The Great Fitness Experiment by Charlotte Hilton Andersen

Author:Charlotte Hilton Andersen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781578604760
Publisher: Clerisy Press
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Out of the Gym

WANT TO GET PEOPLEALL RILED UP at your next family reunion? (Nothing says family fun like family feud!) Ask them what they think of Jillian Michaels. It turns out that she—not President Clinton—is the great polarizing factor of this generation. Some people hate her, some think she’s a goddess, but rarely will you find anyone who says, “Jillian? Meh.” And like any good consumer in our culture, I began to have opinions about her too.

How She Eats

My first brush with the Jillian Phenomenon was in reading an interview on the Web site neversaydiet.com with Ali Vincent, the first woman to win The Biggest Loser. Ali gushed about working with the world’s most famous personal trainer, “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.” 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. (And if I say that enough times, one of these days I’m going to believe it, by golly.)

Several years ago when the media was all aflutter over “Pro-Ana” and “Pro-Mia” sites—a small subset of Web sites 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 were 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 Web sites. Mostly, they were not what the media portrayed them to be—i.e., fist pumping bastions of alternative lifestyles (die-styles?)—but rather collections of depressed, withdrawn, and highly competitive sick girls.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 esophagus!) 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 destroy-your-food tip.

In April of 2008 I was invited to be a guest on Fox’s morning show, The Mike and Juliette Show, to talk about how girls learn disordered eating habits.

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