I recently finished reading Sarah Moss’s memoir My Good Bright Wolf. It’s a wonderful book, though not necessarily one I’d recommend to anyone triggered by eating disorder stories.
In its second half, Moss describes a horrifying midlife relapse into the anorexia she suffered as a teenager. There’s no single cause (though plenty of analysis of feminism’s questionable role in venerating mind over body). One of the things that speeds Moss along, however — a process that rouses her “half-sleeping dogs” — is intermittent fasting.
This is something with which I’m familiar, having tried it, very briefly, a couple of years ago. It’s essentially skipping meals, day in, day out, only not in the way that some stupid teenage girl might skip meals as part of some stupid teenage girl crash diet. Intermittent fasting is, as Moss learns, a properly scientific process endorsed by “the experts, all men”, whose voices she listens to on podcasts while out running:
She must fast two days in seven […] Or she could fast for sixteen hours in twenty-four, or better yet for eighteen or if she had unusually strong willpower or turned out to be unusually good at fasting, for twenty hours. There were no excuses.
No excuses, indeed.
When I experimented with this, I found that within a very short space of time — a week, perhaps — I felt increasingly anxious about spoiling all my fasting hours by consuming too much in my “eating window”. One lunchtime at work, rather than going to the gym or (god forbid) eating, I found myself touring all of the nearest supermarkets, picking up items from the shelves, reading the calorie labelling, then putting the items back again. The next day I did the same. It shocked me how swiftly I’d embraced the same behaviours I’d exhibited thirty years ago, back when I had a diagnosed eating disorder. Because of this, I stopped. Moss doesn’t.
Even though she feels hungry and dizzy and cannot concentrate on writing, the podcasts tell Moss that “the men of reason did not experience hunger”:
Their concentration improved. They became even better scientists and experts. Their fasting was not a diet … She did as they said … She made their rules her own.
Even when she is in hospital, at risk of heart failure, she worries about the sugar in the drip she is on outside of her eating window, recalling that “diet soda is forbidden during fasting hours because it raises your blood sugar level even though it has no calories, and the same applies to chewing gum … No, you may not add milk to your coffee except during your eating window. No, it is the last mouthful of dinner and not the first that must be swallowed when the eating window closes”. These are mad rules. This is obvious when the context is that of a woman who is close to death, but they are mad in any context. Nonetheless, when the podcasters recommend these rules, no one accuses them of insanity.
As anyone who has had a restrictive eating disorder will know, recovery requires a kind of selective hearing when it comes to rules relating to diet and “wellness”. It’s not that you’ve misunderstood what the “experts” were saying — it’s more that you, unlike everyone else, took them at their word. A fasting expert, piling one crazy rule on top of another, backing each up with vague references to blood sugar and “how our ancestors lived”, doesn’t really expect you to listen. He expects you to give up, and to blame yourself — your greed, your lack of willpower — rather than question the advice itself.
As for those who take things too far, well, they should have known it was all a con. Released from hospital, Moss listens to a podcast in which one intermittent fasting advocate blithely admits “it probably won’t work in the long term but nor does any diet, we all know that”. What kind of idiot forgets that? Who doesn’t know, deep down, that you’re not actually meant to take this stuff seriously? You’re just meant to try, fail and feel a little bit worse than before.
The attitude of the diet and wellness industry towards eating disorders reminds me, more broadly, of the attitude of beauty, lifestyle and fashion industries towards women who “take things too far”. Yes, we might overload you, day after day, with insane suggestions sold as “simple hacks” but don’t blame us if you take them all on board. Don’t blame us if your efforts to defeat the ageing process leave you looking like an alien; don’t blame us if following all of our household and relationship tips turns you into a miserable tradwife; don’t blame us if by striving for feminine perfection you reduce yourself to airbrushed nothingness. It is as though women are supposed to take all of the recommendations that bombard us — all of the images of ultra thin, laughing-over-salad, stressed-but-not-really, just-like-you women — seriously enough to feel we should “do something”, but not so seriously that we go getting any ideas. None of this is really for the likes of us. Try, but don’t try too hard. Try, but — unlike the starving anorexia sufferer, or the frozen, swollen cosmetic surgery addict — know when to resign yourself to failure. Don’t go embarrassing everyone by making the cruelty and stupidity of the entire system so obvious.
It’s for this reason that while I can see how annoying Netflix’s With Love, Meghan is, something in me bridles at the all-round ridiculing. To be honest, I’ve often felt the same about Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop. It’s not that I don’t see these are highly privileged, thin, beautiful women promoting a lifestyle that is completely dependent on wealth, endless time, the exploitation of others and sheer good fortune. It’s not that I don’t find it offensive to be lectured on relationships, cookery, beauty and “simple touches that make all the difference” by women who have nannies, cleaners, facialists and lots of other employees whose job titles I’ve never heard of. It’s not that I don’t see the hypocrisy in all of it. I see it, but there’s a part of me that thinks at least they’ve gone all out. At least they’ve made it obvious. And it’s not as though they made the rules. They, too, have been subjected to them.
True, Meghan is more complicit than most of us. Nonetheless, she’s also a scapegoat
People are always angriest at the women who embody all of the expectations of femininity at once. Of course these women make it look vacuous, foolish, accessible only to a tiny minority — because it is. Every news publication which has a feature denouncing With Love, Meghan — no doubt with good reason — is likely to have lifestyle pages which feed women the same “life hacks” in a more piecemeal manner, perhaps with a more deceptively feminist framing. When this stuff is fed to you slowly, and you fail bit by bit, there’s nothing to be angry about. You can tell yourself it’s just you, personally, who doesn’t make the grade. Thanks to the likes of Meghan and Gwyneth, it’s easier to see the whole picture. I’m not claiming these women set out to do us a public service. I’m just not sure that the very few women who profit from femininity inc. should be the sole target of our ire.
If we don’t want women to do stupid and/or harmful things — to starve themselves, to inject their faces with poison, to sacrifice themselves on the altar of impossible domesticity — it is not enough to point at those who take it to extremes, calling them mad (if they seem to be losing) or bad (if winning and profiting). Where’s the anger at the multi-billion dollar plastic surgery industry? Or every single company that profits from the unpaid labour of mothers and carers? There’s always been a very fine line between denouncing the having-it-all pseudo-everywoman and implying that any woman who tries to copy her is a fool who brings her suffering on herself.
True, Meghan is more complicit than most of us. Nonetheless, she’s also a scapegoat in a world where plenty of other people — plenty of them men — make money out of making “ordinary” women feel bad. If With Love, Meghan looks absurd and insane, that’s because she’s following the rules of femininity too well. As the Barbie movie’s Gloria put it, “it is literally impossible to be a woman” — or at least, it’s meant to be. No one likes a woman who refuses to admit defeat.
