A Mind’s Cure for the Body

By Emily A. Backus

Part I: Cultural Pathogens

For a few years in the late 1970’s, when I was growing up in Southern California, the most idolized female of the moment was a television star named Farrah Fawcett. Her giant white grin, fantastic tan, thick blond mane and full breasts radiated nonchalant sex appeal from a poster that sold 20 million copies and landed her film and television roles that plunked her at the center of popular attention. Her cascade of thick, feathered locks became the must-have hairdo of girls and women between the ages of 10 and 35. Since most of us did not enjoy the copious, undulating hair needed for a curtain of breaking waves, thin, limp bangs were frequently tortured into a flip and sprayed stiffly into place with the help of blow dryers and curling irons.

I can not say whether Fawcett needed a curling iron, too, but she stood out as an icon of female success. She was the original blond angel in the wildly popular television series Charlie’s Angels, in which three hot babe detectives took orders from the disembodied voice of their mysterious boss, Charlie. She was also married to an alpha male hunk, the television actor Lee Major, who starred as a clever, agile, bionic hero in The Six Million Dollar Man. Fawcett was emblematic of a configuration of beauty, glamor, and fame that kindled aspiration and despair in my generation, an idea of a woman we all wished to be, at least physically, even if we also had dreams of professional careers and motherhood. There were other famed beauties, of course, like Cheryl Tiegs (another feathered hair wonder), Cheryl Ladd (Fawcett’s successor on Charlie’s Angels), Christie Brinkley, Kim Alexis, Brooke Shields and so on. With few exceptions, they resembled each other enough to form a blueprint. The vast majority were white. Most were blond. A few were brunettes. Iman was Somali, but the rest had acquired tans. All were thin and tall, with big, beautiful teeth, small noses, chiseled cheekbones, narrow hips and long legs.

The website BodyMeasurements.org claims Fawcett’s rare and enviable top-heavy hourglass shape boasted a 36-inch bust, 24-inch waist, and 35-inch hips. But by actress and supermodel standards, she might have been considered short and voluptuous, weighing 135 pounds and standing 5 ft 7 inches. This sounds heavier to me than her body measurements or photos would indicate, but to get an idea of her body mass compared to regular mortals, I imagine we would need to chip off some pounds to account for her generous breasts. I am also relying on a dubious looking website, and the truth is more likely to have been variable, since I know no one whose body remains utterly static.

Whatever her actual weight and measurements may have been, she and other successful actresses usually echo a Barbie doll hourglass ideal, while models take slim and tall to extremes. A website called ModelingWisdom advises aspiring models, “Height is typically between 5’9″-6’, bust is between 32″-36″, waist is between 22”-26”, and hips should be between 33”-35”.” Reed-thin figures with large breasts, narrow hips, even tans, slim noses, bee-stung lips, perfect teeth and long legs – an extraordinarily rare genetic configuration – have become a widespread cultural yardstick for beauty on which almost every woman in the world comes up short, and one that has been perpetuated for decades.

Even if we accept our congenital nonconformities, most of us nevertheless would like to achieve some version of the glamorous shapes and faces that beckon us from advertisements, movies, music videos and television shows. We also want to look good in a “decent” standard size, however we define that (usually a couple of notches below what we currently wear). And it does not necessarily help to point out that beauty ideals are culturally and historically conditioned.

Some generations ago, the sexiest women in the West were generously curvy all over. Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Sofia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, early photographic erotica and any photo of bathing beauties before the late 1960s reveal a reverence for flesh. Before I readjusted my mind, I thought all these seductive ladies looked fat; and I am sure that much of the West still does. Meanwhile, women in Ghana chug appetite stimulants to gain weight, and Mauritanians send young women to be force fed on “fat farms” – a curious inversion of what we Westerners mean by the term.

Collective dreams have ways of pushing and pulling beauty ideals to unnatural distortions of what we are. When a culture does this, when it reinforces a value that undermines the mental and physical health of real people, it is a pathogenic meme. I like the term “meme” coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 evolutionary biology classic, The Selfish Gene, because it connotes a disinterested bit of code, like DNA, hellbent on reproduction regardless of the consequences. I hope one day that we all view unnaturally gaunt bodies, injected lips and artificially augmented body parts as repellent as most of us see the corseted wasp waist, bound feet, tribal lip plates, and necks elongated with brass rings. But for this to happen, the ecosystems of culture and commerce need to propagate hostile conditions, and our minds need to build a robust immune response.

There is hope. If one can judge from today’s pop stars and other hot celebrities, it looks as though our odd, newish norm may be beginning to cede, as some flaunt their generous behinds or refuse to allow themselves to be photoshopped to par. Some years ago, cameras began eroticizing the booties of Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, and Rihanna, as Italy and Spain outlawed hiring bone-thin models with a BMI under 18. The catwalk bans were meant to protect beautiful young women from systematic malnourishment and anorexia, but also ensured that a somewhat healthier ideal might possibly be broadcast from runway shows. The editor of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, sent a letter to major designers in 2009 protesting the itsy-bitsy sample dresses provided for photo shoots that required models with “jutting bones” to squeeze into them. Shulman’s protest triggered a tide of indignant articles in favor of flesh and plus-sized beauty in the fashion and lifestyle press. American designer Christian Siriano has since found it commercially beneficial to mix plus-sized models – and garments – into his runway lineup. J Crew employed its staff and their friends to model at the September 2016 New York Fashion Week. H&M’s fall advertising campaign featured a wide range of “normal” women, from a septuagenarian to a trans woman. Shulman herself did put out an issue of British Vogue featuring powerful and influential women instead of models. However, such countercultural responses still fall short of endemic, since they still make the news.

Males should cheer any sign of the erosion of the skinny beauty ideal, as they seem to prefer more generous dimensions – and a broader range of dimensions – than their female counterparts are conditioned to believe. Surveys consistently find that males, given an array of torso images to peruse, tend to express attraction toward women with bodies sized 12 to 14. Women may wish to be a size 2, but sirens of old still sway libidos, at least on a statistical basis in studies conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy and Brazil. An exception was France, where the largest group of men showed more interest in what we popularly think of as normal body mass, not ideally thin.

It is also worth noting that there is a significant distribution of preferences across a range of body types, so the voluptuous do not by any means hold a monopoly on physical attraction. For example, a 2015 survey of 2000 men in the United Kingdom found that the majority of respondents, or 61.2% of them, were drawn to parts of the distribution curve other than bodies sized 12-14. It’s just that the relatively curvy ladies drew the interest of the largest single group, or 38.8%, in the study conducted by the online dating site Badoo. And no study of this kind accounts for the added impact of personality, intelligence, creativity, loyalty, shared values, culture, habits, humor, competence, aesthetics, education and a myriad of other factors that feed into real life attraction.

The lesson I take from this can be verified on the street. If I ever feel a crack in my body confidence, all I have to do is look around on the sidewalk or in the grocery store or wherever, and see that real human beings find other human beings of all shapes and sizes to be attractive. Pairings and families prove the point quite eloquently. Commercial beauty and cultural ideals of beauty do not seem to be a prerequisite for finding love, nor for being a great person, nor for accomplishing marvelous things or living a wonderful life. Commercial and “ideal” beauty do not begin to touch the diversity of empirical beauty, or what kindles real people in the real world. I garden logical inferences from this, cultivating an appreciation of human beauty in all of its manifestations, both inner and outer. (I mention the latter, because I grew up in a subculture that outwardly negated the importance of exterior appearances. Progressive, liberated, substantive women were not supposed to care about being attractive as only interiors mattered. It was masochistic and repressive stance for most under its spell, since physical appearance is an important form of self-expression and affirmation, sexual and otherwise. Whether we like it or not, outward appearance is, to some extent, a window into our interior state of being. We can also choose to embrace the fact that people respond to the messages conveyed by our appearance, or suffer the consequences of ignoring this fact.)

Shulman once explained in a 2014 BBC Radio 2 interview that Vogue continues to use thin models because it is “a magazine that’s about fantasy to some extent, and dreams, and an escape from real life. People don’t want to buy a magazine like Vogue to see what they see when they look in a mirror. They can do that for free.” Shulman’s stance was squarely in line with legendary fashion trendsetter Diana Vreeland, a petite, exacting, brilliantly imaginative figure from the British-American upper crust who for decades, from the 1950s to the 1970s, imposed an aesthetic regime upon Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and fashion operators within her influence that aligned – consciously or not – with the ethos of female ambition expressed in Wallis Simpson’s famous quip, “You can never be too rich or too thin.” Yet media that plays to our fantasies of extreme beauty would do us all a lot of good were they to scout a broader range of outlier prototypes for us to work our imaginations upon – preferably ones where the common denominators are things like glowing health, charisma, emotional resonance and uniquely striking visual appeal.

However, the super skinny, slinky ideal continues to be cranked out by fashion magazines and elite clothing manufacturers, as well as clothing sizes too slim to fit most American women. The Center for Disease Control says that the average woman in the United States is 63.8 inches tall, 166.2 pounds and has a waist circumference of 37.5 inches – dimensions that will not fit a standard clothing size. European women generally find themselves in a similar fix, and I once received a plausible explanation why. An Italian executive for a high-end plus-sized clothing brand told me some years ago that over a certain body mass threshold, it is hard to predict the distribution of flesh. Because thin women have more predictable measurements, it is easier to mass tailor for them. Scaling out clothing designed for the slim yields ill-fitting garments for the full figured. Hence the generously proportioned are frequently condemned to a sea of unflattering choices. Not surprisingly, the former buy more clothes than the latter – perhaps because they feel better about how they look – thus many brands have had little incentive to change their ways.

This sweet-spot in the market – the one that delivers the greatest sales volume at the lowest manufacturing cost – means designers and manufacturers have a financial interest in choosing ultrathin models to market their goods. Unfortunately, a number of luxury designers who are standard bearers for the industry have also developed a strong aesthetic preference for unusually elongated bodies, and feel that people who don’t look good in their clothes shouldn’t be wearing them.

There may be a big kernel of truth to this scenario, but it is an overly simplified interpretation of affairs. Mainstream manufacturers like Banana Republic, Gap, Ann Taylor and J. Crew have practiced “vanity sizing” for years, flattering customers into thinking they are a smaller size than they really are. In addition, the industry standard itself has been adjusted several times over the decades to reflect our general anatomical drift. According to standard size charts in Wikipedia, I would have been a size 12 in the 1970, a size 8 in 2001, and a size 6 in 2011, maintaining my current and constant body measurements. Finally, there has been a rise of high-tech efforts, such as the use of body scanners on an industrial scale, to tackle the tailoring challenges of an evolved, highly diverse, global array of body types. Companies have an incentive to innovate ways to better serve clothing markets because the proportion of people belonging to the sweet-spot has shrunk to historic lows and are bombarded with choices. Moreover, a single set of standard sizes can not address the array of body dimensions that emerge with different ethnicities and geographical regions. For example, garments tailored to big, tall, northern European clientele will not work for petite populations in Asia. Bottoms, bosoms, waists and limb lengths are more generous among some ethnicities, less so among others. Big markets in diverse, cosmopolitan cities complicate matters for manufacturers.

I hope market necessities will whip up effective antidotes to mono-crop Western beauty ideals, but won’t bet on it. Our models, actresses and other beautiful celebrities generally remain unusually lithe; major luxury designers continue to model towering sylphs on their live-streamed runway shows; and “cool” mainstream brands, like Abercrombie & Fitch and Tommy Hilfiger, prefer to keep hyper-lean bodies in their erotic advertising, and clothes on their racks and e-commerce sites that would fit such bodies.

Even if we are immune to yearning for a fashionable wardrobe or model looks, and instead seek to winnow down for health reasons, many of us still fall into a trap set by the weight-watcher mentality. We are prey to nonfat yogurts, sugar-free sodas, no-sugar-added chocolate bars, protein breakfast shakes, Weight Watcher meals and any number of “diet” foods that make up a multi-billion dollar diet industry. Whether seeking to be hotter, healthier, or otherwise improved, we can be sucked into a whirlpool of concern about measurements, progress or relapse – and with that, a host of emotionally-driven behaviors that ignore the body’s natural, physical feedback mechanisms. It is very easy to remain “fat” inside one’s head even when thin or normal to the eyes of others. And it is easy to end up truly fat and very frustrated, with no respite in sight, as diets seldom work. Our bodies have set points, and screwing around with a body’s natural controls often slows the metabolism, so that a return to normal eating can create a new, fatter set point. We also have real nutritional needs, so that avoiding categories or quantities of food may trigger severe cravings, disease, and other negative collateral effects. Weight loss or weight maintenance can become a psycho-emotional purgatory that consumes an inordinate amount of mental energy only to fuel greater insecurities about one’s body and, potentially, physical damage. Based on my own story, I wouldn’t be surprised if one day weight loss diets are chucked in medicine’s bin of unfortunate cures along with blood-letting to balance bodily humours.

Part II: A Personal Cure

Like many of my fellow females, I suffered for years from pining self-torture and insecurity induced by Western beauty ideals. From girlhood through my teenage years, attaining a perfect body loomed as a bottleneck to happiness. I thought it crucial to become as Fawcett-like as possible to render myself popular, attractive to guys, and successful in all things. My reasoning did not follow rational logic, nor was it built on the sound footing of real world experience or the wisdom of elders. It was, instead, an expression of ardent faith in a fairy-tale narrative that I gleaned from Grimm, Disney, preteen novels, film and television that scripted a shimmering path to Destiny. I was a miserable, ugly duckling who would emerge as a glorious swan to bask in glamour and greatness. I was a Cinderella dressed in rags and generally ignored who would be lifted from my miserable condition by a handsome prince to an adoring spotlight. I was a downtrodden dancer who would fulfill her dreams in Flashdance or Fame. When I achieved my own Fawcett-inspired beauty, the chasm between how I was perceived and how I wanted to be perceived would close, because I was, and had to be, secretly exceptional despite a pronounced sense of inadequacy. What I failed to understand was that the chasm in my self-confidence stemmed from the difference between who I was and who I wanted to be – a pain-inducing tautology – and the brass ring of my ideal form could not exist and was not even coherent. Thus it buzzed like a circular saw against my psyche along with its opportunistic beauty pathogen.

I envied females who did map to my beauty ideals, and there were plenty of them in my environment – on the beach, at school, on television and in film – while I was fat. I grew plump around kindergarten. My girth continued to outpace standard sizes throughout elementary school, and far faster than pediatric recommendations. I loathed the polyester stretch pants my mother had me wear. I think she truly believed them to be attractive, but I have a hunch that expedience may have colored her aesthetic judgement, since she did not have to sew up hems. They had elastic waistbands, which meant they puckered high, where I itched to look slimmer, and hugged the bottom and thighs I would have preferred to tent. (Those pants may have saved me from an exotic illness, however, since I was attacked by a monkey on a family trip to Africa. The animal plunged his fangs into stretch polyester instead of my lower calf.)

As a child, I did not follow a diet per se. Instead, I cultivated a routine of binging and feeling guilty, of filching treats, sugar cubes and seconds or thirds on dessert, and then feeling just awful about myself. I had an excellent role model for this behavior at home since my mother – a beautiful soul in very important ways – was an overweight, compulsive, emotional eater. She kept stashes of snacks in the cupboards that ranged from wheat thins to chocolate chip cookies, and she took recourse to them, along with cups of tea, to buoy her through bouts of inertia, anxiety, and unhappiness.

On the other hand, my mother’s energetic efforts to be healthy, vanquish her own demons, and cultivate wholesome eating habits for her children placed her on the vanguard of nutrition research at the time. We ate seeds, nuts, sprouts, seaweed and whole wheat avocado sandwiches. We avoided artificial colouring, additives and processed foods. I did not touch Coca-Cola or a Ding Dong until I was 18 – after my first sips of wine. My mother kept abreast of research on carcinogens and filled our plates with nutrients from natural food sources, offering iodine-laden nori as snacks and spooning steak juices to our plates for a boost of iron. And, looking back, she never fell prey to dietary extremes or odd orthodoxies, like eliminating meat, dairy or sugar. Her grocery choices were based on available nutritional knowledge, common sense, and a hearty appetite for culinary exploration.

I blame scientific research, journalism and the zeitgeist for transmitting through her that fatty, sugar-laden delectables should be viewed as temptations – a lesson reinforced by television and print ads as well as candies and snacks laid out like Halloween treats at grocery store cash registers. Culture at large placed moral virtue in abstinence and lean plates of boiled meat, steamed vegetables, and leafy greens. Advertising made diet foods seem a reasonable means of having one’s cake and eating it, too. It would have been very difficult to escape what had become America’s basic conceptual framework for eating. High-calorie treats were constant seductions, diet foods helped one lose weight, and healthy eating demanded self-discipline and willpower.

Back then, the devil was in the calories, and fat was the densest form of calories. Ergo fat – especially the saturated fat implicated in heart disease – was the devil. Sugar, white flour, pasta, baked potatoes and other simple carbs were lesser evils, as long as calorie count was kept under control. It turns out we can thank the sugar industry for preserving its relatively innocuous reputation. And it all sounds crazy today, given the orthodoxy of viewing pasta and sugar as manifestations of the incubus, and low glycemic index foods as the road to health and virtue. But diets follow fashions spearheaded by trendsetters who may or may not have our collective interests at heart. Even the low-carb fad is sold on the fundamentally faulty assumption that we know more than we really know, and can manipulate through simplistic tricks the complex processes of our bodies without adverse consequences. Weight-loss and disease prevention science may support the low carb diet, but there was plenty of research to support Pritikin’s nonfat diet, too, which seems to have been junked along with massive shoulder pads and high waisted, baggy jeans.

By now we know that diet-based weight loss generally requires unreal maintenance. The contestants from The Biggest Loser, who found themselves in fiendish weight battles after a short-lived triumph, should provide all of us fair warning. I thank my lucky stars that I never got into a real metabolic nightmare that I had to overcome. I have never been obese, clinically anorexic or treated for bulimia. Nevertheless, I did find out the hard way about the vicious cycle of the weight-watcher mentality and suffered its shackles from elementary school through my mid-20s.

When I was in sixth grade, my mother rallied to help us both lose weight by following a group diet with a support group. I don’t remember the name of the diet or its methods, except that it involved meticulous calorie counting, fat avoidance, and keeping track of our daily progress. For every pound lost, we were awarded a bag of sand of equal measure. The idea was that as the sand stacked up, we had a tangible proxy for the burden we had dropped away. It worked for me. I lost weight and became slim. My mother, on the other hand, lost some weight but gained it back. In retrospect, the diet failed both of us.

It failed my mother because it did not solve her weight problem. It failed me because I lost the weight and acquired a new problem. I now became obsessed with remaining slim. And because I did not look like a model even in my thin incarnation, I ached to sculpt myself to such perfection. I have small breasts, wide hips, a prominent nose and fairly large buttocks, so I daydreamed of plastic surgery while continuing to count calories, fat, and sugar. By high school, I had perfected my self-control. My meals were parsimonious. When I got hungry between them, I ate cucumbers or drank coffee to kill my appetite. I also danced vigorously, taking ballet, aerobics, and jazz, sometimes all at once. I whittled myself down to 116-118 pounds at a half inch taller than Farrah Fawcett. And I still had wide hips. I became so thin that my menstruation cycle stopped. My body registered that I was starving, and so suspended my capacity to bring another mouth into the world.

When I relaxed the reins on my eating, I quickly ballooned. I did not become grossly overweight, but rather a big girl (in my mind) at around 130 to 135 pounds. I beat myself up regularly over my indulgences, yet was inordinately drawn to them and as well as to the mirror, which always provided bad news. My body mass was within a normal range, but I still saw myself as congenitally chubby. At a certain point in college, I decided to cure myself by preparing myself to actually try modeling.

Commerce prefers lanky post-adolescent girls with a shelf-life of a number of years. Models generally range in age from 16 to 21, according to the Modeling Wisdom website. (That jibes with my limited knowledge, which comes from my brief flirtation with the job and writing about the fashion sector.) At 20 and looking very normal, I was old to start and did not have the genetic prerequisites. But with the old lure of glamour and glory in mind – and wanting it very badly – I reinstated Spartan ways. I sacrificed a great deal, going hungry and undermining my ability to concentrate on my studies. I drove my weight down to 114-116 pounds and dropped a couple of dress sizes. I also lost my period again.

Predictably, modeling that summer turned out to be a losing venture. A photographer and an agency were happy to take my money to create a portfolio and enroll me in modeling school. The agency also hired me as a receptionist but failed to find me paid work as a model. In the autumn, I went back to college and to eating normally. My meals were moderate, but to my horror I gained more weight than before. Hovering around 140 to 145 pounds, and battling insecurities on various fronts, I transitioned to bulimia. I don’t know if I ever reached truly pathological binging and purging, but perhaps any such behavior should be viewed as such.

After graduation, I had to support myself. I abandoned food waste along with my financial dependence on my parents. My eating disorder had depended on access to an all-you-can-eat buffet at the college cafeteria. Now I had to stretch a measly salary, most of which went to housing and health insurance. But my size still bothered me, and it was still somewhere north of 140. I was very much caught in dieting worry, the war with my willpower, and a depressing fixation on becoming trim. My mind rattled with self-obsessed, self-lacerating, boring, irritating, superficial nattering and complaining. If my thoughts had been a roommate, I would have moved out and cut off all contact. At 24, I evicted them.

I chose to quit my job as an underling in a video production house in New York to live for a year in Paris. I would get a student visa, take courses at the Sorbonne University and search for an internship or work in television news. At the same time, I would cease thinking about my figure. This is different from saying I wouldn’t care for my body. I would look after my body’s needs, but not give a hoot about what it did to my weight and my looks. I would get healthy by acting in healthy ways and leave the rest up to nature. This sounds easier than it was, considering that I was a young woman who cared about personal aesthetics, dating and the search for a life partner. But my heart and my head were pretty important to me and, I figured, should be to a potential suitor as well.

The question remained what eating and behaving in healthy ways actually meant. In the United States, I might have thought it implied trips to the gym every day and some sort of restrictive dietary regime, which are hard to combine with serenity and a serious work schedule. But I observed that few Parisians were overweight. Despite the wine, the rich meats, the vegetables prepared in butter, the baguettes, and fine pastries, they enjoyed enviable figures. And they did not, in general, go to the gym, or do any exercise requiring serious exertion. (A rumor among expats at the time was that Paris’s first modern gym had a 20-minute time limit for the Stairmaster. Any more than that would be considered excessive.) These generalizations were, of course, very broad, but this was my perception based on the Parisians I happened to know. It also turns out to coincide with statistics and the observation of others, yet it is – like all interpretations of complexity – also contested.

Gnawing self-denial, in fact, may be epidemic among Parisiennes – I do not know – but what is relevant to this story is what I saw, and how that shaped what I did.

I noticed that Parisians walked an awful lot, since most relied on their feet and the metro for transport. I noticed, too, that they seemed never to snack. American shops are full of treats at the register aimed at impulse purchases. I did not see any of that in Paris. In addition, eating was a social event. They had lunch or dinner together with others, be they friends, colleagues or family. Eating was not primarily utilitarian, nor did it ever seem to be driven by compulsion – to answer a craving or to take a break or to reward oneself. Enjoying the meal was essential, as it was also an aesthetic, cultural event. The focus was on quality, not quantity, and portions were moderate. One did not stuff one’s face, just as one did not get drunk. Excess was seen as vulgar and repulsive – certainly neither fun nor a common temptation. An all-you-can-eat buffet would have been as appetizing to the Parisians I knew as a steaming plate of escargot would be for most American kids.

I also observed that I was an animal, and that as an animal I had certain appetites. My body had evolved to tell me what I needed when I needed it. I knew when I was thirsty, in pain, tired or sleepy, as my body was an effective, intelligent communicator. If I gave my body what it asked for, if I did not override its signals, it was content and kept me healthy.

Taking inspiration from Paris, my animal instincts, and a yearning to enjoy my meals, I created a few simple rules for myself. The first was inspired by the idea that food is nourishment to live, so I should eat quality food when I was hungry, until I felt sated. This primary rule required that I learn to distinguish between a psychological craving (“Mmm, that looks good”) and my stomach telling me that it needed fuel. I would ignore the former and deeply respect the latter.

I later learned that making the distinction is not easy for everyone, yet it is fundamental. Modern culture subverts observing appetite in a myriad of ways, encouraging us to ignore our own physiological signals in favor of other dictates: measured portions, counted calories, nutrient ratios, schedules or emotional urges. I learned to listen very closely to my hunger and distinguish not only when I needed food, but what kinds of food my body preferred. If I felt a physical yen for meat and fat, then I would eat a roast. It would probably be accompanied by fresh vegetables or a pre-washed salad, but was likely flanked by potatoes and butter, too.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner were sacred events, but I would not start eating until I felt hunger. I avoided snacking unless famished, which insured I was always appropriately hungry at mealtimes. I would eat with company when possible, and seek out meals that I enjoyed, and promised never ever to weigh myself or take my measurements for at least a year.

I also swore off empty calories and processed foods. Every calorie had to offer real nutrients from real ingredients. I was not much of a cook and was on a very limited budget, so this meant eating an awful lot of whole grain bread, cheese, yogurt and fresh produce. But if I was truly hungry for it, I would not deny myself a slice of French fruit tart, since that had eggs, flour, fruit, butter and no industrially engineered ingredients. I did not demonize sugar, although I would not touch a soda – normal or diet – or a packaged pastry. And when a full French meal was possible, I certainly participated with gusto.

I also integrated physical movement into my lifestyle, but did not work out. Being in Paris meant that I walked a lot. It was just part of life there, since I did not own a car. I had walked a lot in New York City as well, which I am sure contained my body troubles when I was there. But in New York, I carried the mental and emotional baggage that I should be doing regular vigorous exercise, that I should be macho about it, that I should always be striving for bigger, better, more impressive physical feats. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I didn’t. I decided that for this one year, I would let go, too, of that sense of imperative. Because the guilt from not working out, or failing to perform, did me harm. It tended to send me into a cycle of self-flagellating lethargy, and added to my insecurities.

Instead, I embraced my longstanding observation that using legs as transport fundamentally improved my quality of life as well as my health, and that residents of dense urban areas suffered less excess weight than residents of places built around car use. I figured that as a species, we had walked long before we ever had driven anywhere. Regular movement has always been part of life, whereas consciously working out was a historical and cultural eccentricity. (I recently found an antique book from the early 1900s in the street market of Turin that actually sought to persuade the reader that exercise was not bad for one’s health. And although the Ancient Greeks and Romans had athletes, the idea that everyone should go to the gym is an idea only decades old.) Hope dawned on me that I didn’t have to be athletic if I just respected my body and put it to use in ways for which it was born.

I faithfully observed these rules for the year I was in Paris. It helped that I was extremely busy with full workload and social calendar. It also helped that Parisians served real food, and did not take recourse to potato chips, Cheetos, fries, candies and other items on my list of forbidden foods.

At the end of that year, when I stepped off the plane back in New York, I finally did weigh myself. I was a lean 127 pounds, which is absolutely fine for a woman who is a little shy of 5 foot 8 inches, and it meant I had lost about fifteen pounds. Permanently. My body had figured it out on its own and adjusted itself. I had found a new way of being and maintaining my weight that was healthy, normal, easy. In the 25 years that have passed since then, my only major weight gain has been due to two pregnancies – the second with twins – and restoring my normal weight was not difficult in either case.

Over the years, I have not stuck to the French regime 100 percent. I don’t always listen for the exact point of satiation, and I do occasionally indulge in things I want to eat even when I am not truly hungry for them. But my body’s set point compensates for temporary excesses, and no “indulgence” is a real temptation for me unless its flavours are truly extraordinary. I find candy or low quality food repugnant. If I go off the rails for a meal or two, I do hop right back on my normal routine of eating habitually healthy meals and letting my hunger steer appetite. I can’t help this behavior, because eating in an unhealthy manner makes me feel physically sick or bloated.

I have also learned to avoid stress if I can. I endure crushing deadlines, inflexible work schedules, emotionally taxing relationships, sleep deprivation and large doses of tedium as little as I can get away with. I am not irresponsible. But I have noticed that the more exhausted I am, emotionally or physically, or the weaker my sense of control over my life, the more unhappy I am. These feelings are often accompanied by the urge to snack or indulge to excess in some way. I have read about studies that have found evidence of a relationship between lack of sleep and food cravings. The idea is that if you feel drained, you eat in an effort to restore energy. This sounds reasonable and coincides with personal experience, but too narrow. I believe that an unhealthy impulse to eat is often the symptom of some greater hunger – be it for sleep, love, life control, exercise, life balance, fulfillment, meaning – that triggers appetites stemming from an urge to escape.

“Healthy” eating is, I think, somewhat individual, and probably far more flexible than we think. Having said this, I am glad that I have experimented with my own eating habits, removing this item or integrating that. I do listen to the latest theories from various schools, such as the Paleo diet and integrative medicine advocates. I do try out some of their suggestions, but also keep their fear-mongering, proselytizing, and marketing machines at bay by using my body’s responses as my measuring stick. Thanks to their advice, I have found some foods – especially heavy dairy and bread – create intestinal trouble for me, while others – such as seeds, nuts, beets and calve’s liver – boost my stamina. Having said this, I quickly discarded the only “detox diet” I have tried because its lack of carbohydrates induced fatigue and severe food cravings. Over time, I have developed a repertoire of meals that constitute “healthy” for me. I frequently repeat them with small variations, since healthy food usually takes more preparation, effort, time and money than the unhealthy sort.

In addition, I have become a more avid exerciser, and run regularly. This is not because I have changed my fundamental attitude about exercise. I am not interested in “personal bests” or becoming the fittest middle-aged person on earth. I run because it makes me feel better and does wonders for my day. It keeps my metabolism, immune system and energy levels revved. Nearly daily aerobic exercise – enough to make me sweat – is a fantastic antidepressant. In fact, the best cure I have ever found for a bout of bad mood is just rigorously tending to health basics for 24 to 48 hours: solid sleep, extremely healthy eating and a good run.

As for my body image, I would be lying if I said that I never dislike my own looks and never feel a pang of envy toward gorgeous women. But I am a fundamentally different person internally. More often than not, I just appreciate beauty in others. And instead of harping inside on how imperfect I am, I harness my own physical characteristics to express my aesthetics and to project a message of my choosing. Commercial images of beauty are often counterproductive for me, since I, like every individual, am unique; and the messages that fashion professionals convey have little to do with what I want people to perceive about me. For example, I would rather be seen as elegant, trustworthy and kind than edgy or sexually available, so you will never see me in a steel-studded leather micro-mini skirt with wild hair and raccoon eyes. And I’ll tell you a secret that I did not figure out until recently. Good looks for most people comes from making themselves mentally and physically healthier: good habits, self-maintenance, grooming and a visual, tactile sense of style.

I have also built an emotional rampart against those who seek to shape my dreams and channel them into revenue. I view professionally beautiful women as being at my service. Models are human sales pitches, hired to sell things to me. I assess whether I like the message, and usually dismiss it as a distraction, like junk in my email box. But since they are often sophisticated compositions made through the collaborative work of professional creative talents, I also look for aesthetic and cultural ideas, such as whether the combinations of colors, patterns, silhouettes, references or trends are worth noting.

When I go shopping for clothes, I do not berate myself for failing to slip into a dress or pair of pants. I am fine. Unflattering clothes are the maker’s fault. It is a reflection of their lack of skill if they can’t make garments that fit and look good on me. They just missed a sale. I won’t accept uncomfortable tailoring either – the kind of clothes that require me to endure stiff seams, pinched parts, or potential exposure gaffs in the name of looking good. My sense of ease is as important as aesthetic appeal.

As for actresses and popstars, well, their job is to entertain me and impress me with their art. If they do their job well, I am more inclined to watch or listen to them, but do not revere them for anything beyond acting and musical talent. Beauty, glamour, seduction and an adoring camera are just part of the show, and attention to them is time away from my own reality. Sometimes a little escape is nice, but often it comes at an opportunity cost. I would rather spend that time building, living, and dealing with a life I love.

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