Ditch the Diet!

Kay Steiger writes about Valerie Frankel's new book Thin Is the New Happy.

In her book, Frankel decides after decades of dieting to stop regimenting her food intake and actually deal with the emotional problems that cause her to diet in the first place—issues she has been ignoring her entire life. She stages confrontations with her mother, husband, and even a childhood enemy to figure out where the insecurities about her weight come from. Eventually, she realizes that her issues are preventing her from appreciating other important parts of life, like her two daughters.

In one experiment, she counts each time she has a negative thought about her body. She discovers it happens about 263 times in one day—that’s once every three and a half minutes. Her negative thoughts about her body surpassed her thoughts about sex, family, work, and money.

The results of Frankel’s experiment are hardly out of the ordinary. Most women today have a negative, chronic relationship with dieting and body image. A 2001 study showed that college women who diet have a much greater disparity between their perceived body image and their “ideal” body image than women who don’t diet. The misconceptions aren’t because their “ideal” body images are unrealistic; it is because they have unrealistic ideas about how heavy they actually are. A study this year explored a behavior known as "fat talk" or intensive conversations young women engage in about food and body size that often lead to negative perceptions of their bodies.

The problem with women’s body image is widespread and difficult to solve. Sure, the way women think about their bodies is shaped by presentations in magazines and advertising, but Frankel acknowledges that many of her deepest insecurities about her weight come from the way her mother harassed her about her weight and comments her husband once made. These were the wounds that ran the deepest.

Frankel’s book first caught public attention because of a chapter in which she talks about her experiences working for the now-defunct Mademoiselle magazine. She used a toxic combination of erratic dieting and cocaine to keep her weight down to avoid shame from other staff members. In the book, she reveals the destructive culture:

At staff lunches, the girl who ate the least won. I can’t count how often editors would announce after taking three bites of a sandwich, “Oh, God, I’m absolutely stuffed. I couldn’t possibly eat another bite.” Then, in classic control-freak fashion, they’d leave the barely dented sandwich on their desk all day long like a badge of honor, as in, “Look what I didn’t eat today!” […] Weight was our world. We couldn’t escape it.

Through her work on endless dieting and weight disorder articles at Mademoiselle, Frankel discovers she is a chronic dieter, which falls under the category of anorexia. Upon making this discovery, she longs for “full-blown anorexia for, like, a month.” She talks about how she wasn’t the only one who had such drastically out-of-touch expectations:

We did an article once on what it was like to be really, really fat in America. The model we used looked huge to us, but when the issue came out, readers sent in letters complaining that the woman in the pictures wasn’t nearly fat enough. She was normal, they wrote. At Mademoiselle, we didn’t know [fat] from normal.

Mademoiselle’s staff is something of an outlier when it comes to social groups, but expectations on women to look thin are all too common. Frankel decides that only by ending her relationship with dieting can she really be happy with herself. She begins working out regularly, stops obsessing about her body image, and buys herself a new wardrobe in her new personal style, thanks to help from her former colleague and What Not to Wear co-host Stacy London. Frankel even decides to take nude photographs to end her misperceptions about her body once and for all. (She could afford having the photos taken by a professional photographer by agreeing to run the photos along with an essay she wrote for the February 2007 issue of Self magazine.) Frankel certainly leaves no stone of self-image left unturned.

Frankel’s exploration into her issues with body image and dieting are a valuable exercise, but she had the luxury to take the time to do so. Frankel is a fairly successful writer in New York; she owns an apartment in Brooklyn where she lives with her husband and two daughters. She could afford to spend $2,000 on a new wardrobe. Her job during the months she worked on her book was to work through her emotional stress over dieting. In other words, the path that Frankel took couldn’t be replicated by a working-class woman. She also largely ignores the issues men have with body image and self-confidence.

Granted, some of the chapters could have been left out, like the fairly obvious realization that baking with real butter and sugar are superior to any margarine compound or Splenda. Still, Frankel’s book is worth reading, if only to help the reader identify some habits that he or she may not even be able to identify. Some of the lessons Frankel learns are valuable to everyone: Love your body for what it is, not for what you wish it were. Stop obsessing about counting calories and start appreciating the real joys in life, like friends and family. Corny, it’s true, but her quest is heartfelt, and most could learn from Frankel’s mistakes.

In the end, Frankel’s quest to achieve emotional balance gets her down to the dress size she’s always wanted to be: a size eight. (We don’t know if she ever achieved her desired weight—she stopped weighing herself at the beginning of the book.) It took years of struggle, but Frankel finally gets what she has always wanted. A book like Frankel’s is a warning sign; hopefully young women will decide to give up dieting, “fat talk,” and negative talk now—before they spend decades on self-destructive behavior.