Facebook's Fat Emoji

Big news in the emoticon world this past week: Facebook removed the emoticon for “feeling fat” following complaints that the emoticon and its description contribute to body image dissatisfaction.

This article in today’s NY Times describes research that explains why that is a good thing. The author,Renee Engeln, describes her research which showed that when subjects were around people who spoke negatively about their bodies, they were more likely say negative things about their own bodies and to feel worse about themselves. It’s not hard to understand: When you hear the person next to you (whose body may look perfectly fine to you) speak ill of himself or herself, you think about how much worse your body must be.

The term “feeling fat” is so much a part of our language that we often forget that we don’t really even know what it means. Usually it’s a catch-all term for “I don’t measure up to some standard I have for myself” or “I wish this were different” or “I hate some aspect of myself.”

Perhaps without fat talk, we will be encouraged to identify more clearly what we really mean and learn how to express it clearly and directly. As for the “feeling fat” emoticon itself, The Verge reports that Facebook merely re-labeled the “rosy-cheeked, bloated” emoticon as “feeling stuffed.” Only to be used on Thanksgiving.

Weight, Weight-Loss and Self-Acceptance

I recently read a moving memoir that taught me a lot about weight, weight-loss and self-acceptance.  In It was Me all Along, Andie Mitchell describes how food became such an integral part of her life and how she coped with her stressful family life. “That girl version of me learned that I shouldn’t experience discomfort. That whenever I start to feel even one inkling of boredom, doubt, anxiety, or anger, food would soothe me. At least temporarily.”  Food became the way for her to cope with the discomfort of an alcoholic father and a mother who worked so hard she was rarely present.  By 16, she weighed 210 pounds, had been on and off of many diets and was a practiced secretive eater.

When she finally lost weight, what helped her? After reaching a high weight of 268 at age 19, she began to consider its impact on her health in addition to her appearance. She started with the gym—thirty minutes on the elliptical—and went with a supportive friend. She focused on the present: “Can you exercise today, Andie? Not tomorrow, not the next day, not even a month from now. Today? Eat the best you can, work your plus-sized heart out….today?” She tried to eat healthfully, which was okay during the day, but torture at night, the time she had been used to eating to numb her feelings. Eventually, she moved to Weight Watchers and found the structure of the point system and the consistent self-monitoring to be motivating. She accepted that it would be hard: “Oh, it’s just going to suck for awhile.”

What else? She developed “an arsenal of ways to distract myself, if only to narrowly escape a binge.” Here are a few: writing in a journal when flagging, calling a friend and talking about something unrelated to weight, losing herself in movies (without snacks), spending more time in nature. A semester abroad in Italy helped her start to appreciate and savor food.

But while losing weight helped her feel better about the way she looked, she still felt like "the fat girl."  "I looked into the mirror and loved what I saw so completely that all I wanted was to snap a picture of the girl within the frame…Without that mirror, without any way of physically seeing my own form in plain sight, I still believed myself to be the fat girl. My mind and eyes were in opposition.” Moreover, she did not feel like the happy thin self she had expected she would become. Instead, she felt anxious, sad, isolated and preoccupied with food. Finally, she went to a nutritionist and a therapist who helped her learn to see how she had been using food for comfort and soothing. She also learned to be more accepting of her appetite and less fearful of losing control.

I’m summarizing the book and perhaps making her painful process sound too easy and linear.  It took a tremendous amount of work and commitment to make the changes that led to her weight loss. But beyond those behavioral changes, it took work and attention to her attitudes about food, her feelings about herself, and the role that food played in her life for her to feel that the way that she felt on the inside and the way she looked on the outside were in sync.

New Year's Resolutions: Focusing on What's Important

In the new year, people often think about self-improvement and new year’s resolutions — losing a few pounds, for example. But though people have the best of intentions, these goals can send them in the wrong direction.

In this past Sunday’s New York Times, Pico Iyer wrote a piece — “Healthy Body, Unhealthy Mind” — touching on this very issue. Iyer writes about his efforts starting in his fifties to wean himself off of Big Macs and start to exercise. He admits, however, that he was ignoring what he took in emotionally. While he wasn’t gorging on calories, he was “gobbling down” a junk-food mental diet of useless information and gossip.

Iyer labels himself an “externalist,” or someone, he says, who “will dwell at length on everything he can see, in order to distract himself from the fact that it’s everything he can’t see on which his well-being depends….He interprets health in terms of his body weight, wealth in terms of his bank account and success in terms of his business card.”

So many of us work hard not to define ourselves solely by these external markers. Indeed, many people find themselves in therapy when they feel they are not measuring up on these counts. Weight and bank balances fluctuate — it’s risky to rely on them as measures of self-esteem. Part of the work in therapy involves helping someone find value in less concrete areas. With weight in particular, it can be tempting to focus on a number — a calorie count, a carbohydrate gram, a scale number — but when the number doesn’t go your way, it can be devastating. It helps to widen one’s lens beyond the concrete.

Orthorexia--when Healthy Eating is Taken to an Extreme

My grandfather’s mantra was “everything in moderation.” He drank a small scotch at 5 o’clock six days a week and lived to be 95.

There’s a growing problem in the US with the concept of moderation when it comes to eating and drinking—but not in the way you might guess. This issue isn’t always with people eating too much of food deemed unhealthy, explains Sumathi Reddy in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal; the problem is with people being overly restrictive in the foods they will eat. The condition she describes is orthorexia nervosa, an unofficial term for when the effort to eat healthy or “clean” becomes extreme and obsessive, affecting either physical health (through weight loss or malnutrition) or mental health (anxiety or avoidance).

What may start out as health-promoting—becoming a vegetarian, going gluten-free or avoiding processed foods—can devolve into something very unhealthy. The condition, says one professional familiar with it, is more akin to an obsessive-compulsive disorder than it is to anorexia nervosa, the eating disorder characterized by overly strict limits on any type of food.

How can you tell if you’ve gone too far? It can be difficult to distinguish between healthy planning and obsessional avoidance. One way is paying attention to how much anxiety you feel. A red flag is when someone's eating habits makes him or her avoid social engagements, according to Marjorie Nolan Cohn, a dietitian quoted in the article.

If you are sacrificing your social life because your need to maintain your diet seems more important, then it may be time to ease up. Similarly, look at how much time you are spending thinking about and preparing food. If other important interests and commitments are getting pushed aside, that may be a signal that you’ve gone overboard.

Saying No to Body Shaming

In a recent New Yorker piece, Lizzie Widdicombe writes about the plus-sized fashion industry, describing how plus-sized women (size 14 and up) have felt stigmatized and marginalized by the types of fashions available for them. Some women have circumvented this, and there are now companies out there producing fashionable clothes in larger sizes.

In the article, she writes that the views we typically hold about weight and fat are recent, developing since the industrial revolution. Around that time, clothing became mass produced, so people started needing to fit their clothes, rather than the other way around.

In addition, fat had previously signaled affluence. Once that ceased and thinness signaled affluence, we started to devalue fat and weight. The author quotes Madeline Jones, the editor of the online magazine Plus- Model: “People become plus size for all sorts of reasons, not all of which involve lifestyle choices. And it’s not clear that shaming people—or requiring them to wear muumuus—is an effective weight loss tool.”

This is certainly true: fat shaming is hardly conducive to weight-loss.  

From Drugs to Diet

To really change behavior is a very difficult task. I was reminded of this reading a story this week about increasing attention paid to diet and wellness within addiction programs.

Traditionally, programs designed to treat alcoholism and drug addiction have focused only on helping people withdraw from the problematic substance. Diet hasn't been a worry, as Abby Ellin explains in her New York Times piece. In fact, sweets and snacks are typically available to ease the adjustment.

The experience can be similar with people who are trying to stop smoking. When people give up the comfort of their tobacco habit, it's easy for them to seek relief by eating more. There are so many things we can use to soothe and comfort ourselves, and they all have their downsides, though to a varying degree.

For some people in addiction treatment, Ellin explains, the process leads to an overreliance on foods with high fat and high sugar content. Now, few people would argue that eating poorly is more damaging than cocaine addiction, but weight gain can still cause problems if it becomes an obstacle to maintaining abstinence. The issue also highlights the importance in addiction programs of addressing multiple aspects of a person’s life: self-care, life skills--a varied arsenal of strategies to manage distress.

Ending Fat Talk

A recent post on the Motherlode blog describes a summer camp’s effort to ban not only “fat talk,” but any talk about appearance. “Fat talk” refers to the almost automatic way people (often but not always women and girls) comment on their bodies. It’s a stream of “I know I shouldn’t eat this, but” “Does this make me look fat?” and “I hate my body part.” It also extends to comments on others’ bodies, as in “You look like you gained/lost weight.” It’s such a pervasive part of conversation that you almost don’t notice it.

For myself, I have tried to disengage from fat talk. I have heard enough from others about how uncomfortable it makes them to have their weight commented on, whether those comments are positive or negative. When it’s negative, it’s pretty straightforward why it’s troubling. When it’s positive, it can make you wonder what people have been thinking all those other times they didn’t say anything about how you look.

However, this camp is taking it a step further and trying to eliminate any commenting on any aspect of a person’s appearance. In place of saying, “You look nice,” they encourage “I feel happy to be around you.”

I imagine it feels a little forced for campers. At the same time, it brings a helpful focus on how much of our thoughts and conversation are tied up with weight and appearance.

It is almost reflexive to think about appearance. I think about it when I see babies. Research has shown that we are more likely to comment on a baby girl’s looks and a baby boy’s strength and ability. I always try to remember that and think of something else to comment on with a baby girl. It’s an extra cognitive step, because it is so ingrained to think about beauty.

I applaud this camp for at least trying to address this issue. It gives campers a summer to think about what else there is to notice about people other than the way they look. Perhaps they can carry it with them the rest of the year.