Dismantling the Skinny Myths: Pt. 1

The Belly Legacy

Hi Beautiful Friends,

No other writing topic has been as challenging and caused me so much internal conflict than nutrition. Reasons for avoiding the subject seem more plentiful than healthy available food options in the US. Any investigation into the food industry turns a trip to the grocery store into an anxious outing. The sense of defeat makes it hard to even care about nutrition. Is it any surprise, then, that much of the time, we consume food impulsively and reflexively? Research shows that humans are generally unreliable food historians unless we journal or take pictures of what we eat. Regardless of nutritional content and health consequences, food choices are susceptible to numerous complex, organic, and deeply personal factors. For midlife women in particular, the graphic below by nutritionist Val Schonberg from her blog The Weight of Menopause illustrates just how fraught eating can be:

Nutrition Matters

Despite all the challenges to the discussion of nutrition, the fact remains that what we eat matters. A lot. It’s hard to write about exercise as I did in my last two posts,

These feet were made for walking

To Zone 2 or Not to Zone 2: That is the Perimenopausal Question

without writing about food. The physical demands of exercise, not to mention life in general, depend on good nutrition. It supports every aspect of well-being, and in the pursuit of greater health, nutrition cannot be ignored. In fact, there are tailored, validated nutritional approaches to help support women through perimenopause and beyond. For the most part, I remain skeptical to a lot of what I hear in this domain, but I will share those strategies I’ve found most helpful.

If I’m being totally honest, the thing that has held me back the most from writing about nutrition is that it forces me into vulnerable territory.

The Belly Legacy

I remember once attempting to place my six-year-old cheek on the soft, squishy, inviting texture of my mother’s stomach. She rejected the contact, repulsed less by me than by that part of her body that more than any other, in her mind, was unacceptably fat. Girls and women especially, grapple their whole lives with the burden of impossibly thin beauty standards and the unfeasible measures recommended to achieve them. The belly often becomes the focal point.

Growing up, I remember the stick-thin, flat-stomached women on soap operas like Young and the Restless and Bold and the Beautiful, not to mention the ladies in the commercials in between or on the covers of Vogue, Elle, and Cosmopolitan. I began regularly watching daytime television with my grandmother at the ripe old age of four. Not surprisingly, correlational studies show a significant link between exposure to television and body image disturbance. On the flipside, a recent study demonstrated that a 50% reduction in social media use led to an overall improvement in how teens and young adults felt about their weight and overall appearance.

Remember these guys? When I was in middle school in the ’90s, every living pubescent soul in the western hemisphere tuned into Beverly Hills 90210 on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. Ninety-four percent of the women on popular television - including everyone on that show - were below average weight (Exacting Beauty, p. 101.). Lack of diversity in other areas such as race jumps out in the picture above. Sabrina Strings provides strong historical evidence for the racial origins of the thinness ideal in her book Fearing the Black Body. More on this in the last post in this series.

“Fun” Facts!

When filmmakers couldn’t find exactly the look they wanted out there in the “real” world, they simply manipulated images. Above we have the poster for Pretty Woman where Julia Roberts’s head is attached to somebody else’s body.

The movie Flashdance used French dancer Marine Jahan as a body double in the dance scenes (including the iconic wet scene), yet her face remains hidden and her name is absent from the credits to maintain the illusion that it was all Jennifer Beals. In the effort to create not just a pretty woman but the “perfect” woman, this cut-and-paste technique reduces female bodies to objects valued solely for appearance on offer for the visual consumption of others. This value placement encourages internalizing the thin ideal and prioritizing the observer’s perspective, detaching a woman from her sensory, lived experience without considering the repercussions of becoming the object rather than the subject of her life. Objectification theory posits that:

“…girls and women are typically acculturated to internalize an observer's perspective as a primary view of their physical selves. This perspective on self can lead to habitual body monitoring, which, in turn, can increase women's opportunities for shame and anxiety, reduce opportunities for peak motivational states, and diminish awareness of internal bodily states. Accumulations of such experiences may help account for an array of mental health risks that disproportionately affect women: unipolar depression, sexual dysfunction, and eating disorders. Objectification theory also illuminates why changes in these mental health risks appear to occur in step with life-course changes in the female body.”

Puberty, a time of turbulent bodily and “life-course changes,” is also a time when we are most impressionable to standards of appearance. As our prefrontal cortex develops, we simultaneously become increasingly aware of cultural ideals while also more capable of overriding internal bodily states such as hunger. Unsurprisingly, then, puberty also coincides with a decrease in mental health and an increase in eating disorder symptomatology.

Midlife is another time we experience “life-course changes” that bring us into sharp contrast with societal standards. We are now bombarded by fad, restrictive diets such as Keto, cleanses, and intermittent fasting; unregulated supplements; and punishing exercise programs, none of which are ideal for health. Unfortunately, the outcome for many is disordered eating.

Comparison of Three Podcasts

According to the Huberman Lab podcast on eating disorders, anorexia is the most deadly of all mental disorders, with a death rate of 20%. He states that clinically diagnosed anorexia is ten times more likely in women (affecting up to two per cent), than in men. As always, his long podcast explicates in great detail the fascinating biological mechanisms underlying disordered eating, but his dismissal of sociocultural triggers that may in turn impact biological changes and unarguably affect mental health and certain behaviours, fails to provide the full picture of disordered eating etiology.

Huberman still did better, in my opinion, than Peter Attia in his podcast interview with a young female bodybuilder. Sitting in a sports bra, revealing an exceptionally thin and fit physique, Holly Baxter discloses that about 50% of women who compete in her elite bodybuilding competitive classes, stop menstruating. Amenorrhea is a sign that a female body lacks enough adipose tissue to support healthy endocrinology or hormone production necessary for reproduction. Baxter herself went ten years without a period. She states in the interview that her body fat is around 12% and that competitors often get down to 10%. According to Stacy Sims, 11-12% is the bare minimum to protect organs, endocrine function, and brain health, and that 20-22% is the place for optimal health.

Dr. Attia’s choice in guest to discuss recovery from a disease that seems prerequisite to competing in bodybuilding made me go “hmmm?” Even he points out that bodybuilding seems “to be the single activity that would most raise the risk of the one thing you are trying to prevent.” In fact, bodybuilding seems like a good choice for an anorexic to hide in plain sight and justify restrictive eating.

At the end of the interview, Dr. Attia asks “Are you going to be okay with aging and the changes that come with that.” Her response is that she will always lift weights for the protection that muscle mass provides, but that she is “content with the idea” that she can still be healthy at a much higher body fat percentage. That might be easy to say at age thirty-five (before perimenopause) in a body still very low in fat due to restrictive eating and extreme training. “Content with the idea” versus the feeling, sitting in a fatter body that she has spent her life manipulating through food and exercise to keep extremely lean, could be vastly different.

What I’ve found tremendously more helpful is to hear from women who are working towards finding their natural set point (weight range based on genetics, metabolism, and musculature) by addressing unhelpful thoughts and changing habits of restriction and extreme physical training to more moderate practices. On We Can Do Hard Things, forty-eight year old Glennon Doyle speaks honestly and vulnerably about facing a lifelong pattern of anorexia and bulimia as she struggles to reconnect to herself in healthier ways. The valuable insights, not just on this episode, and not just from Glennon, but from her wife, ex-soccer player Abby Wambach, her sister, Amanda, and so many brilliant guests, are hard to miss and dare I say, life-changing.

Body Image Disturbance

Beyond disordered eating, I’m much more interested in the number of women who may not reach diagnostic criteria but who are plagued, nonetheless, with body image disturbance that deeply impacts self-concept and quality of life. Based on what I see and hear, I believe that number is significantly greater than two percent. In fact, body dissatisfaction seems like an accepted, unavoidable norm of being a woman, as though one cannot truly identify as woman without a degree of self-conscious, critical commentary on her body and the bodies of others.

Work needs to be done to ensure that our daughters’ Brandy Melville generation can survive the social-media comparisons to believe that we can enjoy showing up in different shapes, sizes, and colours and that our enjoyment flourishes from fully inhabiting our sensory bodies whatever their contours and characteristics may be.

Blast from the Past

The TV commercial below came a little before my time but demonstrates the kind of nasty, patriarchal yuck baked into American consumerism. When we bring forth examples from the past, we may have to endure tiresome comments made along the lines of “but that was then,” as if we’re naive and foolish to be shocked and horrified that there was a time when women were told to prioritize the shape of their bodies for the sole purpose of pleasing her husband. (Selling the idea that drinking any product from the Coca-Cola company will help a woman maintain “a good shape” is truly diabolical. More on the corruption of the sugar industry coming up next.) Furthermore, the comment “but that was then” feels assumptive that the past, a time that in the grand arc of history was relatively recent, is magically disconnected from the present. Instead, the past plagues us with its inevitable, sometimes nauseating, and harmful remnants. “But honey, look how far we’ve come” refers to progress I just don’t see in a country where women’s bodily rights are still up for grabs. Speaking of grabs…are we really on the verge of re-electing a womanizer president who has famously bragged that he has leveraged his power to grab women “by the pussy?” Confronting past norms may reveal some progress, but more importantly it helps me understand why we are exactly where we are today. Until we do better, “but that was then” reeks of complacency and privilege, especially coming from the class of humans not directly impacted.

Wouldn’t it be great if the ludicrous messaging in this ad was the peak of insanity? I guess sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. Stay tuned…