by Celeste Montaño
Last time I had dinner with a friend, she laughed as I set down my food. “You’re so funny,” she told me, but didn’t elaborate. I smiled uncertainly. Seeing that I didn’t get it, she gestured to what I was eating. “The mac & cheese, the fries, the soda… it’s all so unhealthy.”
I looked down at my tray, completely taken aback. Healthiness—or lack thereof—hadn’t even crossed my mind when I picked out my food; I’d just chosen stuff that looked good. I laughed off her comment, but it gave me a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. It made me uneasy that she took note of what I was eating. I don’t pay attention to other people’s food, and it never occurred to me that they might pay attention to mine.
But as I’ve made new friendships in the past few months, I’ve started thinking about food more than usual, and I’ve become more conscious of what I choose at the dining hall. With my new friends, a lot of conversations revolve around weight—how much they’ve gained since starting school, or how often they go to the gym so that they can shed that weight. Sometimes I see them hesitate before picking up a plate. Sometimes they bargain with one another: “I’ll get the pizza if you get the fries.”
I don’t join these conversations. I don’t want to encourage their insecurities, nor do I want to share my own. Sometimes I want to burst out that we should be empowering ourselves, that there’s nothing wrong with being fat anyway, that keeping us worried about being thin is how corporations sell products, and that if you want dessert, you shouldn’t deny yourself that happiness.
But I’m pretty sure they’ve heard it before. We all know that “everyone’s beautiful in their own way” and that “what matters is on the inside.” And while it’s true, reminding people of that fact doesn’t make their insecurities magically fade away. My words are meaningless against 20 years of being told that how much we matter is defined by our appearance.
I feel bad for sitting in silence during weight-related conversations because it feels like it encourages my friends to worry more. I find myself in a dilemma, because I wonder whether being a good friend means going on my feminist rant, reminding them that they’re great just the way they are, and pointing out that an extreme concern with thinness isn’t healthy.
On the other hand, I also think that being a good friend means being supportive and a good listener while others vent. I don’t want to dismiss everything my friends are feeling; their preoccupation with losing weight might be harmful, but their insecurities are still very real. I know there’s comfort in knowing that you’re not the only one who feels self-conscious and who’s constantly worrying. I recognize the need for a place to release your worries and talk about what’s going on in life—and if feeling crappy is what’s going on in life, it feels good to let it out.
But sometimes I worry about myself. Sometimes I want to get away from their conversations instead of being a good listener. Because they’ve also started planting seeds of doubt in me–when everyone else is worrying about what they eat and how much they weigh, it’s difficult not to wonder if you should be worrying about those things as well.
Sometimes they also make comments that make me uncomfortable, like the remark about being unhealthy. But other times they’re meant as compliment, like when they tell me that I don’t eat very much (though I also get comments when I eat more than usual). It makes me uneasy that they’ve scrutinized my eating habits and that they pay more attention to what I eat than I usually do.
Although I am starting to pay attention. Before, I didn’t give much thought to whether I ate a little or a lot; I just ate until I was full. Now I have constant questions running through my head while I pick out food: is this my normal amount? Is it too much?
Ultimately, it’s not so much that I fear getting fat. It’s that I fear getting judged. I’m not trying to eat less, but I do find myself justifying what I eat to my friends. If I think I’m eating more than usual, I’ll tell them that I’m especially hungry that day. Or if I have dessert on top of a meal that wasn’t particularly healthy, I’ll apologetically mention that I’m “just really craving ice cream today.”
I always regret my excuses immediately. I don’t want to be afraid of food, and I don’t want to feel guilty after every meal. I don’t want to apologize for eating and doing what I want.
A couple of people have suggested that I find new friends, ones that don’t make me so self-conscious. But I don’t want to lose these friends, even though I do wish that our friendship were a safe space away from the toxic messages that the world throws at us. And the fact remains that many bonds, especially between women, are formed over insecurities, and in particular insecurities about weight. Even with all the time I’ve spent thinking about my friends and their preoccupation with being thinner, I remember that I was just ten years old when a friend first told me that she was trying to eat less. At the time, it seemed perfectly normal to worry about weight. Now it seems terribly young. Since then, several of my friends have had eating disorders. And it’s starting to hit me that this pattern is not new in my life—it’s been happening forever.
I understand the desire not to be judged, but this writer just totally doesn’t get it. Being grossly overweight is not okay. We have a MAJOR obesity epidemic in this country, and it has nothing to do with appearances or shallow things like looks. The proportion of people with Type 2 diabetes (which is caused by bad food choices) is growing quickly. Heart disease, stroke and cancer (all related to food choices) are also way too common. Food is supposed to nourish our bodies. When we fill our bodies with good tasting but nutritionally devoid crap we will suffer. It’s a self-destructive behavior. The last thing any responsible person should be doing is telling others that it doesn’t matter what you eat because it does. It’s hugely important. We need to have these conversations with our friends and family in a loving way and we should expect people who care about us to do the same.
No, *you* do not get it. Unless and until someone asks you to be their diet buddy, and asks you to help them stay in line, how they eat is just exactly none of your business. The one *possible* exception–and this would take a lot of sensitivity and a genuine crisis situation–would be if you thought your friend was bulimic or anorexic, and endangering her immediate health. Like, that she might be in the hospital before final exams. See how that works? She’s not your responsibility. You are not her mother. You have 99 problems, and your bestie’s carbloading isn’t one of them.
Well said, Molly. Thank you.
So it’s ok to talk to your friend if she’s too thin, but not if she’s too fat? Obesity is also very unhealthy. If we should be intervening for anorexia, we should also be intervening for obesity.
It’s funny how most people start food shaming and weight shaming *long before* someone’s actually in danger of being unhealthy (“overweight” is actually the healthiest band of the dreaded BMI charts, something most people don’t know; they read “normal” and assume that’s what’s healthiest because “over” that weight must be bad, it’s all very badly labeled). It’s often got far, far more to do with looks, and research has shown that shaming people who actually do have a too-much-food/fat problem actually makes it worse. The concept that fat people don’t know they’re fat and need to be told is such a mind-blowing fallacy I don’t even know where to begin.
On the flip side, people with anorexia or bulimia often have to look like skeletons before anyone thinks to say anything, and already a lot of irreversible damage has been done to their organs. They *don’t* think they have a problem because “skinny is good” and people are reluctant to bring it up even if they see the abnormal eating behaviours and not just the person’s size because they wonder if it’s any of their business. Side note: shaming this would be awful as well, but sitting down and talking to them away from the dinner table could be a good thing.
The people going “but the obesity epidemic!” almost always picture people from the extremes of media, instead of people like me who look pretty curvy (very hourglass in my case), and most people I know insist I’m not “fat”. I know that I am, actually, and that’s in large part because I’m disabled. I’m “obese” according to the BMI chart. I literally cannot exercise and the only way to be the “right” size is to stop eating anything but salad – which wouldn’t be healthy either. It would also mean denying myself my flatmate’s downright delicious cooking, which would be cruel and unusual punishment to my mind. (Ex-chefs are amazing flatmates, I highly recommend them). We eat a pretty balanced diet, but since I can’t go to the gym, and can only walk down the street on a good day, working it off isn’t the easiest thing in the world. So go ahead and judge me, tell me all the things I know and all the things I could do (that I also already know) and ignore the fact that actually despite being in the “obese” band I actually don’t fall under the more recently researched, more specific risk factors for diabetes type 2. Or any dreaded obesity risk, either. And with all your hand-wringing I bet you can’t tell me what those risk factors are.
This is a wonderful post, because it is so honest. This is not about one person having all the answers. No one will ever have all the answers and the perfect-all-the-time-flawless attitude about something as complex as body image. What is so inspiring to me about your post is how self-aware you are about all the attitudes and fears and influences going on in your head about this issue. I think the most important thing that teens need to learn (instead of algebra and chemistry) is to think critically…to not just take a message from someone else at face value without questioning it and analyzing and figuring out how it fits into their life.
If I could add my own opinion into the mix, I think the message we need to start sending people of all ages is that what matters is our health, not our image. Skinny doesn’t equal healthy. Skinny doesn’t equal unhealthy. Everyone’s got to figure out what healthy is for themselves.