Dear Fat Nutritionist,

Here’s a question from a first-time visiting guy: how would you rate your awareness that you’re so beautiful it’s kind of totally ridiculous? You know, on a scale from 1 for “totally oblivious” to 10 for “painfully aware, I get messages like this every day.”

Have an awesome week … and good luck with the site!

-Anon

Hey Anon,

I appreciate the compliment, and it’s charmingly stated. You probably intended it as a rhetorical question, but if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to tell you a story about my awareness of my own beauty.

When I was very little, I became aware that I was considered more valuable to other people when I looked a certain way. On days when my mother curled my hair and dressed me in ruffles, I was treated with a kind of fawning admiration by the adults I encountered. When she didn’t, and as I grew older, out of that perfectly sweet toddler age and into a considerably more awkward and willful one, the more invisible I seemed to become.

I proceeded through childhood seeing romantic movies, even cartoons, that depicted the lives and problems of conventionally beautiful people as more important, and endlessly more fascinating, than the lives and problems of the dowdy or traditionally unattractive.

Do you remember how, in ancient times, and even up through the past several hundred years, plays and novels and epics almost exclusively concerned themselves with the lives of royalty, the nobility, or, at least, the very, very wealthy? And have you noticed that now, in this supposedly classless modern society of ours, the stories of the rich and powerful have simply been exchanged for the stories of the young and beautiful? In 1847, Jane Eyre was considered a startling departure from this convention — and it kinda still is. I’m sure you’ve noticed. At any rate, from a very young age, I did.

I spent my girlhood, like many American girlhoods are spent, wishing fervently to become beautiful. When I was ridiculed in school, when I was ignored or picked on or called a nerd, I turned to the fantasy of sudden beauty as some kind of protector-saint, as though it could save me from the pain of being a human among other humans. Unfortunately (I thought) for me, I was an awkward kid, a tomboy with straight brown hair and glasses, and a pearish figure unaccommodated by the fashionable clothes of the day.

I began to seek beauty like a person possessed, starting around age 11. I read fashion magazines and bought makeup. I put the makeup on. I looked ridiculous, but I kept practicing. I bought clothes, and did it all wrong and got laughed at and made fun of, but I kept trying. I had a feeling that if I could just find the combination to this particular padlock, I would be liked by the right people, I would have the right sort of life, and I wouldn’t have to feel like an alien or an outcast anymore.

Once I hit puberty around 12, I basically looked like a grown-up and stayed that way. People thought I was an adult when I was still in gradeschool. Objectively, my looks did not actually change very much between the ages of 12 and 16.

So imagine my surprise when, one morning when I was 16, I got the combination right — the fucking padlock opened.

At that point, I’d actually sort of given up on the whole enterprise of becoming fashionable, and thought to myself, “Fuck it. I’m just going to do whatever I like.” Since I have a kind of eccentric personal style, this meant styling myself in a way that would have been right at home circa 1915. The previous evening, I’d bobbed my hair and received some new clothes in the mail. All the years of making myself look absurd with makeup had actually made me quite skilled with it.

I got dressed and went to school as usual — pleased with myself, but not expecting anyone else to give a rat’s ass. I walked into school where, just the previous day, I’d been ignored, completely invisible, and considered nerdy and unfashionable and weird. As the doors opened, the first thing I heard was, “SHE LOOKS LIKE A MODEL,” loudly stated by the most intimidating punk of the school to his entire group of intimidating friends.

I froze, half-mortified and half-transfixed. It was one of the few times I’d heard anyone comment positively on my appearance since I was a toddler. It was exactly what I’d been craving for so many years; how could I not feel at least partly pleased? But I was also taken aback — this was not, after all, what I was going after when I’d gotten dressed that morning. Still…it was not exactly a bad result, no? Surely my life would now get better?

Sadly, I realized too clearly that I was not, objectively, “beautiful.” I realized that beauty was not a static thing, not a fixed commodity, and that there were very few people in the world who rolled out of bed looking the cultural ideal. And I was certainly not one of them.

For me, beauty was a costume I put on in the morning and took off at night, when I was finally alone with myself. I knew this, and it made me nervous as all hell, frightened that someone would see through my disguise and take away the status I’d finally, accidentally, managed to achieve.

I began to feel an external obligation to put on my beauty costume, every single day. I was unbearably nervous to leave the house without it. Sometimes it took hours. Sometimes it meant getting up at 5am. Sometimes I rebelled — there was a period where I refused to wash my laundry, to do anything but lay in bed most of the day, and I would literally pick my clothes up off the floor and put them on, then tramp through the mud in my heeled oxfords and long skirts to school.

Pretty soon, I stopped leaving the house as much as possible.

There was another reason for this — when I reached puberty, but not quite fashionability, at age 12, I had my induction into the world of womanhood via the ritual hazing of sexual harassment. I was tormented, squeezed, hissed at, touched, groped, fondled, and pulled forcibly into people’s laps at school.

Do not misunderstand: this was not flirting. It was humiliation and cruelty. These people were not interested in me as a human being; they did not have crushes on me; they did not care for me. It was degradation, plain and simple. And I wanted no part of it. I physically and vociferously fought back. But I was confused — I did not understand why it happened, what I’d done to deserve it, and why no one came to my aid.

As bad as this was, it only got worse when I started dressing in beauty drag. I began attracting the attention of perfect strangers, of people much older than me, people who didn’t just mean to humiliate me, but who actually meant me harm. I went from feeling like an invisible person who was occasionally objectified for other people’s pleasure, to being a deer in hunting season. I was highly visible, something about me was now considered highly desirable, and I was no longer just vulnerable to attack — I was actively targeted because of the way I looked. My life and physical safety were threatened more than once.

My peers also seemed continually amazed to discover that I was intelligent, as though the previous ten years — when I’d been known by reputation as a school-nerd — were blotted out completely by my changed appearance.

Even so, boys at school wanted nothing to do with me — except to talk to their friends about how badly I needed to be fucked — and girls who weren’t already my friends started kissing up to me because my status was now higher. I rebuffed them. I told them to fuck off (in my head.) But I was desperately lonely.

As I mentioned, I started becoming afraid to leave the house. A computer nerd from way back, I started using IRC a lot in order to talk to people in a context where I could control how/when to reveal my sex and my appearance.

I had internet boyfriends, who sent me mix tapes, instead of real relationships because I thought I could keep myself safe that way. I was almost completely isolated.

I’d been depressed since about age 12 (SHOCKER), but I was finally diagnosed with depression formally by a therapist who told me, “You look like a Maxfield Parrish painting.”

My last year of high school, I started to fuck around with my beauty disguise. I played with the levels of visibility I could achieve, I suppose as some manner of taking back control over this thing that had gotten entirely out of hand. I dressed up some days, and then, other days, I’d wear running shoes, old jeans, my mom’s jacket and glasses.

Once, a kid I didn’t know approached me at school as I sat in my habitual spot in the commons, doing homework.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I have to ask — are you the same girl who normally sits here?”

“Yeah…?”

“I mean, you normally wear a long dress, right? And no glasses?”

“Yes.”

“You just — you look like a completely different girl. Wow. I thought you were someone else.” And he walked away, shaking his head a bit.

I was oddly pleased by this, but it also reinforced my knowledge that the beauty thing was just a disguise, a costume.

In college, when I was 18, I saw a boy in my mythology class who seemed interesting. He took absolutely no notice of me for several weeks, dressed in my jeans and army surplus jacket. I decided to conduct an experiment: for the next class, I would dress up and see what happened.

What happened was he came and sat by me, asked me if I was new in the class, then carried my books while walking me to my dad’s car when class was over. The only thing different was my mode of dress.

I am older now and a lot fatter, but I still can manage to put on the costume when I need to. I am conscious that I am treated differently when wearing beauty: better in certain circumstances, worse in others. I am sexually harassed more on the street, but receive better service and kinder attentions from people. I get more attention, but people, perhaps, take me less seriously.

I made the conscious decision, when I started this website, that I would use an attractive picture of myself on the front page. Because being fat in this world is already a black mark against me, I knew I would have to tap some of the status that my false beauty can afford to partially make up for that. I knew my writing would be more likely to be read, and people would be more interested in hearing me out, perhaps even giving me media coverage, if they thought I were beautiful.

The truth is the same as it has always been: I’m not actually beautiful. I’m simply and idiosyncratically myself. Beauty is a cultural construct designed to keep people balanced on a knife-edge of anxiety over the potential loss of status, and the rabid desire to gain it. That knife-edge is so slender that hardly anyone, as I said before, rolls out of bed in the morning and balances on it effortlessly. Those who do are highly paid to do just that.

There will come a time when this costume no longer fits, when I am old enough and changed enough that no amount of makeup, no hairstyle, no set of clothes will be able to obscure my nature to the extent necessary to imitate cultural standards of beauty. When that happens, I imagine I will grieve, but I will also feel relief.

So, to answer your original question, the answer is somewhere around 152. Not because I’m constantly showered in praise for my looks, but because I deliberately construct or deconstruct this papier-mâché facade in front of my mirror, depending on what needs to get done that day.

Oh, and I married the internet boyfriend who sent me the most mix tapes.

Warmly,
Michelle

P.S. I hope you don’t mind, but I’m publishing this email :)

Dear Michelle,

I’m wondering what it’s like to be a fat nutritionist. Just to give you my background, I’m in recovery from an eating disorder. I’ve worked with two nutritionists. My first nutritionist was wonderful and taught me a lot about nutrition. My current nutritionist is absolutely mind-blowing and is the most talented eating disorders treatment provider that I have come across. I hate to admit this, but to be honest, my nutritionists’ weights had a big impact on how much I am able to trust them. This is also true for most of the other eating disordered people that I know. I know that this thinking is disordered because, rationally speaking, I really believe in Health at Every Size.

Have you found that your weight impacts your relationships with your clients?

Have you found that your weight has come under fire from others in the field?

Thanks,
Anon

Hey Anon,

I’ve been mulling over your question since yesterday, and I think what it comes down to is this:

People are comfortable with other people for lots of different reasons.

For instance, when I’m choosing a doctor, I have the choice to go with a man or a woman. If I don’t like the way the doctor talks to me, or something about her/his office, or receptionist, or, hell, even their clothing choice, I get to pick another doctor. And this is not only allowed, but tacitly encouraged by just about everyone.

After all, how can you be expected to be vulnerable and open, and to do good work with someone you’re not 100% comfortable with? Even seemingly “silly” reasons for discomfort may be getting at a deeper issue that deserves to be heard and addressed.

So, for that reason, I really don’t mind if someone chooses not to work with me due to my body size. That is absolutely their right.

On a personal level, yes, it would hurt if someone came out and said to me, “I don’t want to work with you because of the way you look.” But, luckily, the way it works out is, no one ever does that. They simply avoid me, move onto the next practitioner, and hope for the best. I never have to know people’s various reasons for not choosing to work with me.

And, especially for people with eating disorders who are at a certain stage of recovery, I can totally understand not wanting to work with a fat nutritionist, or doctor, or whathaveyou. It only makes sense, in the context of the disorder, and I don’t think I would feel particularly hurt by that — it’s the reality of that disease, unfortunately, but as people recover, I think they are likely to get past that kind of thinking.

As far as my colleagues go, no — I’ve never had anyone question my competence due to my body size, and I’ve been hired for some pretty advanced jobs, given that I’m still a student. I worked in an outpatient diabetes clinic with very traditional, weight-loss-oriented dietitians, and they seemed to love me. They chose me over thin candidates who had their degrees finished. They never questioned me about my weight, and were willing to frankly discuss with me their concerns about their patients’ weights. They listened to me when I asked critical questions about the efficacy of weight loss treatments.

I’ve worked in various inpatient areas, and again, my weight never seemed to be an issue. I also worked in an outpatient cancer clinic — in both of these circumstances, the main point of my job was to encourage people to eat as much as humanly possible, because malnutrition was the biggest risk for these populations. I enjoyed it, and seemed well-suited to it.

I work in eating disorders occasionally, though not directly with the patients. I think that, more important than my body size, is my attitude toward food, and myself, and the world. I’m positive about food. I’m comfortable with myself. And I expect good things from the world. I think that, even in this rather sensitive area, these parts of my personality contribute more to my competence at work than my body size.

Anyway, thanks for writing and being so candid. Best of luck to you in your continued recovery. Don’t ever let the bastards grind you down.

As ever,
Michelle

Just the other day, I received the following wonderful letter, and nearly broke my spine tripping over myself to thank the writer for writing it:

Dear Fat Nutritionist,

I am trying to improve my diet by adding things to it, in recognition of the fact that one’s diet is a vital source of vitamins and minerals. So far I have added a daily serving of orange peaches (about the only thing from the orange-vegetables list that I like) and a serving of green vegetables, and I have been eating fish at least twice a week. (I’m giving myself a gold star for that, because it’s progress even though I have far to go. Seriously, eight servings of vegetables every day?)

What I’d like to know is whether there is any truth to the idea that nutrition-free additions to nutritious foods make them less nutritious. Is there something about pouring caesar dressing on a bowl of romaine lettuce that makes the lettuce less nutritious? Are chocolate coated almonds less almondy than unsalted ones? Does cooking my zucchini in butter make it less zucchiniful?

I know these things raise the count of calories and calories-from-fat, but these are things that I am deliberately ignoring.

Thanks Fat Nutritionist,
Bookwyrm

Dear Bookwyrm,

Wow. I’m actually really impressed with how you’re stretching your food-related horizons, especially with more “challenging” foods like fish and vegetables. I’m not a huge vegetable fan myself, so I know that can be a rough one. And as far as the eight-a-day goes, eeeehhh — I treat all those rules as more of a suggestion from a super-paranoid health-freak friend. Which is to say, with salt.

Lots of it.

So, in response to your question, “What I’d like to know is whether there is any truth to the idea that nutrition-free additions to nutritious foods make them less nutritious. Is there something about pouring caesar dressing on a bowl of romaine lettuce that makes the lettuce less nutritious? Are chocolate coated almonds less almondy than unsalted ones? Does cooking my zucchini in butter make it less zucchiniful?”

Basically — no.

Stuff doesn’t magically become less nutritious because you add butter or dressing. There are always tons of crazy nutrient-nutrient interactions, but many of them are so miniscule, or there are so many of them going on at once, that you’d drive yourself crazy trying to account for them all.

You can also always point out to any random nutrition police that, for every nutrient interaction that actively interferes with absorption (like calcium interfering with iron), there’s another nutrient interaction that enhances absorption (like vitamin C with iron.)

So, basically, let’s assume it all evens out. Roughly speaking.

The wider the variety of food you learn to eat, the better your nutrient intake becomes. So, whatever gets the food up off your plate and into your mouth is effectively enhancing its nutritional value.

Because:

1. You’ll eat it today, and
2. You’ll like it enough that you might eat it again another time, and
3. You’re going to be way more likely to stretch those food horizons even farther in the future, since you’ve had awesome experiences with, I don’t know, gravy on your broccoli.

And, going even further, a lot of flavour-enhancers (especially the fatty ones, like butter and oil and salad dressings) actually improve your ability to absorb nutrients in the food (fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K.) What’s more, fat slows down food on its trip through your gut — meaning, your gut gets more time to absorb all the goodness.

Now, of course, it is true that cutting, mashing, and cooking vegetables (and other foods) can destroy certain sensitive vitamins, as does letting them sit in the fridge too long, blah-de-blah-de-blah-everything-you’ve-ever-read-in-a-dry-nutrition-advice-column-blah-de-blah.

But, honestly, it’s really freaking hard to come by food that is so totally bereft of nutritional value that this is going to make much of an impact — assuming you eat enough food to begin with, which most people living in rich countries do. If you’ve got a food-security problem, that’s a whole other ball of wax that needs to be addressed before you go around worrying whether your broccoli is is broccolicious as it can possibly be.

So, bottom line? If you’re eating actual food, and eating multiple food groups, and not starving or unduly restricting yourself, then yay. You’re doing well.

And anything you can do to make that food tastier, sexier, and more likely to end up in your mouth? Go for it.

Hope this helps,
Michelle

Join the FOOD-FIGHT!!!! in comments.

It’s going to take me a little while to get caught up on responding to comments, but thank you so much for the enthusiastic response and encouragement. It means a hell of a lot to someone as petrified as I have been lately.

I’ve just had a letter from a dear reader who shall remain anonymous.

Dear Fat Nutritionist,

I am fat and short — just over five feet and around 225 pounds, to be exact. My husband is medium height, muscular, and not fat, around five feet and eight inches, and around 155 pounds. My question is about our daughter.

She appears to take after my husband in body shape and eating patterns. She is around the 50th percentile for height and the 25th percentile for weight at four years old. Right now, she looks healthy, muscular and lean, with a little bit of a tummy (very kissable).

She loves to eat a variety of things, usually not a whole lot at once, but more in the form of snacks and small meals. We offer her a variety of foods and she eats a good diet, overall, but she also loves ice cream and cake. Aside from the ice cream and goldfish crackers, most of what she eats is homemade.
My question is this (and it feels so neurotic to ask it): Is it possible that I could make her fat, when she doesn’t seem to be destined to be?

I worry about giving in to her desires for a serving or two of ice cream each day, or homemade unfrosted cake. I don’t want to create power struggles over food. I try to have things around that she likes, or we make them for her from scratch, so that they don’t become “forbidden foods.” Thanks mostly to her dad, she does associate some foods with feeling better if she is upset, but generally, I’ve tried to set the example that food is mostly for helping us to have energy, to grow, to thrive, and sometimes also to have fun or celebrate, or enjoy time together.

I let her know all of the time how beautiful she is. How amazing her body and her mind and her whole self are. I do not put myself down in front of her. If she is predisposed to be fat, I think I can be a good role model for her, overall, of good body image and health at every size, but if she has a chance to avoid becoming fat, I want that for her. Oh, this just sounds so neurotic.

So, is there something I need to be doing differently? I am working on my own issues of being a fat kid and fat adult, and try my absolute best not to project this on to her. If I feed her well, teach her to honor her body’s hunger and drive for movement, model showing respect to my own body, provide her with opportunties for creativity and tons and tons of parental love, will she turn out okay on the body image and health front? I thought I had rejected the obesity crisis crap — but when it comes to her, it goes right to my guilt center.

Signed,
Am I Making Her Fat?

Before I begin, let me say, wow. You obviously — and pardon the expression, please — love the shit out of your daughter. What an incredibly lucky girl she is to have someone like you looking out for her.

Now, I think you know all of the things I am about to say. Nevertheless, I think it will do you good to hear them anyway. If only for your own peace of mind.

First, you can’t make someone fat against their body’s will.

And even if you could, as soon as they were removed from your fatty influence, they wouldn’t stay fat. If everything in their genetic makeup resisted fatness, there is nothing you or I could do — short of strapping a person down and giving them a 24/7 IV drip of whipping cream and Hershey’s syrup, and probably not even then — to make them permanently, irrevocably fat.

The rub is, a hell of a lot of us seem to have a genotype that supports weight gain, even if not all of us actively express it. And that, of course, is where things get tricky. But this is an important philosophical point to make, especially if you believe in natural selection — if there were not a decided survival advantage to having the potential to gain weight and become fat, balanced against comparatively minimal risk, then that genotype wouldn’t exist, except as a rare medical anomaly. It certainly wouldn’t be as prominent as it appears to be currently. As things are, most of us seem to have the ability, even the propensity, to gain weight in an abundant environment.

Like many people, your daughter very well might have a genotype that supports weight gain, given the right environment.

Which brings us to our second point: why the hell shouldn’t she?

From her body’s point of view, the trendy moral panic of the day doesn’t matter. What matters are the odds of survival and reproduction. If you’re a betting woman, I’d advise you to go with Mother Nature on this one. You obviously love and want to protect your daughter — luckily, so does her body. You’re on the same team. Go team.

The third thing is, I can totally understand why you’d worry about this.

No one in this culture wants their kid to be the potential victim of fat-bashing. Just as no parent wants their kid to be the potential victim of gay-bashing. Parents have a visceral urge to protect their children from a cruel culture by helping them fly under the radar. It’s understandable.

The problem with this is — what if your kid is destined, against all contrary efforts, to be fat? Or gay?

Trying to cloak them from the radar denies the basic fact of who they are. It tells them, in no uncertain terms, that they are not okay. And the problem is, a kid might not be able to parse the distinction between you trying to protect them from a culture that finds them not okay, and you, yourself, thinking they are not okay.

That’s exactly what you don’t want. Fat or thin, you’ve got to love them anyway.

To get to some of the more practical parts of your letter, AIMHF, do you need to do anything different with regard to feeding her? I don’t know. It sounds like you’re doing pretty well, actually.

My own tendency is to suggest people have regular, sit-down mealtimes and snacks.

And to practice the division of responsibility, meaning — the parent decides what food gets served, where, and when, but then leaves it entirely up to the kid to decide how much to eat.

The dessert question can be a tricky one. And, given that I don’t have children myself, I can’t give full credit to the intricacies of dealing with this in real life. But, theoretically, the idea is to serve dessert as part of the main meal.

Set a serving of dessert at everyone’s plate along with the meal, and don’t give “seconds.”

But don’t take this as a license to get too restrictive — I don’t mean, give her a teaspoon of ice cream once a day and then say “NO MORE FOR YOU, FATTY!” when she asks. I mean, give her a little bowl of it. Depending on how old she is, and how much capacity her stomach has, I’m sure you can trust yourself to pick out what you think of as a “normal” amount.

Another thing about sweets and desserts — there’s a reason she likes them so much, and it has nothing, necessarily, to do with her future as a Confirmed Fatty. You already know this, AIMHF, but I’m going to say it for the sake of my readers: little kids are metabolically active. Meaning, their energy requirements, per unit body mass, are huge. Meaning, they naturally seek out energy-dense foods — like concentrated sugars and fats. Meaning candy, cake, and ice cream.

Meaning, kids are perfectly normal for liking, even for obsessing a little, about these things.

The way to deal with it, in my opinion, is not to make it a big deal. It’s part of a stage they’re going through physically, as well as mentally. Their bodies want the stuff, badly, and their mind is learning what their physical limits are, what makes them feel good, and what makes them sick. This is a valuable learning process — one that I don’t think any child should be denied.

My thought, then, is this: on a daily basis, give your kid dessert in the way I’ve described. Maybe give a dessert at BOTH lunch and dinner, if you like. But feed it along with the meal, like it’s no big deal, it’s no different from other foods. If asked, the only reason seconds aren’t given is because desserts are really filling, and you’ve got to save room for the other foods that give you other nutrients you need. And we’ll have dessert again at dinner. And tomorrow. And the next day.

But, periodically (Ellyn Satter suggests at some snack times), perhaps on holidays that feature sweets as a centrepiece, give your kid the opportunity to eat more liberally. Not because WOOHOO WE HAVE TO CELEBRATE HOLIDAYS BY MAKING OURSELVES SICK, but because I strongly believe that many kids will learn about how to balance their eating by, occasionally, totally messing up. Just like part of learning to ride a bike is, occasionally, totally falling off.

Plan for these occasions, if you can. And make them time-limited. Don’t encourage bingeing, God forbid — in fact, don’t say anything about the food, unless asked. And then just say, “Yes, you may.” And let her test the waters on her own. Be sympathetic if she gets a tummyache. Don’t be overbearing. Let her figure it out — she will, I promise.

I was a kid myself, not so very long ago. It only took once or twice for me to figure this one out.

If she’s anywhere near as smart and wonderful as you are, AIMHF, she will figure it out too. And you’re not neurotic for worrying about this — you live in a messed up culture, and you’re swimming against the current to do everything you can for your daughter.

Keep swimming, and you’ll both be fine.

Much love,
Michelle

Please feel free to send in letters and questions either in comments, or by emailing michelle at fatnutritionist dot com.