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  Valerie Frankel: How Family Holidays Feed Body Image Anxiety
Reported by Huffington Post on Tuesday, 17 November 2009 (on November 17, 2009)
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In my family, we\'ve had some dramatic Thanksgivings. The year Grandma got drunk, called us \"selfish pigs,\" and then locked herself in her Caddie with a bottle of Scotch springs to mind. Even on the relatively calm holidays, however, drama ensued if only in my head. For most people, Thanksgiving is, literally and figuratively, the day to loosen your belt and relax. You spend time with your family and overeat wonderful food. For me, Thanksgiving was fraught with anxiety and dread.
See, I was the chubby kid in the house. My sister and brother were skinny, and encouraged to eat as much as they wanted. But my portions were skimpy. Like Phineas from Greek mythology, I could get close to the table laden with sumptuous food, but I was forbidden to indulge. My mom, a suburban New Jersey housewife, was obsessed with my extra pounds. When I turned eleven, she started the weekly weigh-ins, monitored my intake, yelling and screaming at me to exercise or eat less. Turkey Day was no exception. Every bite I took, her discouraging eyes were on me. Often, she\'d corner me and whisper hotly in my ear that she knew I\'d had three pigs-in-a-blanket and sneaked a spoonful of stuffing. Who did I think I was fooling, she asked, when I said I was going to the bathroom, but was really stealing into the kitchen for a sliver of pie?
You get the picture. Thanksgiving = guilt, shame, fear, self-loathing, resentment, anger--as well as torturous, unsatisfied hunger.
Mom hasn\'t dared make such comments to me since I was in high school. But the residue of feeling watched and judged stuck with me for decades. As a young adult, I would dread the holiday because I knew I couldn\'t enjoy it. The very smell of roast turkey brought on a flood of conflicted emotion. Some Thanksgivings, depending on my regime du jour--for age 11 to 41, I was either on a diet or planning the next--I\'d show up at my parents\' house with my own food in plastic bags. Or I\'d bring a food scale. Or I would eat only the turkey meat, but not the sides. If the holiday fell during a between-diets period, I\'d consciously rebel against my Mom\'s critical eye and my own desire to lose weight by gorging to the power of ten. I\'d go turkey wild. The life of a chronic dieter is one of extremes. Either you are \"on\" a diet, or \"off.\" When a chronic dieter goes \"off,\" better put a lock on the fridge. Otherwise, I\'ll be empty by morning.
Since I painstakingly confronted my bad body image and the destructiveness of chronic dieting while writing my memoir, Thin Is the New Happy, I realized the extent dieting and hating my ten extra pounds had had on my life, relationships, daily existence. Once I stopped dieting--and, instead, ate when hungry, stopped when full--could I relax around food holidays. I had my first happy Thanksgiving at age 42. Finally free from obsessing about not eating, eating too much, what I could eat, whether I was being judged for eating, I had the mental space to focus on the people, the joyous collaborative cooking and cleaning, the lively conversations. It\'s sad, how many holidays I\'d mentally absented myself from. I missed so much. Never again.
To all the women who are bracing themselves for holiday weight gain/seeing their critical mothers/breaking their diets this November 26th, I\'ve got a little advice:
1. Anticipate a five pounds of gain. Accept it as the cost of having fun--no guilt, no shame--and then resume healthy eating and exercising afterward. That way, you won\'t spiral into an \"off\' period, when a five pound gain will turn into ten.
2. If she gives you the hairy eyeball, tell you mother to mind her own business, STFU, and BTFO. When I confronted my Mom, it was tense and painful, yes, but afterwards, it felt goooood to have expressed my long bottled up feelings. She\'s a grown woman. She can handle it. And so can you.
3. Instead of worrying about breaking a diet, try breaking up with dieting. Study after study proves that diets don\'t work/make you fat. Choose to let go of an unrealistic ideal, lift your eyes up from the scale, and look into the eyes of the people who love you exactly the way you are. Oh, and one more thing . . .
4. Life is short. Have pie.
Links: Full news story
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