Diet-Hater Goes On Diet
Kira Cochrane, a British writer with a column in the Guardian, hates the diet industry. And although she is “at best, reluctant about diets, and, at worst, disgusted by the very notion,” she’s going on a diet. And here is her introduction to the new column, and it is is definitely worth a read.
I’m happy to report that getting fat is actually extremely easy…I have none of those tales that crop up in binge memoirs, of chugging back vats of chips, making midnight runs to kebab shops, or digging half-eaten chocolate cakes out of the rubbish to gobble down gloriously in a single sitting. I just ate what felt normal, without thinking about it (I still had a lot of things on my mind) and, like Violet Beauregard in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I grew and grew and grew.
And you know what? I didn’t mind. In fact, as I started to escape the fug I had been in, looked down and noticed my belly, I realised that being fat was kind of cool… Most of all, being fat meant that I was suddenly cast out of that uniquely depressing dance that goes on – particularly between women – of policing each other’s weight.
I found that when you get properly, recognisably fat as an adult, you stop having to have these conversations. It’s not that people don’t say horrible things to you – like the cyclist who shouted, “Watch out, fattie!” as he careened through a red light and almost ran me down. That happens, sure. But the moment when I said to a friend, “God, I’m so fat,” and she looked me up and down, pity drenching her eyes, and replied, “Yeah, but your skin looks really good,” was the moment I realised that I had been exiled from that exhausting diet-talk loop. I felt depressed by my friend’s answer for about five seconds, before I realised what it meant: I was free!
…[T]here are a lot of people out there like me. People who feel that they should lose weight, but have done so before and seen it all go back on, and then some. People who feel that the diet industry is a vast conspiracy, predicated on failure – after all, if any diet actually worked the whole billion-dollar baby would go bust…
In writing about my experiences, I won’t be including updates on lost kilos (I don’t weigh myself). I won’t be providing fabulous tips for reducing the size of your behind (what do I know? I just plan to eat less and exercise more). I won’t be declaring that Rosemary Conley was right when she said, “Nothing tastes as good as being slim feels!” (Clearly impossible, as ice cream exists.) I won’t be providing endless portions of self-loathing, as I don’t hate myself – or anyone else – for being fat.
I know some people might feel pissed off that she’s trying to lose weight. But I see where she’s coming from; she seems to be pretty balanced and awesome about it all. There’s a whole lot of bullshit that she seems aware of and unwilling to buy into. And she’s so pretty and funny! And I… kind of want to be best friends with Kira Cochrane. I’ll definitely be reading her column.
Thanks to Annie for the link!
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Filed under: International, Magazines, Media, Weight Loss
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I kind of want her to be my best friend, too.
I like this excerpt, but I frankly just can’t wrap my head around it. If you know that you’re fat when you eat normally, you kind of like it, and you hate diets, why go on a diet? If you eat enough now, why eat less? If by “diet” you mean “not actually deliberate weight loss, just eating more nutritious food and paying attention to satiety,” why call it a diet?
The only cogent reason I can see is that she believes that she can’t be active when she’s fat, which is a total myth. A column about going from being a sedentary fattie to an active fattie — that I’d totally read and respect. But a column whose premise is “I don’t want to go on a diet, I hate diets, my food intake is normal, I associate dieting with misery… but I’m going on a diet anyway”? That reads to me like either a craven paycheck grab or a major missed opportunity. Probably both.
Also, I think this was my favorite quote in the article:
“I can understand why women often don’t feel that they or their abilities are really valued, and try to assert whatever small slice of power they can through drawing attention to their body by denigrating it. I understand it, and I don’t blame anyone who does it, and I have done it myself, but I also really hate it. It is boring. It is tiring. It is sad.”
Fillyjonk, I think she provides quite a reasonable rationale for trying to lose weight, which is that she feels physically sluggish at her current weight and that historically, she has been more active when she was leaner. I can personally relate to this, as I also find exercise to be more enjoyable when I am at a lighter weight. That’s not to say that exercise can’t be enjoyable for anyone of any size, but if the feeling of your body dragging you down presents an impediment to being active, and if you see your diet has some room for improvement, as she apparently does, I think it’s entirely rational to want to make some changes.
I think maybe she could’ve chosen a different word than ‘diet’. I know that I am currently striving to eat better, which means more veggies and prepared meals because seriously, grabbing the first food stuff that doesn’t require heating or silverware is not the best strategy for life. Perhaps she is taking a similar approach? I’m pretty interested to see how this works for her.
I’d chalk this one up to cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, she’s fairly rational about fat, and capable of a good deal of smart, feminist critique of the diet industry and women’s self-criticism and policing of weight.
But on the other hand, she evinces a fair amount of ignorance and uncertainty, being unable to really believe that genetics plays a role in weight, and she discusses her family’s medical history with a familiar refrain of, “Fat = Death.” Likewise, her fears about the size of her ass suggest a belief that, if she has become fatter, that process is infinite, without end, a future of ever-increasing fatness. Yet we know from what she’s saying that she isn’t binging, and we know that, really, people don’t get fatter and fatter until they pop. Her anxiety about that is related to her inability to really parse the idea of a setpoint, so of course she sees her fatness as a slide into ever increasing levels of fatness.
Likewise, she says that she doesn’t hate herself, yet she compares herself to a hippo (a dehumanizing gesture–and one that’s a cliche, like the whale, for excessively fat).
Her beliefs about exercise suggest that she’s convinced that she needs to become thinner in order to exercise, which is nonsense. Her description of carrying her own body fat as like carrying around strap-on weights makes no sense at all, as, if that were a true analogy, she could just exercise without the strap-on weights and not have to work as hard to work out.
I hesitate to call this outright hypocrisy, but her writing does show the extent to which otherwise intelligent women who are on the road to FA and HAES can still be intimidated into doubting their reasoning skills, their bodies, and their experience to the point of embracing stereotypes and publicly undermining everything they’ve ever said against fat hatred.
While I understand why some fat women would be upset that a beautiful, talented, and intelligent woman wants to go on a diet, even though she hates the term and doesn’t hate herself for being fat, I think it’s important to realize that she’s a human being. And, we’re not really rational beings. Our choices are made by integrating in a host of responses other than logic. She does a good job of describing how she feels carrying around extra weight and is probably somewhat torn over her new diet. If she feels sluggish and wants more energy, then changing the way she eats to jumpstart that lost energy is a good idea. I’m glad she has a column; in the coming weeks and months we can read for ourselves whether or not she is going about it all in a healthy manner. If she has a large body of support to help her along the way, it will probably be easier for her to make good decisions on how much she should lose.
I find it disappointing, simply because we all know that the likelyhood is she will gain the weight back. If she was originally eating normally, but got fat by doing so, there is something going on that a diet isn’t going to fix. Very sad. The diet is likely to make it worse.
I’m not much of a dieter. I got off of that rollercoaster a bunch of years ago. All I try to do is be more active and be aware of what I eat. I’m not really changing my eating habits except to eat a bit less on occasion (for example, I used to overeat when I went out to eat – to the point of being miserably full. Now I stop when I’m full and take the rest home to warm up the next day). Have I lost a bunch of weight? Nope. I’ve lost a bit, but not enough to really make a difference. Do I feel better? Yep.
There’s a big difference between dieting and trying to live more healthily. The first is focusing on weight loss, the second is focusing on being healthy regardless of weight. I tossed out my scale a few years ago, and I don’t miss it a bit.
I am curious…a couple of you have characterized the author’s prior eating habits as “normal.” By that, do you just mean that she doesn’t binge eat? Because it sounds to me like she feels her own eating is not so “normal” when she says things like “I kept happily eating – bread, butter, brie, ice cream.” Those are, of course, all things that can be eaten as part of a healthy diet, but they are also highly caloric and highly palatable foods that most of us have to consciously curb our intake of in order to avoid excessive weight gain. So personally, I would say that it is “normal” to eat ice cream, but not “normal” or desirable to eat as much ice cream as you would like whenever you like. But of course, I also appreciate that everyone has a different concept of “normal.”
Red Flags:
“…getting fat is actually extremely easy. Given the right combination of food, drink and inactivity, you can put on 4st in four months…”
Who can easily gain weight? That depends on genetics, metabolism, and a million other biological factors that are not equal in everybody.
“(My motto has always been “Go big, or go home”, and I can’t see that changing.)”
Except that it just did didn’t it?
“The trouble is that, for me, being overweight isn’t conducive to activity…was always active until I got fat.”
Hello, me 6 years ago. You are WRONG. Activity didn’t get hard because you got fat. Activity got hard because you let fat be a convenient excuse not to move because other people wouldn’t want to see you and it would be HARD. Dieting only made it harder, love. Know what makes activity easier? DOING IT!
Fat or thin, being active is HARD at first. It’s hard to overcome entropy. The only effective way to do it is to find something you ENJOY and DO IT.
“Carrying this much fat around with me though, I just don’t have their resolve, their will to work it. My weight makes me feel sluggish in the most literal sense of the word.”
Oh, so you’re the special exception to the rule. Here’s a free clue: stop making excuses and DO IT.
“A lot of people, then, who know that they have to lose weight, but approach the project with ambivalence.”
Perhaps because losing weight will not make them magically more active. The only thing that will make a person more active is, well, BEING more active.
Sorry, she’s no different than Queen Latifah, Oprah, or anyone else who has ever said “my problem is my weight” instead of “my problem is my attitude about my weight (and physical activity.)” What’s worse is that she completely undermines everything we say in Fat Acceptance by saying that it doesn’t apply to her.
If she’s really afraid of dying young and feels uncomfortable in her own skin, there are far more healthy ways of dealing with those issues than DIETING. Dieting is not a shortcut to health, confidence, happiness or anything else. It is a hindrance. If you write, “I warn you: there will be grumpiness,” you’re already off to bad start.
It’s perfectly normal to eat bread, butter, and ice cream (not brie, but only because it’s gross). People with a history of restriction and a troubled relationship with food eat these things excessively, but people who eat them when they want them eat them when they want them. I eat ice cream whenever the hell I want, and I can’t even remember the last time I had some (I guess it was a couple months ago when I had a sore throat? Damn, that hit the spot, too). Nothing “abnormal” about those foods.
I don’t agree that you have to have a troubled relationship with food to want more ice cream than you ought to have. And I think that small children are a testament to that! Our bodies adapted over hundreds of thousands of years to withstand starvation by giving us a preference for sugary and fatty foods. And now that we live in a society where our consumption is not limited by our circumstances, those drives don’t serve us quite as well.
“…now that we live in a society where our consumption is not limited by our circumstances, those drives don’t serve us quite as well…”
Those drives serve us as well as they always have. What doesn’t serve us well is the way dieting keeps us locked in a pattern of starvation so that those drives are always at work trying to stop us from starving.
I kind of took her point to be that if she wants a cookie she’s going to have it and actually enjoy it, just as she’s now enjoying no longer having to obsess over her weight (or whether her friends are obsessing over it, either), but that she still intends to work at being more healthy.
And I respect her for that.
““The trouble is that, for me, being overweight isn’t conducive to activity…was always active until I got fat.”
Hello, me 6 years ago. You are WRONG. Activity didn’t get hard because you got fat. Activity got hard because you let fat be a convenient excuse not to move because other people wouldn’t want to see you and it would be HARD. Dieting only made it harder, love. Know what makes activity easier? DOING IT!”
I totally disagree with you on this one. Physical activity IS hard when you’re fat. Carrying an extra 15, 20 or 100 pounds on your body is going to make moving that body the way you did when you were thin more difficult. Your personal experience may differ from mine, but being fat now makes it VERY difficult for me to do the things I did when I was thin such as running, biking or hiking up steep trails. Once the weight is all off and I am lugging less fat around with me, running, biking and hiking will be much easier!
This is the telling part for me a period of weight loss preceeding a period of weight gain.
I think this is also part of the reason why she may feel activity is difficult, depression can leave a lot of baggage and doesn’t heal tidily and in order.
I don’t think of her as a hypocrit or a sell-out. She’s just a woman, a human being. And human beings are full of conflicting ideas and notions. I’m fat, and I’m on my way to accepting the fact, and I feel more comfortable in my skin than I ever have (though I still have my bad days), but I have to admit that if I were given the chance to fit comfortably in an airplane seat again, I would take it. I already eat a fairly balanced diet, and I exercise several times a week, and I’m still fat. But if I thought that there were something I could do to decrease my girth that was healthy and that would actually permanently work, I can’t say I wouldn’t do it.
What this woman is doing may not be permanent and it may not work for her, and if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t, and she will have learned that. But doesn’t she deserve the right to try to feel comfortable in her own body by whatever means she deems fit? She isn’t saying she’s going to go on a starvation diet or some othre extreme. She doesn’t even believe in weighing herself. I don’t think we have the right to judge her motives. Every person who comes to self acceptance comes to it in their own unique way, traveling their own unique path.
I wish her happiness.
If she likes the way she is, then why is she changing herself?
An addition: I was rereading my post and I think I come off as sounding pretty pro-diet. Which I am not. I just believe that all people have to come to terms with themselves and their bodies in their own time and their own way, and no one has any right to judge them for it.
lisa-marie- you are right that everyone’s experiences are different. Personally, I have been fat my whole life, so have no idea what exercise feels like when thin. I hike, bike, backpack, and rock climb, and they are just fun for me. When I started those activities, of course they were difficult (but it is a rare person, thin or fat, who goes on belay and just tears ass up a rock) but after a while, they become easy. And being heavy is fun on a bike, especially on downhills when gravity helps you beat all your friends to the end :)
there was no time “when I was thin”, and I don’t consider my weight to be all that “extra” either…it is just my body.
Hmm, I found that I wasn’t as fit when I was at my thinnest. Also, I wasn’t really that fit when I ballooned up to my heaviest weight. However, when I made being fit, and NOT weight loss my goal, surprise! I suddenly found out that my body could do a shit load more than I ever believed it was capable of doing. If, for any reason, Kira Cochaine wants to change her eating habits/exercise habits, then she should by all means do so. Maybe her body is telling her she’s gone beyond a comfortable weight. We don’t know what her body wants, but she does.
I like this woman.
I don’t expect perfection of thought from people. She’s just a person, trying to maintain a healthy and balanced outlook on life. And trying to moderate her behaviors when it comes to food and physical activity. I’m thinking that it is unfortunate that the “D-word” was used, but given the headlines, it was meant to be an attention grabber.
I don’t think of what is being done as a “sell-out” or really even a diet. She’s doing what she is doing because she knows she had been making unhealthy choices (for any size) and wants to get a little energy going. I just think it gets called a diet because really, what else would we think to call it? If you see someone eating better and being more active, I bet you most people would call it a diet even though the person doing it may just think of it as living healthier (whether it results in weight loss, weight gain or stability) For example I started going to the gym a little more than a year ago. I’ve since -gained- 35lbs, but I’ll tell you I can move it so much better than ever before!
It really does sound as though this woman has absorbed the message that you can’t exercise or move well when you’re fat. Maybe the once-slender find that activity can feel different if you have more body fat, but I don’t see why that should necessarily stop you. You just find new ways of doing things. (Says me, the big fat newly-addicted-to-yoga person. Sure, if I lost 100lbs, I could do some postures as textbook, but I can do them right now with teacher-approved modifications and props. And get all the benefit without having to force myself thinner.)
I hesitate to call this outright hypocrisy, but her writing does show the extent to which otherwise intelligent women who are on the road to FA and HAES can still be intimidated into doubting their reasoning skills, their bodies, and their experience to the point of embracing stereotypes and publicly undermining everything they’ve ever said against fat hatred.
Nail, hammer, yep. I’m sure I went through a similar thought process to this several times during the course of my own journey to self-acceptance. I’d like to think she’ll make it in the end – if only because she knows dieting and weight obsession are fundamentally unhealthy and a total waste of time.
And La Wade, you know what I find makes people yearn for more ice cream than they “ought” to be eating? Dieting.
Eh, it’s a weird, complicated area for a lot of us. I have, in the last six months or so, consciously stopped “dieting” and focused more on eating and exercising in ways that leave me feeling good. In a lot of ways, I feel better about myself because I’m rejecting the inherently self-hating idea that my body is wrong, and that I have to fix the wrongness by eating less than I want (or depriving myself of what I want) or exercising more than I enjoy.
At the same time…I’m bigger than I was six months ago, too. Not dramatically, but noticeably. And while I am stronger, because I love Pilates and now take lessons twice a week, I do, in fact, feel a little more sluggish in a bigger body much of the time. I feel…you know, heavier. Moving around in the course of the day felt better for -me- when I was lighter.
Where that puts me, I don’t know. I’m sticking with the intuitive eating thing for now, and warmer weather will allow me to walk for exercise again without feeling like it’s punishment, and maybe that additional exercise will make the difference in terms of feeling lighter on my feet regardless of weight.
But it’s pretty easy to be damn conflicted on all this, and I just can’t fault her for it or think of her as a hypocrite. Maybe her efforts won’t work in the long term, and maybe that’s how she’ll get to accepting her own fat — but we all have to get there our own way, if that’s where we’re going, you know?
this reminds me of True Life on MTV. a woman gained weight on purpose in order to build confidence and was reluctant to lose it. She ballooned into 300 lbs. Then went to her doctor and the doctor recommended she lose weight to avoid diabetes.
Im kind of laughing AT me because after I read all your insightful commenters I think: DANG I have NOTHING new to add.
so I wont.
Linking to you tomorrow in my linklove.
been blogging for years BUT just now trying a new fitness venture so Im not sure what the trackback stuff is etc….just thought Id let you know.
C.
Via Big Fat Deal, I found an interesting column intro on the Guardian about Kira Cochrane…
I think it’s her own personal choice, and she can go lose weight if she thinks she can. It’s not like she’s yelling a fat people to lose weight; she basically said that fat can work for some people, but she’s not comfortable with it. We don’t yell at people for dying their hair a different color. And maybe she called eating healthier a ‘diet’. Whenever I plan on making a change in my eating habits (hmm, I think I’ll eat more carrots!) I call it a diet, even if it technically might not be.
>If she likes the way she is, then why is she >changing herself?
Well, I can’t speak for her, but I didn’t have to dislike myself to decide to eat better and hopefully lose some weight. I liked myself just fine forty pounds heavier, but I started having issues with high cholesterol in my late twenties, I have a family history of diabetes on both sides, (and it seems to be confined to heavier family members), and I was stressed out by work and life in general. A lot of that was due to lack of exercise and not making any “me” time.
My health and general quality of life improved in lots of ways thanks to the improved eating/weight loss/improved exercise habits. I’m guessing each of those three things played a role.
I’m no fan of the “diet industry” myself, and I was awfully, awfully skeptical about becoming a member of a particular weight loss group, since I was already losing weight, exercising and eating somewhat better on my own, but I let a friend talk me into it. Luckily, that turned out to be a good situation and it worked out well for me. I learned a lot and I’m sure I did better in the long run than if I had kept going on my own.
And if I really wanted a cookie, I ate a cookie. I was fine with previously being a size 12/14, if it weren’t for the associated health problems it seemed to cause for me. I think things mostly worked out because I didn’t think I was a bad person for eating a cookie and I didn’t have some magical pants size/scale reading in mind.
I guess what I did was a “diet”, but only in the sense that I changed my regular eating/exercising habits and eventually tracked what I was eating. Not so much the “diet = starvation and deprivation and eating prepackaged diet doodlybobs” sense. I didn’t really do prepackaged diet doodlybobs. And, truth be told, I eat/ate much more, volume-wise, than I did when I was heavier.
I reckon “diet” can mean anything from “more fruit, less cheese” to “starving myself”, depending on who is doing the defining. The word “diet” has got the different connotations like whoa.