One of Next Question’s more personal episodes, this conversation features a very special plus one: Katie’s daughter, Carrie Monahan! Katie and Carrie, along with their guest, author Emmeline Clein, have all grappled with disordered eating at certain points in their lives. The research bears out that this is a nearly universal experience for American women, and that was a central inspiration for Clein’s new book, Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm.
So many of us know on a deep level how easy it is to be beguiled by the pressure to be thinner, that thin means “perfect”--and how hard it is to get out of that mindset because, as Clein explains, "society as a whole is 'colluding with anorectic reasoning.'" But something powerful happens when lived experience is borne out in research, data, and other types of “proof”: it becomes impossible to continue to blame the victims for what is a much more complex and insidious societal sin. That is a driving message of Clein’s book, and this episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hi everyone, I'm Kitty Kuric, and this is next question. Today.
We're exploring a topic that has a lot of relevance
to me and to my plus one today, who happens
to be my daughter. Carrying onahan, I had an eating
(00:24):
disorder when I was in my late teens and early twenties.
I was blimic. I was always on a diet. If
I deviated even slightly from what I thought were the
right foods or good foods, for example, having a piece
of gum that wasn't sugarless, I would then binge indiscriminately
(00:45):
and make myself throw up. Now there's some evidence that
this disease may be hereditary. We'll be asking our guests
about that. But Carrie, you had an eating disorder, not once,
but twice. Can you just tell us a little bit
about your experience.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
I think I was in sixth grade when I started
to feel uncomfortable in my own body. I was in
a so called early bloomer, which some people are proud
of being. I certainly was not. I really wanted to
stay a little girl, and I was very upset about
am I allowed to say. I was getting breast buds.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yes, on this pood. Yes, I think that's allowed.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
And I even remember going to a checkup, maybe in
fifth grade or maybe it was even fourth grade, and
I thought I had breast cancer because it felt hard
under my knippall and I had told maybe our babysitter,
and she said, oh, we should ask the doctor about it.
I don't know why she wasn't just like you're getting boobs. Anyways,
(01:51):
I think the onset of puberty. I think this is
very common, made me feel very ashamed of my body.
Used to say to me, Oh, it's normal to grow
out then up or something, which I did not like
to hear because I was like, well, what if I
never grow up?
Speaker 3 (02:09):
And you know whatever? And so I think in.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Sixth grade I started because I was on, you know,
consuming a lot of thin people in media, watching the
oc et cetera.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
I started to.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Diet in sixth grade.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
In sixth or maybe seventh grade, I started to lose weight,
stuff getting my period. Eighth grade, I think I had
a touch of blimia.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
And laxative use. Is this too graphic?
Speaker 4 (02:37):
Okay?
Speaker 2 (02:38):
And then ninth grade going to a co ed school
where I felt like I didn't get attention from boys.
I kind of tried to model my body after a
girl I was friends with who I think I wanted
to be or maybe want to be with.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
That's something maybe want to discuss.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
But and then it became kind of as I think
we'll talk about this addiction to the external validation. I
don't know if addiction is the right word. I think
we'll talk about that again. But and then became kind
of like an orthorexia wellness thing. And I think I'm
mostly fine now. I mean, I think about food and
my body like all the time, but I think the
(03:21):
behavior is more managed.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
And you got very very thin in high school, to
the point it was really quite scary. You were very underweight,
and do you remember how you wouldn't eat anything. I
think you were actually anorexic during that period.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
You know, I still ate.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
I just ate the same things every day, and I
was I think I must have had mercury poisoning or something,
because I ate tuna fish every single day at lunch.
And I was very afraid of gaining weight, even to
the point where being at Sleepwoy Camp, a place that
I'd love for like eight years. When I read not
being able to go back to camp, it was like
(04:03):
this dialectic in my mind, like I really want to
be thin, I'm really afraid of gaining weight, but I
also want to be normal and stop thinking about this
all the time. So yeah, of course I remember all
of that. But I think it's also important to note
that there were a lot of moments in my adolescence
or young adulthood when I wasn't necessarily thin, but I
was still struggling. And when you're not underweight, you can
(04:25):
still be having an eating disorder, and often those people
don't get the attention or care that's needed because their
body doesn't happen to be clinically underweight.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Well. Our guest today is Emmaline Kline, and Emmaline has
written a new book called dead Weight Essays on Hunger
and Harm, And in many ways it feels like the
definitive exploration of eating disorders, the cultural history, the economic triggers,
and the stories we're told and have told ourselves for decades.
(04:56):
It's both deeply personal and meticulously researched, fast eight and insightful. Emmaline,
thank you so much for coming to the podcast.
Speaker 5 (05:05):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy
to be here and talking to you guys.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Now we should mention how do you all know each other?
You have a mutual friend in Carrie's high school friend
and your college friend Matt Malone.
Speaker 5 (05:17):
Right, we have a mutual aubacity. Shout out to him.
We'd be lost without him.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Yes, Emline and I are new friends.
Speaker 5 (05:24):
But it's going really well so far.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Emmaline and I met for the first time only in
maybe late November, but we really bonded. I think over
a lot of the content of the book and Emmaline
and her book invokes her sisters often, but I do
feel like I'm part of this sisterhood with her, and
I think that's made us become fast friends.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Totally agree, Emline. So tell me. I was going to
say I devoured your book, and then I thought maybe
that's not the right verb to use. But tell me
what made you want to write this book.
Speaker 6 (06:00):
So I started struggling with my body and the way
that feeding it seemed to affect its appearance, and the
way that I was received in the world based on
my parents when I was really young, like how old,
like eleven twelve. But the first time I became severe
enough that I needed to get medical care for it
(06:21):
was in around seventh grade, so I've been thinking about that,
and then I was struggling with it on and off
through high school and college, but it was mostly at
a sort of manageable EBB. So I've been thinking about
these issues for a really long time, and I've just
always felt in my own journey to attempt to recover
that educating myself.
Speaker 5 (06:39):
About the history of these diseases.
Speaker 6 (06:41):
And finding models of other women who have been able
to recover was incredibly healing for me. But I found
that most of the books I was reading were very
siloed and limited in the range.
Speaker 5 (06:58):
Of narratives about these diseases.
Speaker 6 (07:00):
Is that we're being told often eating disorders in our
culture are discussed either through pure memoir or a self
help book or just a highly academic sort of medical book.
Speaker 5 (07:11):
And I felt like I.
Speaker 6 (07:13):
Was looking around at the world and thinking to myself, Well,
diseases that are just as demographically prevalent as eating disorders,
like opioid addiction, like alcoholism, like depression are understood as
clinical diseases, yes, but they're also understood as microcosms of
a lot of cultural and social and economic and political forces,
and looking at them that way can foster a sense
(07:35):
of solidarity among people who are suffering from them that
I think isn't often available to eating disorder sufferers who
feel that this is a very individual failing and then
a very individual journey through recovery. And so I wanted
to create a book that would give eating disorders that
sort of layered intellectual and historical treatment, while also acknowledging
that the messages girls received from a very young age
(07:57):
are coming from a lot of cultural sources like team
television shows and why fiction and stuff that is not
necessarily usually analyzed as influential as it can be on us.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Before we talk about those cultural influences, because as you
all being contemporaries, I want to kind of dive into
some of the TV shows and magazines and etc. That
really impacted you all growing up. But how widespread is
this problem? Because I think people really don't have a
full understanding of well, we'll talk about the spectrum of
(08:29):
eating disorders in a moment, but how many people are
impacted by this?
Speaker 6 (08:34):
This issue affects far more people than we generally imagine
it affecting, and not only at a fully clinical diagnosable level,
but pretty much any woman I've known in my life
has had some symptom of disordered eating over the course
of their adolescence, teenage years, and womanhood.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
Many men I know have suffered from it.
Speaker 6 (08:55):
It's hugely widespread, and I think our general understanding of
food and beauty and bodies is itself disordered, and the
prevalence of diet culture sort of creates a world in
which it's pretty much impossible not to have an eating disorder,
and the eating disorders that we think of as the
main ones, anarexi and bolimia are actually less prevalent than
(09:16):
binge eating disorder. And then on the other end of
the spectrum, eating disorders and obesity are often talked about
like totally separate, even dueling epidemics, and in fact I
think they're both sort of symptoms of our larger disordered
eating culture.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
You two have a lot in common in terms of
the shows you were consuming as teenagers. Can you all
talk a little bit about the shows and how they
impacted your sense of self and the way you looked
at your bodies?
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Yeah, I mean, I think Emmaline and I were clearly
both very enamored of Marissa Cooper on the OC played
by Misha Barton, who, as Emmaline writes about, had to
get her character killed off in order to heal herself,
the actress she later wrote about. And I think not
(10:03):
only were we consuming the same shows like Gossip Girl,
and Emmeline writes about Blair Waldorf's bulimia, which is somehow
never brought up again after one episode.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
But it's very much in the book Gossip Girl.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Yes, so from Gossip Girl to the OC, you know
all of these CW TV shows, And I think also
Emmeline and I, as contemporaries and both struggling with disordered eating,
were visiting all a lot of the same web forums,
a lot of pro anorexia websites and tumblers and looking
(10:40):
at what you know, was called the inspiration or thinspo
or there's also a reverse spo which I didn't really
know about until reading your book, which is like when
somebody gains weight like supposed to discourage you from eating,
which is really disturbing.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
So these websites and such were all ubiquitous even when
you all were like twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old.
Speaker 6 (11:01):
I think that there's actually really fascinating overlap between what
was depicted on these shows, and then the actresses in
these shows were being covered by the tabloid media, and
then both the actual shows and the tabloid imagery were
being used on these sort of inspiration forums. I think
(11:22):
often perhaps the creators of some of this media thought
they were writing cautionary tales and ended up providing.
Speaker 5 (11:28):
Role models for a lot of young girls.
Speaker 6 (11:30):
And then at the same time as you're seeing this
depicted on the show, you're seeing those same starlets being
picked apart in US Weekly every week. And then as
soon as they developed and eating disorder, likely because of
the way they were retreated in the media, you have
like them being called bad role models because they're inneraxic.
Speaker 5 (11:45):
On this cover of the same magazines.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
It was very and still is. I think it's not
as if so much has changed, but it's so many
mixed societal messages, and I thought it was interesting that
you write this book for the victims of our cultural obsession,
which turns out to be all of us. Let me
read you the following. The skinny, Sexy, sad girl silhouette
(12:09):
has haunted so many of our dreams. She hawks her
six sort of beauty, purring false promises, from just over
the horizon line, but someone stranded her at the vanishing
point where she recedes even farther into the distance. The
closer we get, and they don't want us to reach her,
because then we might save her, convince her she's been
lied to. Like the rest of us, I'm trying to
(12:32):
row a lifeboat and write a love letter and learn
to swim. I am writing this for the living girls
hiding in their bedrooms, obsessing over the dead ones, the
hungry girls and horny girls and hidden girls, the dead
girls who thought the only way they'd be remembered was
by sliding into their place, and the cannon come mausoleum
(12:54):
for all the girls who weren't wrong and all the
girls who were. It's clear to me that throughout this book,
you don't want to demonize anyone, and you wanted this
to feel like an inclusive look at this issue. It's
not like the skinny girls, the perfect girls were the
(13:15):
heroines and the girls who didn't look like them were
the victims. They're all victims. All of these women are victims.
Why did you want to make sure that you approached
it this way?
Speaker 5 (13:29):
Thank you for.
Speaker 6 (13:29):
Asking that question, because that decision was really central to
my sort of ethical considerations as I was writing this book,
because I wanted to highlight the way this very specific,
misogynistic and racist beauty standard of this extremely skinny white
girl has given so many of us eating disorders or
(13:53):
symptoms of disordered eating.
Speaker 5 (13:55):
And yet I don't think that it's her fault.
Speaker 6 (13:58):
The girl that embodies that beauty stand actually probably had
to suffer so much to a body it, and I
feel like often in the discourse around eating disorders, the
different diagnoses become hierarchical, the way that people look becomes hierarchical,
And what I wanted to do was parse out the
(14:20):
ways that we've all felt the same way, and we've
all shared this incredibly intense form of suffering, and it
actually isn't as important who was getting closer to the
beauty standard versus who wasn't able to, because we were
sharing the same pain. And I have read so many
books myself that ended up manuals or bibles or something
(14:45):
that they weren't intended to be, and so I wanted
to write something that was very clearly not instructive and
was not glamorizing that beauty ideal, and was sort of
dissecting it from inside out, while also coming from a
place compassion and sort of saying to any girl out
there who's ever hurt herself to embody that beauty standard,
(15:06):
like I have two and I completely understand that impulse.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Carrie and I both commented on how interesting it was
to really look at eating disorders in a hierarchical way,
the fact that anorexia is sort of the noble one
and bulimia I think you even described it as well.
The British Journal of Psychiatry called the disorder Anorexia's ugly
(15:32):
sister in two thousand and four. I was surprised that
an expert finally named bulimia just fifty years ago, a
pretty recent diagnosis. And then, of course there is binge
eating disorder. So it seems like you divided up into
these three categories, but people can go from one to
(15:52):
the other, and they can be kind of a mishmash.
Can you just talk about how this hierarchy was established
and is it part of our society's obsession with thinness
that we elevate people who are emaciated to a higher level.
Speaker 6 (16:12):
Yes, I mean short answer, yes, I definitely think it is.
But I think part of the reason anarexia exists at
the top of this hierarchy is because of our societal
obsession with thinness. So in the book, I really try
to look at it from a perspective, that is, looking
at the way that the hierarchy exists in the medical field,
but also how it exists in our culture. So in
movies and in books, often aner exx are depicted as
(16:35):
sort of taking the good girl archetype too far, wanting
to be too perfect, following society's rules too well. She
knows she shouldn't take up so much space, like she's.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
It's perfection on steroids exactly.
Speaker 6 (16:49):
And there's and it's this fetishization of discipline that we
also have in our culture, and of being able to
follow a lot of rules and of being able.
Speaker 5 (16:57):
To control your bodily needs.
Speaker 6 (17:00):
It's also often very much hyper intellectualized, whereas Bulimia gets
constructed as sort of the disease of the like spoiled
Brady girl, and you see that in terms of the
character and Gossip Girl, the way she's depicted in the
books and in the show, but also in medical journals,
with a medical journal calling Bolimia anarxia's ugly sister. There's
(17:21):
articles from the eighties when it was first becoming added
to the DSM and widely understood as a disease that
you were seeing in like mainstream newspapers would be saying
bolimia usually starts as after a male rejection, or like
the doctor Gerald Russell, who just who first came up
with the diagnosis, was writing things in his notes like
that anorexis and bleimix differed mainly in that beliemix were
(17:43):
often more sexually active and also fatter. So this dichotomy
has been constructed from both an academic perspective and a
psychiatric perspective and is replicated in our culture. And then
that separation serves to make beliemix suffer a lot of
shame and makes it make anerrex feel sort of superior, superior,
but also like that is not that is a very
(18:05):
shaky pedestal that you could fall off at any time,
because forty percent, I believe of people who are diagnosed
with anorexia eventually suffer binge eating disorder symptoms. And then
binge eating disorder is taken even less seriously than bolimia
and anorexia by both the medical profession and by our
society at large. It's often mocked and it's also just
much much harder to get treatment for it's much harder
(18:27):
to get your insurance to take it seriously.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
And yet it's super dangerous. You know, you talked about
people dying from binge eating disorder and the cycle of
starvation and binging and shame, and it really does kind
of take over people's lives completely.
Speaker 5 (18:47):
And there's just so much diagnostic crossover.
Speaker 6 (18:51):
There's one study I've found that was called Pride before
a Fall colon like diagnostic crossover is in Shame or
something like that, and it was interviewing people who move
between anarexia, blimia, and bingeating disorder diagnosis diagnoses. And the
shame that people feel when their diagnosis has changed from
anorexia to one of the others is just so heartbreaking.
(19:11):
And the diagnoses don't really serve much of a curate
ative purpose beyond giving insurance. And the treatment center is
a way to categorize you, to simplify, you know, charging
and how you're thinking about it. And so when so
many of our symptoms are the same and so many
binge eaters go through huge restrictive periods that truly are
(19:34):
simply narexic periods, but we just won't validate their disease
with the same name we.
Speaker 5 (19:40):
Give other people.
Speaker 6 (19:41):
How do we ever expect somebody to recover when that
when these diseases are so rooted in shame, and then
the actual diagnostic structure only often reinforces that shame.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
We have to take a quick break. Then we'll be
back with Emmeline Kleine and my favorite plus one yet
Caring Mine. If you want to get smarter every morning
with a breakdown of the news and fascinating takes on
health and wellness and pop culture, sign up for our
daily newsletter Wake Upcall by going to Katiecuric dot com.
(20:19):
We're back with Emmeline Klein m I plus one, Kerrie
Courric Monahan.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Emline to your point about people cycling through different diagnoses
or different disorders, and how dividing into different categories and
subcategories not only promotes competition, but it also is unrealistic
in that people often move between them and one often
will trigger the other. So I know that for me personally,
(20:49):
my bolimia was caused by the so called recovery from inarexia.
And I found this really interesting that in nineteen fifty five,
doctor Albert Stunkard coin the term mourning and which was
when you know, a patient would not eat all day
in pursuit of thinness or dieting. And then understandably at
twilight you write something like would follow the light of
(21:12):
the refrigerator or something and binge eat and that would
obviously cause a lot of digestive problems and like a
cycle of shame. And I think a lot of people
don't understand that binging often is the result of restriction.
I mean, Mom, I know we've talked about this before,
that when you would feel like you'd been so good
(21:33):
all day but then you you know, quote unquote messed up,
then it would lead to you eating I shouldn't say
crazy amount of food, but a lot of.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Food, or over eating or eating kind of forbidden foods.
But I think what Carrie's getting at is this whole
idea you explore in the book that diet culture, restrictive eating,
which hey, it makes people hungry, has actually led to
the prevalence of eating disorders.
Speaker 5 (22:01):
Yes, completely, And I think that was one of the
most sort.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Of aha moments.
Speaker 6 (22:05):
Yeah, well, It was just really transformative for me, even
in my own recovery, because it helped me realize the
extent to which I was upon and this wasn't an
individual failing. So we have a culture that is obsessed
with diets and selling us diets and convincing us that
diets work. Which diets we think work in a given
era are constantly changing, despite the fact that or on
(22:26):
a grand scale, like ninety five percent of diets quote
unquote fail in that people gain back the weight, whether
even if they originally lose it.
Speaker 5 (22:35):
But this is because human bodies have a.
Speaker 6 (22:38):
Set point and there is a not that large range
which your body wants to settle at.
Speaker 5 (22:45):
And so when you go on any diet.
Speaker 6 (22:49):
Whether it's extreme restriction or just a low level restriction
which often spirals into extreme restriction, your body is sort
of thinking it's in a famine right to be really
hungry after the diet is over.
Speaker 5 (23:03):
And we have seen this since literally the fifties.
Speaker 6 (23:08):
As Carrie was mentioning, there's a really interesting study that
was run by Ansel Keys called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment
that was genuinely its purpose was to investigate what was
going to happen when people who had been forced to
eat very little due to wartime rations after World War Two,
we're going to start eating normally again. So they had
(23:28):
conscientious objectors start eating half their normal calories and then
eventually start eating freely again. And they wanted to see
what would happen. And basically what happened is that before
there was even a diagnosis for binge eating disorder, these
people all developed what are very clearly the symptoms of
binge eating disorder in the wake of what was basically
forced anorexia, right, And so they were eating in huge quantities.
(23:51):
One man was hospitalized because he binged so much. And
the period in which they wanted to binge lasted much
longer than they expected, Like, it wasn't just the initial
couple weeks where they were eating food again.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
So what did this show?
Speaker 6 (24:05):
So what this showed is that pretty much anytime you
embark on a restrictive diet, your body is going to
want to overcompensate because it's afraid that that's.
Speaker 5 (24:16):
Going to happen again. Right, It has no idea.
Speaker 6 (24:18):
And so this is one of the reasons that actually
repeated dieting is correlated. And there's this obesity researcher Jranet
Tomayama who said this repeated dieting is actually correlated with
a higher weight in the end than with a lower weight,
because your set point moves up because it's trying to
avoid the famine.
Speaker 5 (24:37):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 6 (24:38):
And so basically, despite the fact that we've known that
since like the fifties, and despite the fact that also
the rations that were being given to these men to
mimic literal starvation was very similar to the calories that
were being given out at weight loss treatments.
Speaker 5 (24:55):
At the time in the fifties.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Right, it was something like sixteen hundred calories.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Yeah, I mean then it is prolong.
Speaker 6 (25:01):
Yeah, the rations were higher than what an app like
my fitness Pal was telling me to eat when I
was entering in my desired vision, right, you know. So
we have all of this information, and we also know
that weight cycling, which is when your weight changes significantly,
is hugely correlated with so many with both ending up
at a higher weight and also with a lot of
(25:23):
very dangerous things like heart disease.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Right, Like yo yo ing is supposed to be really
bad on your body.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Right.
Speaker 5 (25:29):
Weight cycling is one of the most dangerous things you
can do for your body.
Speaker 6 (25:32):
And we live in a society that's constantly telling us
to yo yo diet. I even I talk about in
the book this phenomenon on TikTok that's called hashtag last
night eating, which is when people will be like, well,
I failed. My last diet failed because I couldn't stick
to something to nourishing my body much less than what
it wanted. So now I'm going to start another one
next week. But before I do that, I'm going to
(25:53):
do a crazy feast and I'm going to film it.
And so this is a very clearly binge eating disorder
right followed by a restrictive period. And yet we're not
calling that behavior disordered. We're just calling it dieting, which
is part of what then further entrenches the epidemic of
eating disorders because people are just taking all of this
(26:16):
this messaging.
Speaker 5 (26:18):
To somewhat of an extreme right. But then because we
silo that extreme.
Speaker 6 (26:22):
Off from the rest of diet culture and we say
eating disorders are separate from diet culture, we can't see
that diet culture is what gave us the eating disorders
in the first place, and instead we try to treat
it in ways that aren't successful, in extremely medicalized ways
that refuse to engage with really much sort of politics
(26:42):
or history or feminism.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
I was interested in how you write about dieting disordered eating,
is this kind of normalizing force, especially for queer people
and for women of color. I remember this piece maybe
in The Economists last year about the biness is good
economics for women. So you write, living in a body
of color in a world that worships white beauty standards
(27:07):
can disturbingly render disordered eating in assimilationist coping strategy. So
I think that was true when writing about queer people
with eating disorders, and also black women with eating disorders.
Do you want to expand.
Speaker 6 (27:20):
Throughout my research, I found a lot of stories of
people of color and queer people who felt shame about
the way their body appeared in society. And when people
are feeling this shame and simultaneously receiving these messages about
this very slim beauty standard, then using disordered eating behaviors
(27:44):
as a mechanism to sort of bring yourself into alignment
with the normative standard can feel very alluring, and it
can feel like a genuine economic proposition. As Carrie said,
there is evidence about thinner women getting better salaries and
better promotions more quickly, et cetera. And so you see
black women and people of color suffering from these issues
(28:04):
in huge numbers, but they also are being underdiagnosed on mass,
which is part of why it took so long for
this handbook to exist, because even though large scale studies
that are just surveying people about their symptoms would find
out that black women were really suffering from this issue,
a lot of those interviews weren't with people that were
necessarily getting diagnosed explicitly and getting treatment right. It's just
(28:26):
knowing that you're having the symptomatic thoughts and behaviors. And
then when black women are diagnosed, they're often diagnosed only
with binge eating disorder because they don't always even if
they're going through an anaoxic period or suffering from bolimia,
don't always hit the BMI standard that itself was mostly
based on studies of white people's bodies, So it's just
(28:50):
very difficult to get the diagnosis if you're not in
the body that we associate with the diagnosis. And on
top of that, for low income communities, there's a lot
of widespread food scarcity that forces people to live in
a state of hunger that then when food becomes accessible,
can lead to a binge, and especially when that food
(29:11):
is highly processed food that is the cheapest food and
the most accessible food, and that food is also designed
to incite binges on top of the way that your
body also is very hungry in that state, highly processed
foods that have been shown in like MRI scans to
light up the similar opioid receptors as doing drugs. So
(29:32):
it's basically just a really perfect storm for these communities
where the messaging that people are receiving about beauty standards,
the food that is available, and the funds that exist
to access it are creating binge and restrict cycles and
also creating specific binge and restrict cycles that often lead
(29:52):
people to end up in a.
Speaker 5 (29:53):
Body that is a higher weight.
Speaker 6 (29:54):
And so then all of those people are then demonized
using the language of the obesity epidemic, when in fact
fact many of them are not suffering from obesity, but
are suffering from an eating disorder, or they're suffering from
both at the same time, and often the eating disorder
caused the obesity, and we can't actually treat that issue
effectively now because we haven't treated the underlying issue and
(30:17):
we're even refusing to acknowledge it.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
The same sort of restriction binge cycle that is so
prominent in diet culture is prominent in these underserved communities
because of food scarcity and then food abundance and kind
of going back and forth between those two extremes.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Yeah, I think this quote from Emmeline sums it up.
The food insecure, fast food consuming, fat person is perennially
cast as the problem, entrenching the lie that bodies are
built by individuals instead of systems, rather than recognizing that
food insecurity, the temporal structure of low wage workers' days,
and the addictiveness of processed foods render poor people especially
(30:57):
vulnerable to binging and obesity alive fat and poor people
are demonized, imagine to make bad choices and prefer unhealthy.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Food, and it's really the system that's setting them up
for this vicious cycle completely.
Speaker 6 (31:12):
And then to just kind of circle back a little
to the hierarchical topic we were talking about before, like
whether you're being set up to have an eating disorder
in a low income community for all the reasons we
just described, or if you're just being set up to
have an eating disorder in a completely separate environment while
watching a CWU television show. In both cases, the issue
ends up getting individualized, and then the diagnostic hierarchy makes
(31:38):
us unable to see the similarities that we just aligned
between our two positions and understand the way that our
economic system and weight loss companies and many other corporations
that make food, for example, are really profiting off of
the eating disorder epidemic and the obesity epidemic alike, and
(32:01):
the way that the two end up motoring each other
and revving each other up is really just making a
lot of these issues get worse and worse.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
They're sort of symbiotic in a way.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
And the investors themselves in you know, these weight loss apps,
whether it's my Fitness Pal, I don't know if that's
one of them, but the investors who are funding the
weight loss apps or even you know, Wagovy and ozempic
are also funding I'm not sure if it's for profit
(32:32):
eating disorder centers, but certainly the treatments and the apps
and so neither really has an interest.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
In solving the problem.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Solving that problem because often the person using my fitness Pal.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
Maybe this wasn't one of the apps, and none.
Speaker 5 (32:48):
Of those is it.
Speaker 6 (32:49):
It's like the person, so the person using a weight
Watchers app or my fitness Pal app often might end
up getting an eating disorder and then receiving treatment at
a center that, unbeknownst to them, invested in a weight
loss app. The example I used in the book is
(33:10):
I think Noom because that's just one of many apps
that has sort of shared investors between both, Like they're
investing in the treatment center and they're also investing in
the weight loss app, and so it's creating this sort
of cycle, which I don't even think is a conspiracy
on the part of the investors. But it's just that
this is so entrenched, and we're so our society is
(33:31):
so unwilling to see what you said, Katie about the
fact that the society has the eating disorder, that we're
still deluding ourselves into believing that the weight loss industry
can exist in the way it exists now without creating
eating disorders. So we want to believe that a weight
loss app could exist, and so could a eating disorder
treatment app, and that those two things could have nothing
(33:51):
to do with each other.
Speaker 5 (33:52):
But that just isn't the world we live in.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
I want to ask about solutions in a moment, but
before I do, I want to ask you about the
mas messages we're getting right now. You know, it seems
like we were getting real traction in this body positivity
movement that people come in all different shapes and sizes.
You know, some people are tall and willowy and some
(34:14):
people just aren't. Like you know, you have ectomorphs and
mesomorphs and endomorphs. I think I'm a mesomorph morph. Oh,
those are different body types like no, no, no, not
so much fruit, but like just you're naturally tall and thin,
or you're very muscular, or you're heavier, right, I mean this,
maybe those things are outdated too, But my point is
(34:38):
it seemed like we were accepting different bodies and appreciating
different body sizes. Along comes ozembic, wigovy whatever and all
these weight loss drugs, and suddenly we're hearing, no, you
don't want to be a certain size because everyone wants
(35:01):
to be thin. And you see people who were appreciated
for their weight, like Mindy Kaalen because she represented a
certain segment of the population, or Oprah suddenly becoming thin,
and I'm it's just very confusing I think for the
average woman.
Speaker 6 (35:19):
I completely agree there's so many mixed messages, but I think, well,
I think one thing that it reveals is that a
lot of the body positivity messaging, while valiant, and it's
just not working. Well, it's just it's not that it's
not working, but it's it's sort of what I was
saying before, where it's like the fact that so many
(35:41):
people that were like beacons of body positivity clearly like
once becoming thin via a syringe was accessible, then they
might not want.
Speaker 5 (35:50):
To be a beacon of body positivity anymore.
Speaker 6 (35:52):
Indicates that while that messaging was beautiful and valiant, it
wasn't necessarily breaking through the centuries of message that we'd
been given around thinness. And we have seen and the
executives who make these drugs will readily admit that the
minute you go off it, you start getting weight again.
All of these executives will say that they see this
(36:13):
as a chronic right and you have to be on
it for the rest of your life. So if somebody
doesn't want to be on it for the rest of
their life, or they can't afford to be on it,
for the rest of their life.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Or they don't really know the impact exactly of a
long term use of the drug thyroid cancer.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
To quote this person in the Gea Tolentino, Yes, yes.
Speaker 6 (36:32):
You know, like the animals, the long term sidies that
have done on animals, many of them have thyroid cancer.
Like people report a lot of stomach pain and really
bad things, but also future side effects we don't know
about that might involve losing an organ, and we still
think it's worth it to get these the benefits that society
gives you for being thin, and so I think the
question that that should make us ask is why do
(36:53):
we allow thinness to hold this power in this society?
And how can we start asking ourselves that question? But
instead it seems like the question we're asking is like
how many people? How will insurance start paying for everyone's
zam big, which is depressing.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Just to put a button on that. I think it's
very interesting that weight Watchers has joined forces with wa
GOVI or with these weight loss medications. I think weight
loss companies are afraid they'll go out of business if
they don't embrace medical options.
Speaker 6 (37:24):
I think that that's true, and I think they also
know that because these drugs do not work at all.
The minute you're off it, many people are going to
be going on journeys with their doctors where like they
do lose enough weight that then they're no longer eligible
for the ozembic they were on, right, and so now
they need something like weight watchers in that interim period to.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Like to stabilize their weight after losing it right medication.
Speaker 6 (37:51):
If they go off it, they'll start experience experiencing that
extreme hunger and then like many of us in those moments,
will reach for a rigid diet plan that can help
us control what feels out of control but is actually
our body just trying to nourish us and get us
back to where it wants to be.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
And this cycle may continue, right and unless they get
back on the drug, and it's unclear the long term,
and they.
Speaker 6 (38:12):
Can just cycle back and forth because the weight watchers
won't work, and then they'll have a bench period and
then they'll be eligible for the ozombic again.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
And Emmaline even cite this leaked weight watchers memo or me, yes,
this is that part of their business model is that
it doesn't work.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Yes, there's just coming back.
Speaker 6 (38:29):
There was a like leaked memo where the CEO was
saying that because there's there's a really the average weight
watcher's customer, does it like four to six times the
whole like the if you're like a paid program member,
and the CEO is saying, well, yeah, of course that's
our business model.
Speaker 5 (38:42):
If it worked, we would be out of business.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
We'll be right back with Emmeline Kleine and my plus one,
my daughter Kerry Couric Monaghan. We're back with Emmeline Klein
and my co host du Jour Carrie Monaghan.
Speaker 6 (39:10):
Speaking of all of this weight cycling and the sort
of ways that anarexia for so long was understood as
the pinnacle of this disease hierarchy, and many of the
other disorders that I'm now talking about being very much
invalidated or associated with shame just weren't even understood or
around or recognized as diagnoses. And in the book I
write about Karen Carpenter, who died of anarexion one was
(39:32):
one of the first public figures to do so, and
cass Elliott, who died of what was then considered an
obesity related heart attack but was very likely due to
her lifelong struggle with disordered eating and very restrictive dieting
that she would talk about very publicly, but was never
recognized as disordered eating because she was large, And so
I was just wondering what those figures meant to you
(39:52):
at the time as a young woman.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
I write in my book how Karen Carpenter's death had
a huge impact on me, and I realized even though
I was bleiemic and she was anarexic, although I think
she might have been beliemic as well. I think a
lot of times you can be anorexic and beliemic, but
bliemic and anorexic is less common, right.
Speaker 5 (40:14):
Well, you can, I mean, there's just so much crossover
between all of them.
Speaker 7 (40:17):
And you had ans, yes, and also that weaing disorder,
not otherwise And I always wanted to be anorexic, which
is so sickond and of itself.
Speaker 5 (40:28):
Oh I did the I was the exactly.
Speaker 6 (40:30):
I mean, I when I first in seventh grade got
my first diagnosis, Like it's something I write about in
the book, I was.
Speaker 5 (40:36):
I'm ashamed to say this.
Speaker 6 (40:37):
Now, but I was so disappointed when I got my
eating disorder not otherwise specified diagnosis because I was like,
so you're just telling me I'm not good enough at anorexia.
And then that was obviously and then that diagnosis often
ends up being motivating, and it made me sicker because
I wanted to feel like I was you know what
I mean. And so it's just very scary. But anyway,
back to back to Karen and Casson, I agree with
(40:59):
you that there is I mean, Karen died using something
that makes you throw up, right, so she clearly did
suffer from bolimia as well. That was just not talked
about as much because we're so obsessed with talking about inerexia.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
I just think that cass Elliott, who was as talented
as Karen Carpenter and I love them both musically, was mocked.
Of course, the rumor was that she died she choked
on a ham sandwich, and I think that was a
way too honestly, was so cruel and people, I'm sure
(41:34):
late night comedians made fun of it.
Speaker 6 (41:37):
Well, there's an incredibly cruel joke that was made that
I mentioned in the book in like literally like a
movie in the two thousand and five where somebody is
the character says is talking about Karen Carpenter, and cass Elliott,
and is like, if they could have just shared the
ham sandwich, they'd both be alive today, which I think
is so cruel and also so emblematic of so many
of these issues, because it's serving to put these two
(41:59):
women who were suffering from the same pain at odds
and also and spit them against each other while also
mocking them both simultaneously. And it's also wildly oversimplifying the
issue and implying that, like, you know, women are idiots.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
I think you're right. I mean, I think cass Elliott,
knowing what we know now, deserves as much sympathy as
Karen Carpenter. I mean, they were both tragedies and both
I think manifestations of societal expectations of what a beautiful
or attractive woman should look like, and they were both
(42:38):
trying to achieve it, but obviously with very different outcomes,
and yet the source of their pain was very similar, and.
Speaker 3 (42:48):
Yet they both ended up dying from it completely.
Speaker 6 (42:51):
And it brings me back to the sort of first
of the first question you asked me about why it
was so important to me to make sure that sort
of story had no villains and also was attempting to
create this sort of ghost sisterhood or Coraline and also
and destroy the higher arps exactly, yes, because I you know,
(43:12):
like it just is so sad. Like I wish that
Karen Carpenter and cass Elliott could have gotten in a
room together and talked about how it felt to be
a woman in the public eye whose body was constantly
being analyzed, And I wonder if that conversation could have
helped both of them, and instead they were understood as
suffering from completely different issues.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
But I feel like there are villains in the book.
The villains are the executives and oh yeah.
Speaker 5 (43:33):
But the villain. There's no people that right, There's.
Speaker 7 (43:35):
No girl villains, right And in fact, you say, except
for the girl bosses.
Speaker 6 (43:39):
Yeah, okay, but they're being manipulated too, Okay.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
Okay, Emmeline, you right. I'm trying to find out what
might happen if we blamed someone other than each other
and ourselves for a change. So that leads to this question,
who is to blame and what can we do as
the society about it? Or is it just too ingrained
(44:04):
in our culture?
Speaker 6 (44:05):
I think that it is very ingrained, sadly, but I
don't think that it's impossible. I think the weight loss
industry is largely to blame. I think the medical establishment,
while in many ways well intentioned, is in its current
iteration exacerbating the issue rather than genuinely creating models that
I think aid in true recovery. But I think that
(44:27):
it made me really happy to hear you say right
at the beginning of this conversation, like, Oh, this whole
society has an eating disorder, and how are we going
to deal with it? Because I think that the first
step is literally saying that sentence allowed, which for so
long people haven't wanted to say. And a lot of
the companies that benefit from this issue want to keep
(44:50):
eating disorders understood is the clinical issue and not a
political issue or an economic.
Speaker 5 (44:54):
Issue at all, and not a social issue, because.
Speaker 6 (44:56):
If we can keep it siloed off in the medical establishment,
then everything else can keep on running. And so I think,
just even as earnest and simple as it seems, I
think having really honest conversations with people in your life
about what nourishing, what consuming food has meant to you
and the ways in which we've all engaged in self
(45:19):
harm in order to come closer to a beauty standard
that many of us don't even politically believe in but
are still subject to. Like the whims of I think
can change our perspective so much.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
How do we destroy the concept that beauty equals thinness?
You know, I interviewed a Harvard's psychologist named Mazarin Banagie.
Mazarine Banagi wrote a book called blind Spot, and it
says how our brains are wired to make connections from
the time we're very, very young, and so I think
(45:55):
when you're accosted by all these images of supposed beauty
and they all look the same, They're all thin, they
all have the same body type. Oftentimes they're the same color.
Although we're seeing more diversity and what is considered beautiful now,
we have to break that connection. And you know, I'm
(46:16):
sure when you were little, when I was little, fashion magazines, billboards, etc.
All these visual images just reinforce these unrealistic beauty standards.
What if from a very early age, from children's books
to all the visual stimuli we're faced with every day,
(46:36):
showed that that wasn't necessarily the case if we broke
that connection, I totally agree.
Speaker 6 (46:43):
I mean that would I don't have tons of faith
in this society to do that.
Speaker 5 (46:47):
But I completely agree with you, and I believe it.
Speaker 6 (46:49):
And there's a book called Unshrinking by Kate Mann that
just came out that's about fat phobia and is really amazing,
and she talks about being a fat woman and feeling
so much shame about it her whole life, and suffering
from any eating disorders, and then having a daughter being
what was one of the things that really helped her
(47:09):
finally recover, not wanting to teach her daughter to understand
beauty in the ways she was taught to understand it.
And she talks about being isolated in the pandemic and
actually being like, maybe a silver lining of this is
that I actually have an opportunity to not expose you
to like the billboards and to the magazines and to
(47:30):
the TV, but to curate an Instagram feed that I've
made and just show you all different types of bodies
when your mind is still very fertile and.
Speaker 5 (47:39):
Able to make those connections.
Speaker 6 (47:40):
And I, you know, was like crying when I read that,
and I thought that was really beautiful, and I think
that is a really amazing model. But what makes me
really scared is that most young people are on TikTok
and on Instagram, not getting that type of feed.
Speaker 5 (47:55):
At the end of the book, I call it a
feminism of attention.
Speaker 6 (47:58):
Like I wonder if if we listen, we've for so
long the stories we've told about both beauty and about
eating disorders are as narrow and as slim as the
bodies that we've been taught to want. And if we
tell if we listen to a wider range of stories
and let the stories twist and turn, I and also
(48:20):
look back farther than we have and really historicize this
beauty standard and it's like deeply misogynistic, deeply racist, deeply
capitalist roots, then I do think we can start to
unlearn it, because I know, at least for me, like
once I realized how many companies were profiting off of
the pain that I've been taught to feel about the
(48:41):
way I looked, it did start to change some of
what I think of as beautiful.
Speaker 1 (48:47):
There's so much more to this conversation. People really need
to get your book, which is profound in so many ways.
It's called dead Weight Essays on Hunger and Harm. Emmaline,
Thank you for writing it, and thank you for talking
with us about it. Today, and Carrie, thank you for
being my plus one.
Speaker 5 (49:07):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 6 (49:09):
This was an amazing conversation and I think maybe we
were starting to do some of the amazing unlearning I
was talking about.
Speaker 4 (49:16):
And I was honored to be here.
Speaker 5 (49:30):
Carrie.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
I think Emmaline's book is really revolutionary and that I've
never read something that is so expansive on this topic.
How did you feel when you were reading this book.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
I felt liberated and seen in a lot of ways.
I say liberated because you know, just the whole crux
of it is that bodies are built by systems and
to understand, you know, we've been lied to instead of
demonizing myself or you know, glorifying past versions of myself
(50:06):
when I was thinner, and just to feel a little
bit of personal responsibility taken off of my shoulders for
the way I have felt I was crazy when it
comes to food, eating, exercising, anorexia or the exia, bolimia,
(50:27):
all of that, just to you know, I think I
knew at some level, yes this is baked into our culture,
all the images, etc. But just like the level of
collusion going on, it was very satisfying to discover that
through reading the book.
Speaker 1 (50:44):
Did it remove some of the shame and some of
the kind of feelings you've had about your appearance or
your weight, or being less than or more than.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
Yeah, I mean, I think to see it describes so
eloquently the hierarchy of disorders. The sort of worshiping of
Thinness made me feel vindicated because I have worshiped or
glorified past thinner versions of myself. But then when I
think back to how I was doing at that.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
Time, iel miserable.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
I was really unhappy and so lonely. Just to know
that that's a societal problem, like the society is colluding
with the aneractic thinking, it's not just on an individual level,
and just to understand kind of the etymology of all
of it was really helpful for me, much less so
(51:39):
than it and it wasn't in a way that was
triggering to intellectualize all of this.
Speaker 1 (51:53):
Thanks for listening everyone. If you have a question for me,
a subject you want us to cover, or you want
to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world,
reach out. You can leave a short message at six
h nine five P one two five five five, or
you can send me a DM on Instagram. I would
love to hear from you. Next Question is a production
(52:15):
of iHeartMedia and Katie Kuric Media. The executive producers are Me,
Katie Kuric, and Courtney Ltz. Our supervising producer is Ryan Martz,
and our producers are Adriana Fazzio and Meredith Barnes. Julian
Weller composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode,
(52:35):
or to sign up for my newsletter wake Up Call,
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wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Hi everyone, I'm Kitty Kuric, and this is next question. Today.
We're exploring a topic that has a lot of relevance
to me and to my plus one today, who happens
to be my daughter. Carrying onahan, I had an eating
(00:24):
disorder when I was in my late teens and early twenties.
I was blimic. I was always on a diet. If
I deviated even slightly from what I thought were the
right foods or good foods, for example, having a piece
of gum that wasn't sugarless, I would then binge indiscriminately
(00:45):
and make myself throw up. Now there's some evidence that
this disease may be hereditary. We'll be asking our guests
about that. But Carrie, you had an eating disorder, not once,
but twice. Can you just tell us a little bit
about your experience.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
I think I was in sixth grade when I started
to feel uncomfortable in my own body. I was in
a so called early bloomer, which some people are proud
of being. I certainly was not. I really wanted to
stay a little girl, and I was very upset about
am I allowed to say. I was getting breast buds.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yes, on this pood. Yes, I think that's allowed.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
And I even remember going to a checkup, maybe in
fifth grade or maybe it was even fourth grade, and
I thought I had breast cancer because it felt hard
under my knippall and I had told maybe our babysitter,
and she said, oh, we should ask the doctor about it.
I don't know why she wasn't just like you're getting boobs. Anyways,
(01:51):
I think the onset of puberty. I think this is
very common, made me feel very ashamed of my body.
Used to say to me, Oh, it's normal to grow
out then up or something, which I did not like
to hear because I was like, well, what if I
never grow up?
Speaker 3 (02:09):
And you know whatever? And so I think in.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Sixth grade I started because I was on, you know,
consuming a lot of thin people in media, watching the
oc et cetera.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
I started to.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Diet in sixth grade.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
In sixth or maybe seventh grade, I started to lose weight,
stuff getting my period. Eighth grade, I think I had
a touch of blimia.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
And laxative use. Is this too graphic?
Speaker 4 (02:37):
Okay?
Speaker 2 (02:38):
And then ninth grade going to a co ed school
where I felt like I didn't get attention from boys.
I kind of tried to model my body after a
girl I was friends with who I think I wanted
to be or maybe want to be with.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
That's something maybe want to discuss.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
But and then it became kind of as I think
we'll talk about this addiction to the external validation. I
don't know if addiction is the right word. I think
we'll talk about that again. But and then became kind
of like an orthorexia wellness thing. And I think I'm
mostly fine now. I mean, I think about food and
my body like all the time, but I think the
(03:21):
behavior is more managed.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
And you got very very thin in high school, to
the point it was really quite scary. You were very underweight,
and do you remember how you wouldn't eat anything. I
think you were actually anorexic during that period.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
You know, I still ate.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
I just ate the same things every day, and I
was I think I must have had mercury poisoning or something,
because I ate tuna fish every single day at lunch.
And I was very afraid of gaining weight, even to
the point where being at Sleepwoy Camp, a place that
I'd love for like eight years. When I read not
being able to go back to camp, it was like
(04:03):
this dialectic in my mind, like I really want to
be thin, I'm really afraid of gaining weight, but I
also want to be normal and stop thinking about this
all the time. So yeah, of course I remember all
of that. But I think it's also important to note
that there were a lot of moments in my adolescence
or young adulthood when I wasn't necessarily thin, but I
was still struggling. And when you're not underweight, you can
(04:25):
still be having an eating disorder, and often those people
don't get the attention or care that's needed because their
body doesn't happen to be clinically underweight.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Well. Our guest today is Emmaline Kline, and Emmaline has
written a new book called dead Weight Essays on Hunger
and Harm, And in many ways it feels like the
definitive exploration of eating disorders, the cultural history, the economic triggers,
and the stories we're told and have told ourselves for decades.
(04:56):
It's both deeply personal and meticulously researched, fast eight and insightful. Emmaline,
thank you so much for coming to the podcast.
Speaker 5 (05:05):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy
to be here and talking to you guys.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Now we should mention how do you all know each other?
You have a mutual friend in Carrie's high school friend
and your college friend Matt Malone.
Speaker 5 (05:17):
Right, we have a mutual aubacity. Shout out to him.
We'd be lost without him.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Yes, Emline and I are new friends.
Speaker 5 (05:24):
But it's going really well so far.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Emmaline and I met for the first time only in
maybe late November, but we really bonded. I think over
a lot of the content of the book and Emmaline
and her book invokes her sisters often, but I do
feel like I'm part of this sisterhood with her, and
I think that's made us become fast friends.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Totally agree, Emline. So tell me. I was going to
say I devoured your book, and then I thought maybe
that's not the right verb to use. But tell me
what made you want to write this book.
Speaker 6 (06:00):
So I started struggling with my body and the way
that feeding it seemed to affect its appearance, and the
way that I was received in the world based on
my parents when I was really young, like how old,
like eleven twelve. But the first time I became severe
enough that I needed to get medical care for it
(06:21):
was in around seventh grade, so I've been thinking about that,
and then I was struggling with it on and off
through high school and college, but it was mostly at
a sort of manageable EBB. So I've been thinking about
these issues for a really long time, and I've just
always felt in my own journey to attempt to recover
that educating myself.
Speaker 5 (06:39):
About the history of these diseases.
Speaker 6 (06:41):
And finding models of other women who have been able
to recover was incredibly healing for me. But I found
that most of the books I was reading were very
siloed and limited in the range.
Speaker 5 (06:58):
Of narratives about these diseases.
Speaker 6 (07:00):
Is that we're being told often eating disorders in our
culture are discussed either through pure memoir or a self
help book or just a highly academic sort of medical book.
Speaker 5 (07:11):
And I felt like I.
Speaker 6 (07:13):
Was looking around at the world and thinking to myself, Well,
diseases that are just as demographically prevalent as eating disorders,
like opioid addiction, like alcoholism, like depression are understood as
clinical diseases, yes, but they're also understood as microcosms of
a lot of cultural and social and economic and political forces,
and looking at them that way can foster a sense
(07:35):
of solidarity among people who are suffering from them that
I think isn't often available to eating disorder sufferers who
feel that this is a very individual failing and then
a very individual journey through recovery. And so I wanted
to create a book that would give eating disorders that
sort of layered intellectual and historical treatment, while also acknowledging
that the messages girls received from a very young age
(07:57):
are coming from a lot of cultural sources like team
television shows and why fiction and stuff that is not
necessarily usually analyzed as influential as it can be on us.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Before we talk about those cultural influences, because as you
all being contemporaries, I want to kind of dive into
some of the TV shows and magazines and etc. That
really impacted you all growing up. But how widespread is
this problem? Because I think people really don't have a
full understanding of well, we'll talk about the spectrum of
(08:29):
eating disorders in a moment, but how many people are
impacted by this?
Speaker 6 (08:34):
This issue affects far more people than we generally imagine
it affecting, and not only at a fully clinical diagnosable level,
but pretty much any woman I've known in my life
has had some symptom of disordered eating over the course
of their adolescence, teenage years, and womanhood.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
Many men I know have suffered from it.
Speaker 6 (08:55):
It's hugely widespread, and I think our general understanding of
food and beauty and bodies is itself disordered, and the
prevalence of diet culture sort of creates a world in
which it's pretty much impossible not to have an eating disorder,
and the eating disorders that we think of as the
main ones, anarexi and bolimia are actually less prevalent than
(09:16):
binge eating disorder. And then on the other end of
the spectrum, eating disorders and obesity are often talked about
like totally separate, even dueling epidemics, and in fact I
think they're both sort of symptoms of our larger disordered
eating culture.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
You two have a lot in common in terms of
the shows you were consuming as teenagers. Can you all
talk a little bit about the shows and how they
impacted your sense of self and the way you looked
at your bodies?
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Yeah, I mean, I think Emmaline and I were clearly
both very enamored of Marissa Cooper on the OC played
by Misha Barton, who, as Emmaline writes about, had to
get her character killed off in order to heal herself,
the actress she later wrote about. And I think not
(10:03):
only were we consuming the same shows like Gossip Girl,
and Emmeline writes about Blair Waldorf's bulimia, which is somehow
never brought up again after one episode.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
But it's very much in the book Gossip Girl.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Yes, so from Gossip Girl to the OC, you know
all of these CW TV shows, And I think also
Emmeline and I, as contemporaries and both struggling with disordered eating,
were visiting all a lot of the same web forums,
a lot of pro anorexia websites and tumblers and looking
(10:40):
at what you know, was called the inspiration or thinspo
or there's also a reverse spo which I didn't really
know about until reading your book, which is like when
somebody gains weight like supposed to discourage you from eating,
which is really disturbing.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
So these websites and such were all ubiquitous even when
you all were like twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old.
Speaker 6 (11:01):
I think that there's actually really fascinating overlap between what
was depicted on these shows, and then the actresses in
these shows were being covered by the tabloid media, and
then both the actual shows and the tabloid imagery were
being used on these sort of inspiration forums. I think
(11:22):
often perhaps the creators of some of this media thought
they were writing cautionary tales and ended up providing.
Speaker 5 (11:28):
Role models for a lot of young girls.
Speaker 6 (11:30):
And then at the same time as you're seeing this
depicted on the show, you're seeing those same starlets being
picked apart in US Weekly every week. And then as
soon as they developed and eating disorder, likely because of
the way they were retreated in the media, you have
like them being called bad role models because they're inneraxic.
Speaker 5 (11:45):
On this cover of the same magazines.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
It was very and still is. I think it's not
as if so much has changed, but it's so many
mixed societal messages, and I thought it was interesting that
you write this book for the victims of our cultural obsession,
which turns out to be all of us. Let me
read you the following. The skinny, Sexy, sad girl silhouette
(12:09):
has haunted so many of our dreams. She hawks her
six sort of beauty, purring false promises, from just over
the horizon line, but someone stranded her at the vanishing
point where she recedes even farther into the distance. The
closer we get, and they don't want us to reach her,
because then we might save her, convince her she's been
lied to. Like the rest of us, I'm trying to
(12:32):
row a lifeboat and write a love letter and learn
to swim. I am writing this for the living girls
hiding in their bedrooms, obsessing over the dead ones, the
hungry girls and horny girls and hidden girls, the dead
girls who thought the only way they'd be remembered was
by sliding into their place, and the cannon come mausoleum
(12:54):
for all the girls who weren't wrong and all the
girls who were. It's clear to me that throughout this book,
you don't want to demonize anyone, and you wanted this
to feel like an inclusive look at this issue. It's
not like the skinny girls, the perfect girls were the
(13:15):
heroines and the girls who didn't look like them were
the victims. They're all victims. All of these women are victims.
Why did you want to make sure that you approached
it this way?
Speaker 5 (13:29):
Thank you for.
Speaker 6 (13:29):
Asking that question, because that decision was really central to
my sort of ethical considerations as I was writing this book,
because I wanted to highlight the way this very specific,
misogynistic and racist beauty standard of this extremely skinny white
girl has given so many of us eating disorders or
(13:53):
symptoms of disordered eating.
Speaker 5 (13:55):
And yet I don't think that it's her fault.
Speaker 6 (13:58):
The girl that embodies that beauty stand actually probably had
to suffer so much to a body it, and I
feel like often in the discourse around eating disorders, the
different diagnoses become hierarchical, the way that people look becomes hierarchical,
And what I wanted to do was parse out the
(14:20):
ways that we've all felt the same way, and we've
all shared this incredibly intense form of suffering, and it
actually isn't as important who was getting closer to the
beauty standard versus who wasn't able to, because we were
sharing the same pain. And I have read so many
books myself that ended up manuals or bibles or something
(14:45):
that they weren't intended to be, and so I wanted
to write something that was very clearly not instructive and
was not glamorizing that beauty ideal, and was sort of
dissecting it from inside out, while also coming from a
place compassion and sort of saying to any girl out
there who's ever hurt herself to embody that beauty standard,
(15:06):
like I have two and I completely understand that impulse.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Carrie and I both commented on how interesting it was
to really look at eating disorders in a hierarchical way,
the fact that anorexia is sort of the noble one
and bulimia I think you even described it as well.
The British Journal of Psychiatry called the disorder Anorexia's ugly
(15:32):
sister in two thousand and four. I was surprised that
an expert finally named bulimia just fifty years ago, a
pretty recent diagnosis. And then, of course there is binge
eating disorder. So it seems like you divided up into
these three categories, but people can go from one to
(15:52):
the other, and they can be kind of a mishmash.
Can you just talk about how this hierarchy was established
and is it part of our society's obsession with thinness
that we elevate people who are emaciated to a higher level.
Speaker 6 (16:12):
Yes, I mean short answer, yes, I definitely think it is.
But I think part of the reason anarexia exists at
the top of this hierarchy is because of our societal
obsession with thinness. So in the book, I really try
to look at it from a perspective, that is, looking
at the way that the hierarchy exists in the medical field,
but also how it exists in our culture. So in
movies and in books, often aner exx are depicted as
(16:35):
sort of taking the good girl archetype too far, wanting
to be too perfect, following society's rules too well. She
knows she shouldn't take up so much space, like she's.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
It's perfection on steroids exactly.
Speaker 6 (16:49):
And there's and it's this fetishization of discipline that we
also have in our culture, and of being able to
follow a lot of rules and of being able.
Speaker 5 (16:57):
To control your bodily needs.
Speaker 6 (17:00):
It's also often very much hyper intellectualized, whereas Bulimia gets
constructed as sort of the disease of the like spoiled
Brady girl, and you see that in terms of the
character and Gossip Girl, the way she's depicted in the
books and in the show, but also in medical journals,
with a medical journal calling Bolimia anarxia's ugly sister. There's
(17:21):
articles from the eighties when it was first becoming added
to the DSM and widely understood as a disease that
you were seeing in like mainstream newspapers would be saying
bolimia usually starts as after a male rejection, or like
the doctor Gerald Russell, who just who first came up
with the diagnosis, was writing things in his notes like
that anorexis and bleimix differed mainly in that beliemix were
(17:43):
often more sexually active and also fatter. So this dichotomy
has been constructed from both an academic perspective and a
psychiatric perspective and is replicated in our culture. And then
that separation serves to make beliemix suffer a lot of
shame and makes it make anerrex feel sort of superior, superior,
but also like that is not that is a very
(18:05):
shaky pedestal that you could fall off at any time,
because forty percent, I believe of people who are diagnosed
with anorexia eventually suffer binge eating disorder symptoms. And then
binge eating disorder is taken even less seriously than bolimia
and anorexia by both the medical profession and by our
society at large. It's often mocked and it's also just
much much harder to get treatment for it's much harder
(18:27):
to get your insurance to take it seriously.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
And yet it's super dangerous. You know, you talked about
people dying from binge eating disorder and the cycle of
starvation and binging and shame, and it really does kind
of take over people's lives completely.
Speaker 5 (18:47):
And there's just so much diagnostic crossover.
Speaker 6 (18:51):
There's one study I've found that was called Pride before
a Fall colon like diagnostic crossover is in Shame or
something like that, and it was interviewing people who move
between anarexia, blimia, and bingeating disorder diagnosis diagnoses. And the
shame that people feel when their diagnosis has changed from
anorexia to one of the others is just so heartbreaking.
(19:11):
And the diagnoses don't really serve much of a curate
ative purpose beyond giving insurance. And the treatment center is
a way to categorize you, to simplify, you know, charging
and how you're thinking about it. And so when so
many of our symptoms are the same and so many
binge eaters go through huge restrictive periods that truly are
(19:34):
simply narexic periods, but we just won't validate their disease
with the same name we.
Speaker 5 (19:40):
Give other people.
Speaker 6 (19:41):
How do we ever expect somebody to recover when that
when these diseases are so rooted in shame, and then
the actual diagnostic structure only often reinforces that shame.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
We have to take a quick break. Then we'll be
back with Emmeline Kleine and my favorite plus one yet
Caring Mine. If you want to get smarter every morning
with a breakdown of the news and fascinating takes on
health and wellness and pop culture, sign up for our
daily newsletter Wake Upcall by going to Katiecuric dot com.
(20:19):
We're back with Emmeline Klein m I plus one, Kerrie
Courric Monahan.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Emline to your point about people cycling through different diagnoses
or different disorders, and how dividing into different categories and
subcategories not only promotes competition, but it also is unrealistic
in that people often move between them and one often
will trigger the other. So I know that for me personally,
(20:49):
my bolimia was caused by the so called recovery from inarexia.
And I found this really interesting that in nineteen fifty five,
doctor Albert Stunkard coin the term mourning and which was
when you know, a patient would not eat all day
in pursuit of thinness or dieting. And then understandably at
twilight you write something like would follow the light of
(21:12):
the refrigerator or something and binge eat and that would
obviously cause a lot of digestive problems and like a
cycle of shame. And I think a lot of people
don't understand that binging often is the result of restriction.
I mean, Mom, I know we've talked about this before,
that when you would feel like you'd been so good
(21:33):
all day but then you you know, quote unquote messed up,
then it would lead to you eating I shouldn't say
crazy amount of food, but a lot of.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Food, or over eating or eating kind of forbidden foods.
But I think what Carrie's getting at is this whole
idea you explore in the book that diet culture, restrictive eating,
which hey, it makes people hungry, has actually led to
the prevalence of eating disorders.
Speaker 5 (22:01):
Yes, completely, And I think that was one of the
most sort.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Of aha moments.
Speaker 6 (22:05):
Yeah, well, It was just really transformative for me, even
in my own recovery, because it helped me realize the
extent to which I was upon and this wasn't an
individual failing. So we have a culture that is obsessed
with diets and selling us diets and convincing us that
diets work. Which diets we think work in a given
era are constantly changing, despite the fact that or on
(22:26):
a grand scale, like ninety five percent of diets quote
unquote fail in that people gain back the weight, whether
even if they originally lose it.
Speaker 5 (22:35):
But this is because human bodies have a.
Speaker 6 (22:38):
Set point and there is a not that large range
which your body wants to settle at.
Speaker 5 (22:45):
And so when you go on any diet.
Speaker 6 (22:49):
Whether it's extreme restriction or just a low level restriction
which often spirals into extreme restriction, your body is sort
of thinking it's in a famine right to be really
hungry after the diet is over.
Speaker 5 (23:03):
And we have seen this since literally the fifties.
Speaker 6 (23:08):
As Carrie was mentioning, there's a really interesting study that
was run by Ansel Keys called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment
that was genuinely its purpose was to investigate what was
going to happen when people who had been forced to
eat very little due to wartime rations after World War Two,
we're going to start eating normally again. So they had
(23:28):
conscientious objectors start eating half their normal calories and then
eventually start eating freely again. And they wanted to see
what would happen. And basically what happened is that before
there was even a diagnosis for binge eating disorder, these
people all developed what are very clearly the symptoms of
binge eating disorder in the wake of what was basically
forced anorexia, right, And so they were eating in huge quantities.
(23:51):
One man was hospitalized because he binged so much. And
the period in which they wanted to binge lasted much
longer than they expected, Like, it wasn't just the initial
couple weeks where they were eating food again.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
So what did this show?
Speaker 6 (24:05):
So what this showed is that pretty much anytime you
embark on a restrictive diet, your body is going to
want to overcompensate because it's afraid that that's.
Speaker 5 (24:16):
Going to happen again. Right, It has no idea.
Speaker 6 (24:18):
And so this is one of the reasons that actually
repeated dieting is correlated. And there's this obesity researcher Jranet
Tomayama who said this repeated dieting is actually correlated with
a higher weight in the end than with a lower weight,
because your set point moves up because it's trying to
avoid the famine.
Speaker 5 (24:37):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 6 (24:38):
And so basically, despite the fact that we've known that
since like the fifties, and despite the fact that also
the rations that were being given to these men to
mimic literal starvation was very similar to the calories that
were being given out at weight loss treatments.
Speaker 5 (24:55):
At the time in the fifties.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Right, it was something like sixteen hundred calories.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Yeah, I mean then it is prolong.
Speaker 6 (25:01):
Yeah, the rations were higher than what an app like
my fitness Pal was telling me to eat when I
was entering in my desired vision, right, you know. So
we have all of this information, and we also know
that weight cycling, which is when your weight changes significantly,
is hugely correlated with so many with both ending up
at a higher weight and also with a lot of
(25:23):
very dangerous things like heart disease.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Right, Like yo yo ing is supposed to be really
bad on your body.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Right.
Speaker 5 (25:29):
Weight cycling is one of the most dangerous things you
can do for your body.
Speaker 6 (25:32):
And we live in a society that's constantly telling us
to yo yo diet. I even I talk about in
the book this phenomenon on TikTok that's called hashtag last
night eating, which is when people will be like, well,
I failed. My last diet failed because I couldn't stick
to something to nourishing my body much less than what
it wanted. So now I'm going to start another one
next week. But before I do that, I'm going to
(25:53):
do a crazy feast and I'm going to film it.
And so this is a very clearly binge eating disorder
right followed by a restrictive period. And yet we're not
calling that behavior disordered. We're just calling it dieting, which
is part of what then further entrenches the epidemic of
eating disorders because people are just taking all of this
(26:16):
this messaging.
Speaker 5 (26:18):
To somewhat of an extreme right. But then because we
silo that extreme.
Speaker 6 (26:22):
Off from the rest of diet culture and we say
eating disorders are separate from diet culture, we can't see
that diet culture is what gave us the eating disorders
in the first place, and instead we try to treat
it in ways that aren't successful, in extremely medicalized ways
that refuse to engage with really much sort of politics
(26:42):
or history or feminism.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
I was interested in how you write about dieting disordered eating,
is this kind of normalizing force, especially for queer people
and for women of color. I remember this piece maybe
in The Economists last year about the biness is good
economics for women. So you write, living in a body
of color in a world that worships white beauty standards
(27:07):
can disturbingly render disordered eating in assimilationist coping strategy. So
I think that was true when writing about queer people
with eating disorders, and also black women with eating disorders.
Do you want to expand.
Speaker 6 (27:20):
Throughout my research, I found a lot of stories of
people of color and queer people who felt shame about
the way their body appeared in society. And when people
are feeling this shame and simultaneously receiving these messages about
this very slim beauty standard, then using disordered eating behaviors
(27:44):
as a mechanism to sort of bring yourself into alignment
with the normative standard can feel very alluring, and it
can feel like a genuine economic proposition. As Carrie said,
there is evidence about thinner women getting better salaries and
better promotions more quickly, et cetera. And so you see
black women and people of color suffering from these issues
(28:04):
in huge numbers, but they also are being underdiagnosed on mass,
which is part of why it took so long for
this handbook to exist, because even though large scale studies
that are just surveying people about their symptoms would find
out that black women were really suffering from this issue,
a lot of those interviews weren't with people that were
necessarily getting diagnosed explicitly and getting treatment right. It's just
(28:26):
knowing that you're having the symptomatic thoughts and behaviors. And
then when black women are diagnosed, they're often diagnosed only
with binge eating disorder because they don't always even if
they're going through an anaoxic period or suffering from bolimia,
don't always hit the BMI standard that itself was mostly
based on studies of white people's bodies, So it's just
(28:50):
very difficult to get the diagnosis if you're not in
the body that we associate with the diagnosis. And on
top of that, for low income communities, there's a lot
of widespread food scarcity that forces people to live in
a state of hunger that then when food becomes accessible,
can lead to a binge, and especially when that food
(29:11):
is highly processed food that is the cheapest food and
the most accessible food, and that food is also designed
to incite binges on top of the way that your
body also is very hungry in that state, highly processed
foods that have been shown in like MRI scans to
light up the similar opioid receptors as doing drugs. So
(29:32):
it's basically just a really perfect storm for these communities
where the messaging that people are receiving about beauty standards,
the food that is available, and the funds that exist
to access it are creating binge and restrict cycles and
also creating specific binge and restrict cycles that often lead
(29:52):
people to end up in a.
Speaker 5 (29:53):
Body that is a higher weight.
Speaker 6 (29:54):
And so then all of those people are then demonized
using the language of the obesity epidemic, when in fact
fact many of them are not suffering from obesity, but
are suffering from an eating disorder, or they're suffering from
both at the same time, and often the eating disorder
caused the obesity, and we can't actually treat that issue
effectively now because we haven't treated the underlying issue and
(30:17):
we're even refusing to acknowledge it.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
The same sort of restriction binge cycle that is so
prominent in diet culture is prominent in these underserved communities
because of food scarcity and then food abundance and kind
of going back and forth between those two extremes.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Yeah, I think this quote from Emmeline sums it up.
The food insecure, fast food consuming, fat person is perennially
cast as the problem, entrenching the lie that bodies are
built by individuals instead of systems, rather than recognizing that
food insecurity, the temporal structure of low wage workers' days,
and the addictiveness of processed foods render poor people especially
(30:57):
vulnerable to binging and obesity alive fat and poor people
are demonized, imagine to make bad choices and prefer unhealthy.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Food, and it's really the system that's setting them up
for this vicious cycle completely.
Speaker 6 (31:12):
And then to just kind of circle back a little
to the hierarchical topic we were talking about before, like
whether you're being set up to have an eating disorder
in a low income community for all the reasons we
just described, or if you're just being set up to
have an eating disorder in a completely separate environment while
watching a CWU television show. In both cases, the issue
ends up getting individualized, and then the diagnostic hierarchy makes
(31:38):
us unable to see the similarities that we just aligned
between our two positions and understand the way that our
economic system and weight loss companies and many other corporations
that make food, for example, are really profiting off of
the eating disorder epidemic and the obesity epidemic alike, and
(32:01):
the way that the two end up motoring each other
and revving each other up is really just making a
lot of these issues get worse and worse.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
They're sort of symbiotic in a way.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
And the investors themselves in you know, these weight loss apps,
whether it's my Fitness Pal, I don't know if that's
one of them, but the investors who are funding the
weight loss apps or even you know, Wagovy and ozempic
are also funding I'm not sure if it's for profit
(32:32):
eating disorder centers, but certainly the treatments and the apps
and so neither really has an interest.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
In solving the problem.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Solving that problem because often the person using my fitness Pal.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
Maybe this wasn't one of the apps, and none.
Speaker 5 (32:48):
Of those is it.
Speaker 6 (32:49):
It's like the person, so the person using a weight
Watchers app or my fitness Pal app often might end
up getting an eating disorder and then receiving treatment at
a center that, unbeknownst to them, invested in a weight
loss app. The example I used in the book is
(33:10):
I think Noom because that's just one of many apps
that has sort of shared investors between both, Like they're
investing in the treatment center and they're also investing in
the weight loss app, and so it's creating this sort
of cycle, which I don't even think is a conspiracy
on the part of the investors. But it's just that
this is so entrenched, and we're so our society is
(33:31):
so unwilling to see what you said, Katie about the
fact that the society has the eating disorder, that we're
still deluding ourselves into believing that the weight loss industry
can exist in the way it exists now without creating
eating disorders. So we want to believe that a weight
loss app could exist, and so could a eating disorder
treatment app, and that those two things could have nothing
(33:51):
to do with each other.
Speaker 5 (33:52):
But that just isn't the world we live in.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
I want to ask about solutions in a moment, but
before I do, I want to ask you about the
mas messages we're getting right now. You know, it seems
like we were getting real traction in this body positivity
movement that people come in all different shapes and sizes.
You know, some people are tall and willowy and some
(34:14):
people just aren't. Like you know, you have ectomorphs and
mesomorphs and endomorphs. I think I'm a mesomorph morph. Oh,
those are different body types like no, no, no, not
so much fruit, but like just you're naturally tall and thin,
or you're very muscular, or you're heavier, right, I mean this,
maybe those things are outdated too, But my point is
(34:38):
it seemed like we were accepting different bodies and appreciating
different body sizes. Along comes ozembic, wigovy whatever and all
these weight loss drugs, and suddenly we're hearing, no, you
don't want to be a certain size because everyone wants
(35:01):
to be thin. And you see people who were appreciated
for their weight, like Mindy Kaalen because she represented a
certain segment of the population, or Oprah suddenly becoming thin,
and I'm it's just very confusing I think for the
average woman.
Speaker 6 (35:19):
I completely agree there's so many mixed messages, but I think, well,
I think one thing that it reveals is that a
lot of the body positivity messaging, while valiant, and it's
just not working. Well, it's just it's not that it's
not working, but it's it's sort of what I was
saying before, where it's like the fact that so many
(35:41):
people that were like beacons of body positivity clearly like
once becoming thin via a syringe was accessible, then they
might not want.
Speaker 5 (35:50):
To be a beacon of body positivity anymore.
Speaker 6 (35:52):
Indicates that while that messaging was beautiful and valiant, it
wasn't necessarily breaking through the centuries of message that we'd
been given around thinness. And we have seen and the
executives who make these drugs will readily admit that the
minute you go off it, you start getting weight again.
All of these executives will say that they see this
(36:13):
as a chronic right and you have to be on
it for the rest of your life. So if somebody
doesn't want to be on it for the rest of
their life, or they can't afford to be on it,
for the rest of their life.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Or they don't really know the impact exactly of a
long term use of the drug thyroid cancer.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
To quote this person in the Gea Tolentino, Yes, yes.
Speaker 6 (36:32):
You know, like the animals, the long term sidies that
have done on animals, many of them have thyroid cancer.
Like people report a lot of stomach pain and really
bad things, but also future side effects we don't know
about that might involve losing an organ, and we still
think it's worth it to get these the benefits that society
gives you for being thin, and so I think the
question that that should make us ask is why do
(36:53):
we allow thinness to hold this power in this society?
And how can we start asking ourselves that question? But
instead it seems like the question we're asking is like
how many people? How will insurance start paying for everyone's
zam big, which is depressing.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Just to put a button on that. I think it's
very interesting that weight Watchers has joined forces with wa
GOVI or with these weight loss medications. I think weight
loss companies are afraid they'll go out of business if
they don't embrace medical options.
Speaker 6 (37:24):
I think that that's true, and I think they also
know that because these drugs do not work at all.
The minute you're off it, many people are going to
be going on journeys with their doctors where like they
do lose enough weight that then they're no longer eligible
for the ozembic they were on, right, and so now
they need something like weight watchers in that interim period to.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Like to stabilize their weight after losing it right medication.
Speaker 6 (37:51):
If they go off it, they'll start experience experiencing that
extreme hunger and then like many of us in those moments,
will reach for a rigid diet plan that can help
us control what feels out of control but is actually
our body just trying to nourish us and get us
back to where it wants to be.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
And this cycle may continue, right and unless they get
back on the drug, and it's unclear the long term,
and they.
Speaker 6 (38:12):
Can just cycle back and forth because the weight watchers
won't work, and then they'll have a bench period and
then they'll be eligible for the ozombic again.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
And Emmaline even cite this leaked weight watchers memo or me, yes,
this is that part of their business model is that
it doesn't work.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Yes, there's just coming back.
Speaker 6 (38:29):
There was a like leaked memo where the CEO was
saying that because there's there's a really the average weight
watcher's customer, does it like four to six times the
whole like the if you're like a paid program member,
and the CEO is saying, well, yeah, of course that's
our business model.
Speaker 5 (38:42):
If it worked, we would be out of business.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
We'll be right back with Emmeline Kleine and my plus one,
my daughter Kerry Couric Monaghan. We're back with Emmeline Klein
and my co host du Jour Carrie Monaghan.
Speaker 6 (39:10):
Speaking of all of this weight cycling and the sort
of ways that anarexia for so long was understood as
the pinnacle of this disease hierarchy, and many of the
other disorders that I'm now talking about being very much
invalidated or associated with shame just weren't even understood or
around or recognized as diagnoses. And in the book I
write about Karen Carpenter, who died of anarexion one was
(39:32):
one of the first public figures to do so, and
cass Elliott, who died of what was then considered an
obesity related heart attack but was very likely due to
her lifelong struggle with disordered eating and very restrictive dieting
that she would talk about very publicly, but was never
recognized as disordered eating because she was large, And so
I was just wondering what those figures meant to you
(39:52):
at the time as a young woman.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
I write in my book how Karen Carpenter's death had
a huge impact on me, and I realized even though
I was bleiemic and she was anarexic, although I think
she might have been beliemic as well. I think a
lot of times you can be anorexic and beliemic, but
bliemic and anorexic is less common, right.
Speaker 5 (40:14):
Well, you can, I mean, there's just so much crossover
between all of them.
Speaker 7 (40:17):
And you had ans, yes, and also that weaing disorder,
not otherwise And I always wanted to be anorexic, which
is so sickond and of itself.
Speaker 5 (40:28):
Oh I did the I was the exactly.
Speaker 6 (40:30):
I mean, I when I first in seventh grade got
my first diagnosis, Like it's something I write about in
the book, I was.
Speaker 5 (40:36):
I'm ashamed to say this.
Speaker 6 (40:37):
Now, but I was so disappointed when I got my
eating disorder not otherwise specified diagnosis because I was like,
so you're just telling me I'm not good enough at anorexia.
And then that was obviously and then that diagnosis often
ends up being motivating, and it made me sicker because
I wanted to feel like I was you know what
I mean. And so it's just very scary. But anyway,
back to back to Karen and Casson, I agree with
(40:59):
you that there is I mean, Karen died using something
that makes you throw up, right, so she clearly did
suffer from bolimia as well. That was just not talked
about as much because we're so obsessed with talking about inerexia.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
I just think that cass Elliott, who was as talented
as Karen Carpenter and I love them both musically, was mocked.
Of course, the rumor was that she died she choked
on a ham sandwich, and I think that was a
way too honestly, was so cruel and people, I'm sure
(41:34):
late night comedians made fun of it.
Speaker 6 (41:37):
Well, there's an incredibly cruel joke that was made that
I mentioned in the book in like literally like a
movie in the two thousand and five where somebody is
the character says is talking about Karen Carpenter, and cass Elliott,
and is like, if they could have just shared the
ham sandwich, they'd both be alive today, which I think
is so cruel and also so emblematic of so many
of these issues, because it's serving to put these two
(41:59):
women who were suffering from the same pain at odds
and also and spit them against each other while also
mocking them both simultaneously. And it's also wildly oversimplifying the
issue and implying that, like, you know, women are idiots.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
I think you're right. I mean, I think cass Elliott,
knowing what we know now, deserves as much sympathy as
Karen Carpenter. I mean, they were both tragedies and both
I think manifestations of societal expectations of what a beautiful
or attractive woman should look like, and they were both
(42:38):
trying to achieve it, but obviously with very different outcomes,
and yet the source of their pain was very similar, and.
Speaker 3 (42:48):
Yet they both ended up dying from it completely.
Speaker 6 (42:51):
And it brings me back to the sort of first
of the first question you asked me about why it
was so important to me to make sure that sort
of story had no villains and also was attempting to
create this sort of ghost sisterhood or Coraline and also
and destroy the higher arps exactly, yes, because I you know,
(43:12):
like it just is so sad. Like I wish that
Karen Carpenter and cass Elliott could have gotten in a
room together and talked about how it felt to be
a woman in the public eye whose body was constantly
being analyzed, And I wonder if that conversation could have
helped both of them, and instead they were understood as
suffering from completely different issues.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
But I feel like there are villains in the book.
The villains are the executives and oh yeah.
Speaker 5 (43:33):
But the villain. There's no people that right, There's.
Speaker 7 (43:35):
No girl villains, right And in fact, you say, except
for the girl bosses.
Speaker 6 (43:39):
Yeah, okay, but they're being manipulated too, Okay.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
Okay, Emmeline, you right. I'm trying to find out what
might happen if we blamed someone other than each other
and ourselves for a change. So that leads to this question,
who is to blame and what can we do as
the society about it? Or is it just too ingrained
(44:04):
in our culture?
Speaker 6 (44:05):
I think that it is very ingrained, sadly, but I
don't think that it's impossible. I think the weight loss
industry is largely to blame. I think the medical establishment,
while in many ways well intentioned, is in its current
iteration exacerbating the issue rather than genuinely creating models that
I think aid in true recovery. But I think that
(44:27):
it made me really happy to hear you say right
at the beginning of this conversation, like, Oh, this whole
society has an eating disorder, and how are we going
to deal with it? Because I think that the first
step is literally saying that sentence allowed, which for so
long people haven't wanted to say. And a lot of
the companies that benefit from this issue want to keep
(44:50):
eating disorders understood is the clinical issue and not a
political issue or an economic.
Speaker 5 (44:54):
Issue at all, and not a social issue, because.
Speaker 6 (44:56):
If we can keep it siloed off in the medical establishment,
then everything else can keep on running. And so I think,
just even as earnest and simple as it seems, I
think having really honest conversations with people in your life
about what nourishing, what consuming food has meant to you
and the ways in which we've all engaged in self
(45:19):
harm in order to come closer to a beauty standard
that many of us don't even politically believe in but
are still subject to. Like the whims of I think
can change our perspective so much.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
How do we destroy the concept that beauty equals thinness?
You know, I interviewed a Harvard's psychologist named Mazarin Banagie.
Mazarine Banagi wrote a book called blind Spot, and it
says how our brains are wired to make connections from
the time we're very, very young, and so I think
(45:55):
when you're accosted by all these images of supposed beauty
and they all look the same, They're all thin, they
all have the same body type. Oftentimes they're the same color.
Although we're seeing more diversity and what is considered beautiful now,
we have to break that connection. And you know, I'm
(46:16):
sure when you were little, when I was little, fashion magazines, billboards, etc.
All these visual images just reinforce these unrealistic beauty standards.
What if from a very early age, from children's books
to all the visual stimuli we're faced with every day,
(46:36):
showed that that wasn't necessarily the case if we broke
that connection, I totally agree.
Speaker 6 (46:43):
I mean that would I don't have tons of faith
in this society to do that.
Speaker 5 (46:47):
But I completely agree with you, and I believe it.
Speaker 6 (46:49):
And there's a book called Unshrinking by Kate Mann that
just came out that's about fat phobia and is really amazing,
and she talks about being a fat woman and feeling
so much shame about it her whole life, and suffering
from any eating disorders, and then having a daughter being
what was one of the things that really helped her
(47:09):
finally recover, not wanting to teach her daughter to understand
beauty in the ways she was taught to understand it.
And she talks about being isolated in the pandemic and
actually being like, maybe a silver lining of this is
that I actually have an opportunity to not expose you
to like the billboards and to the magazines and to
(47:30):
the TV, but to curate an Instagram feed that I've
made and just show you all different types of bodies
when your mind is still very fertile and.
Speaker 5 (47:39):
Able to make those connections.
Speaker 6 (47:40):
And I, you know, was like crying when I read that,
and I thought that was really beautiful, and I think
that is a really amazing model. But what makes me
really scared is that most young people are on TikTok
and on Instagram, not getting that type of feed.
Speaker 5 (47:55):
At the end of the book, I call it a
feminism of attention.
Speaker 6 (47:58):
Like I wonder if if we listen, we've for so
long the stories we've told about both beauty and about
eating disorders are as narrow and as slim as the
bodies that we've been taught to want. And if we
tell if we listen to a wider range of stories
and let the stories twist and turn, I and also
(48:20):
look back farther than we have and really historicize this
beauty standard and it's like deeply misogynistic, deeply racist, deeply
capitalist roots, then I do think we can start to
unlearn it, because I know, at least for me, like
once I realized how many companies were profiting off of
the pain that I've been taught to feel about the
(48:41):
way I looked, it did start to change some of
what I think of as beautiful.
Speaker 1 (48:47):
There's so much more to this conversation. People really need
to get your book, which is profound in so many ways.
It's called dead Weight Essays on Hunger and Harm. Emmaline,
Thank you for writing it, and thank you for talking
with us about it. Today, and Carrie, thank you for
being my plus one.
Speaker 5 (49:07):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 6 (49:09):
This was an amazing conversation and I think maybe we
were starting to do some of the amazing unlearning I
was talking about.
Speaker 4 (49:16):
And I was honored to be here.
Speaker 5 (49:30):
Carrie.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
I think Emmaline's book is really revolutionary and that I've
never read something that is so expansive on this topic.
How did you feel when you were reading this book.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
I felt liberated and seen in a lot of ways.
I say liberated because you know, just the whole crux
of it is that bodies are built by systems and
to understand, you know, we've been lied to instead of
demonizing myself or you know, glorifying past versions of myself
(50:06):
when I was thinner, and just to feel a little
bit of personal responsibility taken off of my shoulders for
the way I have felt I was crazy when it
comes to food, eating, exercising, anorexia or the exia, bolimia,
(50:27):
all of that, just to you know, I think I
knew at some level, yes this is baked into our culture,
all the images, etc. But just like the level of
collusion going on, it was very satisfying to discover that
through reading the book.
Speaker 1 (50:44):
Did it remove some of the shame and some of
the kind of feelings you've had about your appearance or
your weight, or being less than or more than.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
Yeah, I mean, I think to see it describes so
eloquently the hierarchy of disorders. The sort of worshiping of
Thinness made me feel vindicated because I have worshiped or
glorified past thinner versions of myself. But then when I
think back to how I was doing at that.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
Time, iel miserable.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
I was really unhappy and so lonely. Just to know
that that's a societal problem, like the society is colluding
with the aneractic thinking, it's not just on an individual level,
and just to understand kind of the etymology of all
of it was really helpful for me, much less so
(51:39):
than it and it wasn't in a way that was
triggering to intellectualize all of this.
Speaker 1 (51:53):
Thanks for listening everyone. If you have a question for me,
a subject you want us to cover, or you want
to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world,
reach out. You can leave a short message at six
h nine five P one two five five five, or
you can send me a DM on Instagram. I would
love to hear from you. Next Question is a production
(52:15):
of iHeartMedia and Katie Kuric Media. The executive producers are Me,
Katie Kuric, and Courtney Ltz. Our supervising producer is Ryan Martz,
and our producers are Adriana Fazzio and Meredith Barnes. Julian
Weller composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode,
(52:35):
or to sign up for my newsletter wake Up Call,
go to the description in the podcast app, or visit
us at Katiecuric dot com. You can also find me
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