“She’s really let herself go.” You can just hear it, can’t you, the gossipy curtain-twitching spitefulness with an undertone of salacious tabloid satisfaction.
And in theory, none of us should care about what the people inclined to make such statements think, let alone make (or fail to make) major life decisions because of them. But we’re creatures for whom gossip has long been a survival strategy (Dunbar, 1996), and we find it hard not to care.
And so, when it comes to “should I recover from my restrictive eating disorder?” or “should I keep going in my recovery even though I’m definitely at the point where no one would call me thin anymore?”, we let ourselves be swayed by the demeaning gendered barbs—or rather, by the imagining of them.
Many of my coaching clients have cited fear of people thinking they’ve let themselves go as a reason why they’re stalling in their recovery progress from eating disorders. None of my clients has ever given me an example of anyone actually saying this about them. Some of their evidence has been at least adjacent: the figure-obsessed salad-eating woman who says something lightly snarky about how presumably one is nearly done with recovery now, the faux-solicitous woman who gives the gentle nudge not to go too far and lose all the oh-so-handy thin privilege. But I’m still waiting for the report of the actual other human who has demonstrably said that sentence “she’s really let herself go” about another human who’s in recovery from an eating disorder.
Of course, though, it’ll have been said somewhere—or if not quite this, all the specific sentences that this one is the umbrella for. Because the benefit that this kind of remark offers the speaker is that it is a politically correct way to make a dig about someone’s size/shape/weight. It’s a shorthand for all those easy lazy associations of body size and composition with self-discipline or self-control, and also with self-care. It says that stopping keeping up appearances by staying thin (or trying to) means 1) losing willpower and 2) stopping taking care of yourself.
This isn’t just an eating disorder thing, of course. A woman contemplating jumping off the diet wagon will have the same kind of worries, even though calorie-restricted diets have (outside the anomaly that is anorexia nervosa) an appalling track record in actually working (e.g. Ge et al., 2020). The conflict may grow even knottier as a woman ages and starts to feel, perhaps around middle age and perhaps after childbearing, the weight of all the associations between controlling body size and “ageing well”. In an eloquently angry love letter to letting oneself go, Dayna Evans writes, “Being a woman is a little like putting on a pair of tight shoes at birth and then not taking them off until you die.” The tight shoes might be literal, as in Chinese foot-binding or Western stilettos. Or they might take other forms, literal ones like corsets and Spanx or metaphorical ones like diets and the desire to be tiny.
Yet all of this is a beautifully direct mesh with the preoccupations an eating disorder revolves around. Control is an anorexic cliché for a reason: It’s bound up with a lot of what lets it survive in many individuals for as long as it does. After years or decades of equating body size/shape/weight and/or energy intake with self-control, and years or decades of ingesting those pop-science précis of how deferred gratification measured by time spent resisting eating a marshmallow predicts your child’s net worth 50 years from now, the idea of switching to another value system is daunting. You’ve lived by this one a long time, you have strong evidence that a lot of other people also do, and so you infer that if you keep gaining weight, you’ll be switching admiration and envy for pity and criticism.
You may also worry about a predicted mismatch between how you feel and how you look. After poisoning a lot of your life with an excess of self-control, how will it feel to look like you have none? And you may worry about success itself: about doing this so properly that you do in fact stop caring, and about not caring becoming more or less equivalent with not knowing, indifference sliding into ignorance. This is the fear-filled image of being the fat idiot wandering around with a grin on her face, not only not giving a damn what anyone else thinks but not even realizing there’s anything to give a damn about.
The fear of exchanging thin and paranoid for fat and happy is, in a simple sense, a fear of succeeding. In one of anorexia’s impressively baffling volte-faces, the longed-for yet implausible not-caring becomes all too plausible—but as the nightmare not the dream. Perhaps the most reasonable part of this meta-paranoia, this insistence on remaining paranoid, is the prediction that any alternative would not be stable: Eventually I’ll snap out of the fantasy, I’ll realize how I really look, and I will not be able to bear the shame. Such predictions may have a history: an anorexic origin story in which the pudgy child was dragged into premature self-consciousness by the parent who inflicted some well-meaning body shaming or the boyfriend who made an offhand remark about how the other girls eat. Those early lessons about other people’s value systems are hard to grow away from.
And then there are a final couple of planks to this edifice that make it prototypically anorexic and hard to topple. The first is a catastrophizing assumption that to get better you’ll need to get massively fat; that the current level of restrictive eating habits is the only thing standing in the way of that. The second is an exorbitant requirement that a recovered life be perfect (e.g. absent all body insecurities). Both neatly rescue one from the discomfort of actually doing anything, because either the outcome of doing anything is bound to be hellish or at the very least it’s not bound to be heavenly.
So, how to break through the many-levelled defenses of that supreme block on living wholeheartedly, the fear of “letting oneself go”? Well, as we’ll explore in the next part of this post, the answer turns out to be living in the question itself, in the idea and the practice of letting go.
References
Dunbar, R. I. M. (1996). Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language. Harvard University Press. Google Books preview of 2010 edition here.
Ge, L., Sadeghirad, B., Ball, G. D., da Costa, B. R., Hitchcock, C. L., Svendrovski, A., ... & Johnston, B. C. (2020). Comparison of dietary macronutrient patterns of 14 popular named dietary programmes for weight and cardiovascular risk factor reduction in adults: Systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomised trials. British Medical Journal, 369, m696. Open-access here.
“Letting Yourself Go” as a Block to Recovery
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26.03.2024
“She’s really let herself go.” You can just hear it, can’t you, the gossipy curtain-twitching spitefulness with an undertone of salacious tabloid satisfaction.
And in theory, none of us should care about what the people inclined to make such statements think, let alone make (or fail to make) major life decisions because of them. But we’re creatures for whom gossip has long been a survival strategy (Dunbar, 1996), and we find it hard not to care.
And so, when it comes to “should I recover from my restrictive eating disorder?” or “should I keep going in my recovery even though I’m definitely at the point where no one would call me thin anymore?”, we let ourselves be swayed by the demeaning gendered barbs—or rather, by the imagining of them.
Many of my coaching clients have cited fear of people thinking they’ve let themselves go as a reason why they’re stalling in their recovery progress from eating disorders. None of my clients has ever given me an example of anyone actually saying this about them. Some of their evidence has been at least adjacent: the figure-obsessed salad-eating woman who says something lightly snarky about how presumably one is nearly done with recovery now, the faux-solicitous woman who gives the gentle nudge not to go too far and lose all the oh-so-handy thin privilege. But I’m still waiting for the report of the actual other human who has demonstrably said that sentence “she’s really let herself go” about another human who’s in recovery from an eating disorder.
Of course, though, it’ll have been said somewhere—or if not quite this, all the specific sentences that this one is the umbrella for. Because the benefit that this kind of remark........
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