Let's say you have a nice house with a deck. The floor is elevated a few feet, and a wooden lattice around the base prevents skunks from hiding underneath and stinking up the place. One day you notice the lattice has been ripped away, and a bear is slumbering under your deck. This problem strikes you as so large and imposing that, instead of making it your business to get the bear out of there no matter what it takes, you simply reject the information and hope the bear goes away.
The bear settles in. By night, she wanders the neighborhood searching for food. In the morning, your new friend is back there snoring, and scattered around the deck is evidence of bear bacchanalia: a KFC bucket, beer cans and seven scavenged dog toys. Now you have a bear under the deck plus an eyesore.
The neighbors start whispering. So you do the natural thing: While the bear sleeps, you nail sheets of wood around the base of the deck to hide the bear and her mess. You stain the wood so it looks nice and leave an opening in hopes that the bear will leave and solve your problem. Instead, you've just given her more privacy — made her more comfortable. And the longer she stays, the sloppier she gets until one day you find that you're spending a lot of time picking up bear garbage in your yard and hoping the neighbors don't file a complaint.
This image ran through my head the other day as I was thinking specifically about the problems some of us (many of us?) have had in our dysregulated relationships with food. When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, there was a single standard of beauty to which white American women were held. It had various names — Twiggy, Christie, Cheryl — but it was always tall, blond and Virginia-Slims-thin. It was a rough environment for almost anyone who didn't have a preternatural ability to reject standards set out by the media and reinforced by one's peers.
For the longest time, I fantasized that our culture would magically shift its ideas of female beauty back to the Renaissance, where thick thighs and zaftig juiciness were enviable features. Or at least acceptable. Or at least not UNACCEPTED. Or at the VERY least, not mistaken for lack of character and stupidity.
That was not the world of the 70s.
Or 80s.
Or 90s.
So those of us with Food Issues became ambidextrous. In one hand we held the whip of self-flagellation. In the other, a cupcake.
Today, our culture still prizes female beauty, but the tyranny of tall-thin-and-blonde has given way to much more democratic ideas of what can constitute physical acceptability and beauty. Today we have Lizzo. We can be large and in charge. We can own our big butts and round bellies. The practice of body shaming will never completely go away, but younger generations have correctly reframed it as just another unseemly form of prejudice. On social media, body shamers find themselves huddling outside under an awning in the rain, like the last people in the office who still smoke.
In other words, my fantasy has, in part, come true. I am an average woman living in a world that prevailingly no longer gives a shit about "thunder thighs." (Young people: Have you even heard that phrase?) I have no doubt that being fat is still a barrier to entry in some worlds; my husband and I have been streaming the law-firm drama "Suits," and I suspect that real life white shoe firms still prefer their female partners to be couture-slender, as they are on the series. But in general, social acceptance seems far less connected to being thin than it was in decades past.
And yet.
The truth is that for me, freedom from self-loathing around my body is only possible when I am facing my food-addicted brain and managing well. Self-judgment that used to be tied to what others think about how I look is instead tied to whether I'm handling the kitchen — and the space between my ears — in a way that aligns with reasonable eating and a reasonable-for-me weight.
On a given day, if I'm mainlining scone batter, I feel like Jaba the Hutt, regardless of what I weigh. But if I successfully face down the food demons, I feel like I look great, even if I weight more than the BMI charts say I should. Even if I actually look like a late-middle-aged woman with thinning, graying hair and aging Irish skin and a sagging chin and Fred Flintstone feet. When I'm eating healthy meals and rejecting junk, I feel like one of those unreasonably handsome older women in a Prevagen commercial.
Both images are illusions, but I prefer the second. Feeling good in one's skin is what comes from treating oneself well for the sake of treating oneself well.
Everyone has their own requirement for what it takes to feel good. The requirement is less a decision, I think, than something that has been programmed into us. The issue isn't thin versus fat; it's peace versus chaos.
For me, peace requires that I get up each day and evict the bear. It doesn't matter what the neighbors think. It never did. The problem has always been that there's a bear dragging trash under my deck, and the household cannot be right as long as I ignore her. She'll keep coming back. I hope one day she'll get bored and show up less frequently, but there's no telling.
In the meantime, I get up, look her straight in the eye and tell her to scram.