CW: Body Image & Eating Disorders
“I wish I could wear short sleeves like you. No one wants to see your arms when you get to this age”.
I have become a mere figment onto which elderly women take great pleasure in projecting their insecurities. I find myself being either unsolicitedly talked at, or uncomfortably talked about. Such has intensified over the course of the summer as I work with one destructively-insecure individual in particular. She parades around the room recounting heart-warming anecdotes, her radiant wisdom and wit among many of her notable characteristics. Upon first impression, I heeded her passion for life and love, but not her physique — though she so actively identified it as her hamartia.
I came to deeply understand through double-entendres and self-deprecating inflections that she was playing a part; masking her trauma with a comedic safety blanket. Not only is she riddled with insecurity, but had suffered silently from an eating disorder for the better part of her life. Though I am uncertain of the full story, I understand enough that my concern and empathy have become incessant. I understand enough to know that she has never received the treatment or attention this brutal illness so blatantly yearns for. During the long, hot days, our small group of employees would shuffle along the hallways, arms sore from moving chairs and pushing carts as she narrated tales from her youth. She brushed upon her extensive medical history, history of exercise addiction issues, and constant dieting. She mentioned her light meals being a result of her ongoing stomach problems. She touched upon her mother’s habits in the kitchen, of which I quickly realized was a root cause of the mental illness.
“My mother used to tell me to picture the grams of sugar in a bowl,” she said, upon thoroughly scanning the ingredients list on a package of Two-Bite Brownies. “And to think of it as poison. Now, why would you ever put poison into your body? You wouldn’t. So you should never eat sugar. Not that much anyway,” she preached. “Sugar is poison.”
How could a statement I had been trying to unlearn for so long roll off her tongue so easily at four-times my age? It was clear to me that her deeply-ingrained issues stemmed from a parent who’s own views were blinded by diet culture’s heavy hand. Societal standards had already hypnotized her mother, and had now set its sights upon a new target: her. An innocent and gullible victim, in which it would surely thrive. It is understandable that as a child she knew little more than her parents’ belief systems; beliefs that had been socially conditioned into them, and were not their own. Growing up in a brainwashed household, it was inevitable that the poor habits she developed in her youth had never been treated nor discussed as anything out of the ordinary. In fact, at the time, that was the ordinary.
Diet culture spread like the plague in the 50’s. With the popularization of the television, the media was able to preach its problematic gospel to the largest audience America had ever seen. Wherever a TV was in use, commercials were certain to inform women of their worth; if you wanted to be more valuable, you dieted! Because women are nothing more than a pretty picture, right? No matter your shape or size, you could be skinner! You had to be skinnier! Skinny = pretty! So you learned that to “look your best,” some foods were BAD and some foods were GOOD. Generations of women were being educated by the media, or by their mother’s who had been educated by the media, and taught to count, to restrict, to avoid, to categorize.
“Feel free to grab an ice cream sandwich,” I hear another senior co-worker yell to the attendees of the staff party. “And they’re only 90 calories, so don’t worry!”, she adds, gushing about having two because they’re so low calorically “you can”. Another woman, about 60, seizes one of the frozen treats and passes them down the table, “Take a few ladies, and plan your workout for tomorrow!” they chuckle, obliviously.
I hate potlucks.
This form of commentary is scarily normal amongst older women. So normal that it is customary to laugh it off, or at worst, add to it. I feel sorry for them. I feel sorry that this generation of women will never truly experience true food freedom. I feel sorry that they aren’t able to truly formulate nutritional thoughts and opinions of their own. I feel sorry that my coworker and friend, who is pushing 80, continues to wear long sleeves under her t-shirt, bathing herself in excessive sweat, out of fear that her lunch could be “seen in her arms”.
Eating disorders are parasitical — kill them before it does you.