• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

The Fat Girl's Guide to Life

Posted on: Thursday, 23 December 2004, 03:01 CST

The Fat Girl's Guide to Life

by Wendy Shanker.

Bloomsbury, 2004.

I really wanted to like this book. I certainly have empathy for its author, since I too started out the "fat" (though really only slightly larger than average) daughter of a 1970s calorie-obsessed mother. I too grew up to abuse myself with dieting and forced exercise before making my own roundabout way to the pursuit of self- acceptance. However, I expect the author of a book called The Fat Girl's Guide to Life to have a better take on coping with fat- hatred than I do, and unfortunately that's not the case here. A more accurate title for this book might be If I Say I Don't Care About Losing Weight, Can I Please Be Thin? While the overall contradictory, disorganized, bitter and depressing tone of this book effectively demonstrates the damage this fat-hating culture does to women's lives and personalities, Shanker's in no position to be giving advice to other fat women. The book is liberally peppered with self-deprecating references to "my big fat ass,""my big old butt,""my big wide ass." Comparing women to cars, she writes, "Models are limos, my friend, and you and I are just European trash boxes driving on a completely different highway." Shanker is relentlessly heterosexual; it doesn't seem to occur to her that there are women who don't waste a nanosecond's concern on women's magazines, the fashion industry, or men's opinions of our bodies. She spends pages describing the supposedly great friendships between "fat girls and gay guys," ("the gay boy and the fat girl seek each other out to find comfort, acceptance, and the best glitter eyeliner on the market") while lesbians rate one paragraph on page 240- wherein she reassures the reader that she's NOT one.

Shanker appears to be obsessed with exercise, describing workouts so punishing they cause her to pass out, spending over $9000 for a month at the Duke Diet & Fitness Center where she loses 2 pounds and mocks her fellow patients who aren't interested in exercising continuously. And even though she is sarcastic when a therapist suggests she might not have heard of the Atkins diet ("I'm a lifelong dieter. I'm currently fat. I see a newspaper every day. Yeah, I think that's come into my realm of awareness..."), she doesn't seem to have a clue that the rest of us have also been on the receiving end of a lifetime of guilt-mongering about physical activity. Shanker clearly hates exercise-she calls it "literally a pain in my ass." But she can't resist the temptation to lecture the rest of us about it: "But I do it. Because I have to do it. Because it's good for my heart and my health and my cholesterol and my blood pressure. Because I take responsibility for my body. Because it enables me to eat without guilt." What about just...eating without guilt?

Wondering about the constant use of the term "fat girl"? Shanker says, "Why do I call myself a fat girl instead of a fat woman? Personally, using the world 'girl' conjures up the energy of 'girl power,' aka the fun side of feminism." But in chapter 9, she criticizes the writer of a glowing article about the Victoria's secret fashion show: "...what's with all the "gals" and "gals" and "gals"? Even this guy doesn't see the models as "women." Well, what does she expect, when she herself casts feminism and women as lacking energy and being unfun? She writes about masturbation that "you aren't going to get so used to it that you'll never come with someone else. That's all malarkey so that you won't start thinking that men aren't necessary...goodness, it's some sort of femi-Nazi nightmare!" I'm not sure what this means but I doubt it's a demonstration of Shanker's commitment to feminism.

The book is full of contradictions, misinformation and problematic theories about weight and dieting which are presented either ambiguously or unfortunately as fact. She calls obesity a disease and subjects the reader to more moralizing about regular doctor visits, when it's Western medicine that's responsible for the creation of the disease of "obesity"-before the early 1900s, there was no such thing as medical treatment for being too fat. She writes, "Every day in the cafeteria [my high-school girlfriends and I would] slurp down soft-serve vanilla ice cream and chocolate-chip cookies. That was lunch. (And the government wonders why teenagers are getting fat.) Lunch didn't seem to linger on my friends' bodies the way it stuck on mine..." If these eating habits didn't make her friends fat, why does she assume that what she eats-instead of genetics, for example-is responsible for her body size, or anyone else's?

Shanker is an unashamed proponent of medications like Meridia and fen-phen, both of which have been removed from the market due to potentially fatal side effects. Nevertheless, she writes of fen- phen, "I loved the peace of mind it gave me and I'd take it again without hesitation." Of course, it's the peace of mind and not the weight loss she loves. Hmmm, isn't that reminiscent of "I buy Playboy for the articles"? What happened to her concern for her health and taking responsibility for her body? And if weight-loss drugs are so great, why does she warn us later in the book about the dangers of the herb ephedra? Just whose agenda is she supporting here?

On page 52 she writes, "Weight Watchers is math. The Zone is math. There are 3500 calories in a pound, and you have to burn 3500 calories to lose a pound." But then on page 125, she writes,

"If weight were really just the math problem most experts would have you believe, then we would be able to make a nice little loss formula for ourselves based on calories (caloric intake minus caloric output equals weight loss). However, just about anyone who has ever dieted or worked out has discovered that the formula isn't quite so clean-cut."

It isn't clear if contradictions like this are a critique of diet programs, if they're meant to demonstrate the shift in the author's thinking as she comes to terms with the failure of diets, if it's just bad editing, or whether, as the rest of the book seems to demonstrate, she's really of two minds about it all. While she gives lip service to fat acceptance and the latest medical research failing to find causal links between diet, fat, and ill health, it's clear in her less self-conscious passages that Shanker herself still believes the myths and is just waiting for the day Western medicine will come up with a pill that will help her "control" her "appetite" and successfully starve herself into a socially acceptable-and therefore "healthy"-body.

In all fairness, Shanker is dealing with a chronic illness, a difficulty I don't share, and one which I imagine would add complexity to any attempt at body acceptance. And there are some very witty passages in this book-for example, when she takes to task that annoying acquaintance or coworker we all have, you know, the one who can't shut up about her current 'eating plan.' "I have no patience for people who won't eat this and won't eat that...Three cheers for discipline, but, like, stay home and eat. When you're out and about, go with the flow, and deal with your personal eating drama behind closed doors later." She also gives the following suggestion for dealing with fat-hecklers: "Sometimes when somebody invades my body space by saying something rude to me about my weight, I tell them that fat is contagious-that I used to be a lovely slender girl, then I mocked some chubby chick and woke up fat the next day. Like something out of a Stephen King novel. That shuts 'em up real quick."

I can tell you that it is possible to be fat and happy, to eat what you want without guilt, to exercise because it feels good, to have loving relationships with family and friends and a delicious rewarding intimate life, without once noticing shoemakers' failure to provide you with appropriately-sized calf-high boots. But Shanker isn't there yet, and her position as a fashion writer probably doesn't help. I have every hope that she'll fight her way out of the paper bag of self-hate and image slavery someday, since she seems to be working in that direction. Unfortunately, she hasn't yet figured out that in order to love herself she needs to stop focusing on her appearance and start challenging the bitter sarcastic self-hating voice in her head. In the meantime, I wish she wouldn't subject the rest of us to it-our struggle is difficult enough as it is.

For real information and fat-hating myth-debunking presented in an amusing, kind and antihysterical style, read Fat! So? by Marilyn Wann. If you want a fluffy glam-laden fat-girl memoir, Camryn Manheim's Wake Up, I'm Fat! is a much better pick. The Fat Girl's Guide to Life pretends to both and achieves neither.

Copyright Off Our Backs, Inc. Nov/Dec 2004

Source: Off Our Backs

More News in this Category