instagram, and it was clear that she had lost a bunch of weight. Immediately HAES zealots criticized her weight loss. People were “hurt” and “disappointed” in her smaller size (as if she owed them her body). They wrote that celebrating her weight loss was akin to saying that there was something wrong with her before. [3]
Later, Adele would explain–though why should she have to?—that she had been going through a challenging time, and that exercise helped her deal with it. That it was never so much about shrinking, as about getting strong, both physically and mentally. [4] And that is something to celebrate.
The social media backlash against both Jillian and Adele struck me. How what started out as a desire to make the world better–through wellness or body acceptance—could be twisted into making it worse. I wanted to probe that.
Once I finished BODIES TO DIE FOR and started talking about it, so many people told me their own Diet Culture horror stories. Fat or thin, young or old, we’ve all been touched by it.
And that’s why I’ve dedicated this book to all women everywhere, and why it has the ending that it does. I truly believe that we are all sisters. That we need to quit fighting and judging each other. We are responsible for the world that we are bringing our daughters into. What sort of place do we want it to be?
Strong women lift each other up.
References
I think I was in fourth grade. Could have been third or fifth.
One Year After Her Shocking Weigh Loss, Adele Condemns The Controversy (goalcast.com)