Scale of values

[Composed 1/5/19]

This morning I got up and stepped on the scale, the way I usually do on Saturdays, the way I’m supposed to every weekend for the UCSD medical research study that my son and I are currently participating in. The blue digital numbers flashed 140.2. Unacceptable. 139.9 is the absolute upper barrier of what my mind will tolerate these days without panic. I took off my fuzzy, long-sleeved pajama top, used the toilet, and got back on the scale. Now the answer was 139.3. Still high, but within permissible bounds. (There is, of course, no lower limit established on ‘permissible.’ 134.9 is the lowest figure I’ve ever recorded, so that’s what I think of as the bottom of the range.) I exhaled and promised myself to stay away from snacks for the next few days. With luck, I thought, I might even reconfigure my usual fluctuation cycle so that I hit the high point on the weekend and the low point near Wednesdays, when we have the official weekly weigh-in for the research program.

I went downstairs to empty the dishwasher and get my gym bag together for 8 a.m. Zumba. As I put the dishes away, I focused on positive, calming thoughts: Don’t get upset. It’s okay to weigh whatever you weigh. It’s just a number. Then, trying to address the underlying fear as directly as possible, I made myself think the words: You are just as good and valuable a human being at 140 pounds as you are at 135.

And then I stopped, struck by the layers of insanity in that sentence.

You are just as good and valuable a human being at 140 pounds as you are at 135.

How in the ever loving fuck did I get here? Once upon a time I was a curvy-and-proud size 14. I went a decade without even owning a scale; my only dietary goal for most of my life was to avoid ever acquiring an eating disorder. How did I get so caught up in diet culture that this “affirmation” could even occur to me, let alone be reassuring instead of ludicrously unnecessary?

About that medical research study I mentioned earlier: I wasn’t being entirely upfront there. It’s a diet study for overweight children. My ten-year-old, who skates along the edge of the BMI chart between “healthy” and “overweight,” asked to take part in it, wholly for the money (his share will buy quite a few new games for his Nintendo Switch). I have to attend as the parent. As my first prolonged, direct engagement with diet culture -- and in a highly science-oriented and institutional form, at that -- it’s been an eye-opener. From the beginning I have openly refused to participate in any of the recommended calorie counting or portion measuring. I don’t make my son do any, either. In the four months we have completed so far (out of six), he’s tried a few new fruits and vegetables and talked a lot about making choices. He doesn’t seem to be much affected by the program otherwise, although he occasionally reads the backs of boxes.

For me, however, it’s been a challenge to resist the underlying message, which is, as one of my favorite fictional characters would put it, “Constant vigilance!” Week after week, the seminar leaders discuss food as a problem to solve. How can we eliminate the role that food traditionally plays in family celebrations? How can we limit emotional eating? How can we prepare for the temptations of the holiday season? Just before Christmas break, they invited us to share what progress our kids had made in changing their habits. The other parents in the room proudly recounted how their children had started using measuring cups for their meals, taken carrot sticks along to birthday parties, or told their grandmas not to send any more cookies in the mail. I felt sick. But the attitude seeps into my head anyway, in the form of shame at my lapses in control, in the form of hoping for a “good” number for my chart every Wednesday.

Want to hear the kicker? One of the seminar leaders, one of these people telling us every week that following these steps will lead to health and happiness, one of these people who works at a premier research facility conducting studies on weight loss -- is obese.

Searching for a balance of messages, I’ve been reading some radical body positivity blogs for the last few months. They’re a far cry from Dove commercials and Rihanna’s lingerie line. Forget the cultural debate over what we mean by a “healthy” weight; they argue that the assumption that health itself is desirable is ableist and classist. I don’t often agree with this side either, though. I know, for example, that I feel better and have more energy today at 140 than I did three years ago at a prediabetic 175. I do think that there is such a thing as a weight threshold beyond which the odds of being healthy are vanishingly small. I do believe we have a moral obligation to strive for health -- not to the world at large, not to strangers on the street, but to ourselves and the people who love us, to give them and us the gifts of our best selves.

But damned if that thought didn’t pull me up short. You are just as good and valuable a human being at 140 pounds as you are at 135.

If anyone else in my life said they had to remind themselves not to worry about five pounds, I would agree wholeheartedly they were making a fuss over nothing — something not just minor, but practically undetectable. If that concern was tied not just to their physical appearance but to the idea of their being a worthwhile person, I would worry about their mental health. But it’s not another person having that thought; it’s me. The fact that I even linked those two concepts -- that my brain didn’t reassure me with “you’re just as beautiful” but with “you’re just as good a person” -- kind of terrifies me, because it’s not that I think the first claim is unimportant. It’s that I conceded the point without even trying to argue it. Okay, I might not look as good, BUT…. And because it means that I’m worried about something bigger than appearance. I’m worried about essence and identity, and I have to remind myself consciously that those are not a function of the body.

I don’t have a happy ending for this piece. I’m still struggling. And I have a feeling I will be for a long time to come. I know that in publishing this, the part that was the hardest to write -- the actual numbers on the scale -- will be the likeliest target of scorn. Because yeah, I know: my privilege is showing. I was never fat enough that people called me fat, at least in my hearing. And now I’m thin enough that people call me thin. And it’s come with a heaping side of anxiety that I constantly work to get rid of.

Diet culture sucks.