Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

If you haven’t picked up the December issue of O Magazine, I highly recommend it for ONE article. The article is called, “The Fat Fight” and it’s on page 205 and it chronicles the story of a mother, Robin, and her daughter, Jess.

Robin Marantz Henig starts the article, telling her side of the story. She was a health and fitness writer while her daughter was growing up. When Jess was nine months old, a stranger made an off-handed comment about Robin’s baby, which turned into Robin’s obsession with making her daughter thin and acceptable in her mind. From the beginning paragraph, when Robin describes her daughter belly-dancing, she just CAN’T stop herself from demeaning her.

She wore a costume of bright blue and a gold hip scarf with jiggling coins. Her midriff – also jiggling – was bare.

She goes on to pay lip service to the dance by calling it graceful, but I can tell that the “jiggling” belly was the first thing on her mind. From the tone of Robin’s side of the story, you might think that it was all a misunderstanding on her daughter’s side, but one paragraph shows that Robin is still trying to spare her daughter the “pain” of being fat.

When she was 16, Jess sat me down one night and told me she’d been bulimic for years.

That was a VERY brave thing for Jess to do. I never did tell my grandmother about my eating disorder spawned by her desperate attempts to spare me the pain of being fat.

My first thought was she couldn’t be [bulimic], or she wouldn’t be so fat.

When I read that I KNEW with a capital “K” that poor Jess had experienced all that I had, but unlike me, she didn’t have a mother to run home to who loved her just the way she was.

When I read Jess’ side of the story, however, I learned that it was MUCH worse.

When I was 6, my mother, a journalist, wrote an article for Woman’s Day called “Kids Get Fat Because They Eat Too Much… and Other Myths About Overweight Children.” Under the main bar was a sidebar about how she’d turned me from a slightly chubby 4-year-old into a slightly less chubby 6-year-old… by feeding me less.

Let’s be honest. It wasn’t by “feeding her less.” It was by STARVING her. Just like when my grandma fed me 600 calories a day, Robin was starving her daughter because some random woman had said, “I love fat babies,” when Jess was nine months old.

This was typical. When Mom wrote about children and health, I appeared in the role of Fat Kid Saved by Diet or Exercise.

Not only was Robin mistreating her child, she wrote about it regularly for women’s magazines. The kind of magazines that my grandma read. Not only did she starve her own daughter, she recommended the similar treatment of children all over the nation. Maybe even including me.

Somehow the two of them have mended their “fractious mother-daughter relationship,” but I have no sympathy or clemency for Robin. No matter how much she thinks she has changed and accepted her daughter for the way she is, there is monster lurking in there who will never be satisfied, even if Jess were to wither away to a wisp of herself.

Believe me, I know this because I was a wisp of myself when I was 17 years old and my grandparents never accepted me. In their minds, I ALWAYS needed to lose weight. Even as an adult, when I got down to a healthy weight for my height, my grandpa never mentioned anything about my weight loss. Instead, he recommended that I go to Weight Watchers like his friend had done.

There is no satisfying beasts like Robin and my grandparents. Sure, they love us, in their way. They think that the constant negative comments about our bodies will somehow spare us pain, never realizing that the only people causing us pain about our bodies are THEM.

If you have a person like this in your life, I doubt you will ever be able to have a civil conversation about weight. Even if you think you’ve made a breakthrough with them, like Jess and Robin, know that it’s just a truce, not a victory. You will have to find someone different for support with your health and fitness because you can never depend on them to be helpful without bringing up all that pain from the past.