Dear Jessica Brennan,
Ugh. Is there anything worse or more pointless than dieting? Don’t we know this by now? Hasn’t there been more articles written about diets not working than about dieting itself? Yet, somehow we think that if we can just stop eating anything but lettuce and water we will lose weight and be fine. We know this is not sustainable, but still, in desperation we try. I think the brain loses nutrients first because many of us have been on this merry-go-round for most of our lives.
Day one: Eat lettuce, drink water, get headache, reassure ourselves.
Day two: wake up starving, eat a banana, drink water, eat lettuce, get headache, cry.
Day three: wake up with headache, cry, eat half of the lettuce, get a frosty, eat a burger, buy a bag of chips, eat chocolate, cry.
Day four: cry, drink six glasses of wine.
The industry that makes money off of our self-loathing of course is laughing all the way to the bank, while we scrape our self-esteem together and apologize for every bite of food we put in our mouth.
Would you like a roll?
Oh no, I don’t eat bread.
Can I take your order?
I’ll have the chicken parmesan without any pasta or cheese
So you want a plain chicken breast?
Yes please.
Would you like fries with that?
Heavens no!
Mashed?
No, just extra boiled brussel sprouts
The books, oh the books and the articles and the fad-diets and pills. The calorie counting, weighing, hours of reading and planning and deciding and committing. The starting and restarting, mantras and post-it notes and pictures on the fridge and the deprivation, good grief, the endless deprivation and body-shame. This alone should be enough to burn off calories.
In addition to teaching kids about body image and health, I think we should teach them about the advertising industry. Let’s have them do skits that teach them to see the comedy in a fourteen year old waif modeling clothes meant for a fifty year old woman who has birthed three children. I mean that’s funny right? Have them spot the flaws in plates of burgers and trays of pizzas being served up and consumed by the same painfully thin fourteen year old in the fast food ads. Let’s give them scholarships to college if they can figure out what’s true and explain it to their poor fifty year old mum before she jumps off a bridge because she doesn’t look fourteen in those jeans. Mum can’t teach the kids about this because mum has the googily eyes of a brainwashed victim who since age 7 has known she wasn’t quite right.
We could start a revolution of commonsense led by the children who have not yet been fully attacked by the media, and program them with the googily eyes of a generation that do not fall for the 1000 negative body images that bombard them hourly. If you look at the obesity rates, obesity is winning this particular game. Telling people they must be thin to be acceptable is only making people fatter.
I know that our kids can save us, because of something you said recently to me Dear Jessica Brennan when someone asked you about your weight and you said that a few years ago you noticed that you were putting on some pounds. “You were never overweight!”, this woman exclaimed. “Maybe not”, you said, “But I didn’t like how I looked and I realized that this was a direct result of bad choices I was making, so I changed what I was doing.”
“Oh,” I thought, light bulb going on, “Who knew?”
Love Mum xo
