Anorexic "Tips" from the Biggest Loser

Here's a diet tip for you: Eat with a bear. I bet you eat less. Just try it and see.

"She is a great example of fulfilling your destiny. She'll order dessert and take one bite and then pour the salt shaker over it. She's about living consciously."

~ Ali Vincent, first female winner of The Biggest Loser, had this to say about working with trainer Jillian Michaels*.

Setting aside for the moment my ambivalent feelings about Ms. Michaels -- I've swung all the way from hater to budding girl crush on the love spectrum -- I take issue with anyone, celebrity or otherwise, talking about "living consciously" and "fulfilling your destiny" by manipulating your food. Your food is not your consciousness nor your destiny. Do you know why? Because your body is not the sum of your consciousness nor your destiny. We are more than what we eat. We are more than what we look like.

The Anorexic's Notebook
Several years ago when the media was all aflutter over "Pro-Ana" and "Pro-Mia" sites -- a small subset of websites that enable girls in pursuing their disordered lifestyles -- many eating disorder "tips" were published in the news. For those of us who already possessed the eating disordered mindset but up until then blissfully unaware of such sites, this was like a gold mine. I'm not proud to admit it but I spent a considerable amount of time on those websites. Mostly they were not what the media claimed them to be -- i.e. fist pumping bastions of alternative lifestyles (die-styles?) -- but rather collections of depressed, withdrawn and highly competitive sick girls. Most of them (us?) didn't want to stay disordered forever. Most of us realized how much our eating disorder took from us. But all of us wanted to be thin. And so the site authors published tips and tricks for getting to that Waif Ideal.

Some tips were bizarre like the fabled and much reported "eat toilet paper because it fills you up and has no calories" one. I personally never knew anyone that did that or even said they did that although apparently it had enough cultural cache to make it on a Law & Order episode. Other tips were painful, like swallowing cups of vinegar to take away your appetite (and your esophogus!) or punching yourself in the stomach to quell pesky hunger pangs. But there were quite a few tips that actually sounded a wee bit sensible, especially to a person desperate to lose weight. My favorite of those is the Food Destroying tip.

Annihilate Your Food
When I was 15 I took an ill-advised job as a waitress for the catering department of the nearby university. Very quickly I discovered that not only was I younger and more naive (as evidenced by the fact that I did not wear a black or red bra peeking out under my white tuxedo shirt) than most of my fellow waitresses but I was also, well, chubbier. At least to my eyes. In a profession that relies heavily on being attractive to make money, the svelte sylphs I worked with soon became my idols. I watched those girls very carefully to see how they maintained their figures.

They destroyed their food.

Sometimes that entailed drowning it in an incompatible or extreme flavor like salad dressing on cheesecake, raw horseradish layered on creme brulee or even, like Jillian, the contents of the salt shaker poured out over 50$/plate prime rib. Other times it meant "accidentally" spilling cleaning fluid on the leftover butterflake rolls or over squirting dish soap into a chafing dish of hollondaise sauce. The entire goal was to make your plate of food as unappealing as possible. We didn't hide it. In fact, it became a game. The mealtime sport was who could eat the least dinner (and drink the most Diet Coke!) at dinner time.

Back to the Present
And so it is with much trepidation that I read this diet tip from the famed trainer-to-the-hoi-polloi. Not only do I take issue with the blatant wastefulness of the gesture -- "Look! I can afford to pay 7.95$ for a decadent piece of gourmet restaurant cake and I am so wealthy that I can afford to take one bite and then render the rest inedible." -- but I am also offended by what this says about our bodies. To me, this displays an inherent distrust of your body. It makes it so that you treat your body as if it were an enemy to be conquered, subdued, or tricked rather than what it is -- your ultimate partner in your health and well-being.

If all Jillian really wants is one bite of cake, then why not instruct her server to only bring her one bite of cake? (Oh, they'll do it! Especially if she's still paying full price for it.) Or why doesn't she split the piece with the whole table? Everyone gets a bite. Instead she perpetuates a method of disordered eating that, frankly, is a very slippery slope. What's next? Eating food out of the garbage can that you threw away in an attempt to make it inedible?

Food is a gift. It is not something to be feared or demonized but rather to be eaten with joy and thanksgiving. Take it from someone who has eaten food out of the garbage.

So what do you all think? Does living in an super-size world call for extreme dieting methods? Or does this sound insane to anyone else?

*Note: Not having any first hand knowledge of Jillian Michael's eating habits and never having seen the show (I'm still not watching TV), I do not know if Ali Vincent's allegation is true.

Comments

[dimelaverdad]

I am 5'9 and at my lowest was around 100-110lbs. When I was at that weight, I did not see anything that resembled the person everyone else saw. I have a few associates that were anorexic as I was that have become personal trainers. They very well could still be anorexic, I think it's very similar to alcoholism in that, you're always recovering.

I'm much more healthy today than I was back then but it is hard, your relationship with food changes completely.

[chroma601]

I do not understand why women see any form of weight as "bad". Up till the early 20th century, the ideal of feminine beauty was fleshy. Look and Renoir and Reubens and other painters back to the Renaissance and you will see classic female beauty. Only recently has society decreed that skinny is beauty, and it's an abomination.

I'd bet that you were not "chubby" at all, but those waitresses were very skinny. I for one would not have seen them as remotely attractive. Different strokes for different folks. No matter your shape, there is someone out there who will appreciate the way you look.

[Marioli]

People want so much and need so much. And that scares them to death. Their world ends when they eat too much, and it breaks their heart every time. They only think they control their body but in truth they are afraid of it, of themselves, and not of food.

There is so much discomfort about that process of learning to loosening the control and asking ourselves why and how we are REALLY believing these twisted things, but it´s liberating because somewhere along the way we´ll realise that food is really just food.
Of course, we will also realise that our real problem lies deep, deep, deep in ourselves and our history. That´s where the really difficult questions begin to arise.
But that´s also where the healing begins! Because those questions are already the first answers we need!

[rini]

Personally, I think that dieting causes food obsession (a survival instinct) and often, eating disorders. I don't think eating disorders would be as common if obesity were not so prevalent.

We need to really call the junk food industry out on the carpet for advertising to kids and for purposely permeating every moment of our lives with junk food. Something is wrong when a diabetic has to pass by a row of candy on their way to get their insulin at the pharmacy.

Whether we want to admit it or not, I think our bizarre food environment affects us all, just in different ways.

[cyranorox]

An anorexic believes she is fat, in plain contradiction to reality. I comprehend that.

What puzzles me is the further, never-discussed delusion: being fat is very very importantly terrible. The anorexic cannot, as many women eventually do, shrug, eat and exercise reasonably, and forget the issue.

So the root delusion is the belief in the overwhelming awfulness of being fat. It goes without discussion, because it is a sharpening and concentration of the commonly held view. A cured anorexic must be able to say, 'yes, I look fat; so what?'. Health is not this weight or that weight, but resolution of insane ideas about weight.

[Charlotte Hilton Andersen - Huffpost Blogger]

I can honestly say I have never thought of anorexia that way. Very astute observation. I don't know that I necessarily agree with your conclusion of what a "cured" anorexic (is there such a thing?) must be able to say as I rather think healing comes from not looking at yourself as fat or thin... just as your body. But your last sentence is wonderfully true! Thank you.

[cyranorox]

Thank you, I am pleased to have made contact on this issue. If I am right, and I see no reason to doubt it, most therapy is misdirected. A good therapy would be based on accepting the false image of fatness, as a persistent error of minor importance. The tug of I-am-fat, no-you're-not, which must underlie the more sophisticated speech acts of therapy, is futile.
Better would be: "so this is fat [she isn't]. Not too bad. I will decide the valence of being fat from the rest of my experience, such as physical ability and the reactions of others to my person" .

Why then is this attitude impossible?

[wendix]

Thank you.

[Charlotte Hilton Andersen - Huffpost Blogger]

You're welcome.

[sarahvaz]

I think you make an interesting point, but that it may be an oversimplification. I think that just as there are people who would exhibit this behavior as part of a larger problem with body image or a clinical disorder, there are also a significant number of people who do not have eating disorders or body issues that still might have issues with portion control. I think the consciousness aspect being talked about is really being present in the moment and realizing that binge eating or consistently overeating is self-destructive as well. While I would stop short of reccomending that kind of treatment of food on a regular basis, it certainly can remind us that one form of loving ones body is making "conscious" decisions based on the knowledge that we can be abusive through deprivation OR overabundance.

[Charlotte Hilton Andersen - Huffpost Blogger]

Very well reasoned, sarahvaz! I fully admit I come from an eating disordered mindset so it is good to read about the "other" side.

[cyranorox]

Not reasoned at all. First, there are people who eat too much, jargonized as portion control, who should notice their actions. fine, but not an example of thinking. Asserted that overeating can be harmful. fine. remember that we can harm ourselves by privation or excess. ok. None of this goes beyond assertion. But the issue was not eating, but responding to the image in the mirror, or the mind's eye.

My point, to which this appears to be a response [?] was that those who are not fat, but hallucinate that they are, principally suffer from a commitment to the idea that being fat is a terrible evil, to which every waking moment must be devoted, for the remedy of which every energy and resource must be spent, even unto death. This is the epitome of the general belief about fat, to a pathological degree. Seeing it so exaggerated allows us to reflect on, and criticize, the general belief. It also offers a remedy to the sufferer: adapt to the delusion, but discard the belief. Just as with the experiment with upside-down vision glasses, you can learn to work with a visual distortion in ways that make you able to deal with the world as if you saw it correctly.

If such a person cannot discard the belief, that is evidence for its being the primary pathology, and for it [fat-is-evil] to be the primary target of treatment.