Today I shared with someone my height and weight and then flexed my biceps to show how “toned” I am. This was not in boasting, but in discussing how harmful society’s expectations of women continue to be, even as we age. Maybe, even especially as we age. I grew up when Twiggy represented an ideal yet impossible body type for young girls and women. If you don’t remember the iconic wide eyed model from the 60’s & 70’s, her nickname says it all. Nee Leslie Dawson, she weighed a mere 92 pounds at 5’6” tall. Named “British Woman of the Year” in 1966 she claimed to never have dieted and attributed her stick like silhouette to a high metabolism and genes.
According to the CDC the average weight of American women in the 1960’s was 140 lbs with a height of 5’3”. By all accounts, we were shorter and larger than Twiggy but ever hopeful, as the diet industry encouraged us to climb on board their roller coaster ride. (Weight Watchers launched in 1963.) I often wonder if I would have declined that invitation, 10 years later at the age of 16, had my mother not warned me to “watch those thighs.” At 5’7” and 128 lbs there was a space between them so I still don’t know what she was talking about. But I believed her and spent the rest of my life in vigil mode. Thanks to her and all the messaging around me I believed that skinny was the ticket to success in all arenas of life. Hah!
Decades of “thinness” later I recall how many times people have told me they either envied my slender physique or assumed that it meant I had my act together. Or both. Most of them don’t know about the bulemic years, the exercise obsession, the numerous accidents due to low blood sugar from not eating, the self doubt that no matter what the scale said, I’m still not “something” enough. I know it’s ridiculous to equate one’s weight with one’s value and used to teach this as a Health Educator to patients who lived with extra weight and so much shame and self blame. And yet so do I for entirely different reasons even though my scale reads the same as when I was 16. In sharing today with a new person my frustration with this country’s ongoing thin bias, I recognized it’s really misplaced anger at the one person who could have saved me from it. Had I been “enough” in her eyes, who knows what I could have become?
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