This Is Big by Marisa Meltzer (2020)
This Is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World (and Me) by Marisa Meltzer (2020)
Prologue
Later Jean would write, “Most fat people need to be hurt in some way in order to be jolted into taking action and doing something for themselves. Something has got to happen to demoralize you suddenly and completely before you see the light.”
Introduction
But no matter how unattainable perfection may be, working toward it-as opposed to working toward self-acceptance-is satisfying in its own way. There’s action involved in inching closer to a goal, even one you can’t attain-counting calories, working out, weighing in. At least you’re aiming for something tangible (7).
Chapter One: I Was Even a Fat Child
Jean’s obsession with her body reflected the relatively new phenomenon of blue-collar families trying to lose weight, once the pursuit of the wealthy. By the World War II era Jean graduated into, being fat was deeply entrenched in American culture as bad-undesirable, lazy, and inviting mockery. Jean dreaded that fate for herself.
The urge to diet doesn’t come solely from vanity, or family, or habit, or the desire for better health, or society. The best summation I have found is in Hillel Schwartz’s book Never Satisfied, a history of dieting in America.
The desire to be slim is not simply a result of fashion. It must be understood in terms of a confluence of movements in the sciences and in dance, in home economics and political economy, in medical technology and food marketing, in evangelical religion and life insurance. Our sense of the body, of its heft and momentum, is shaped more by the theater of our lives than by our costume. Our furniture, our toys, our architecture, our etiquette are designed for, or impel us toward, a certain kind of body and a certain feeling of weight.
What is considered fat and thin is constantly constructed and updated, subject to the whims of society as much as anything else. While dieting sits at the center of so many seemingly unrelated movements and ideas, the fact is that it places a human being in the middle of these conflicts. Dieting holds out the promise that much can be solved by changing a single person (13-4).
Gradually, in the years from 1880 to 1920, there was a shift in cultural norms; if you were fat, you were not just undesirable; you were physically and morally bad, and that went for women as well as men. While being called plump was once considered a compliment for a woman, meaning she was robust and of optimal health for childbearing (a woman’s primary goal), that ideal changed. The new paragon was personified by the Gibson Girls in the pen-and-ink drawings of Charles Dana Gibson, idealized women with slender, hourglass figures. Being fat became about abundance of appetite, of wanting too much and being lazy on top of that. By 1898, the Ladies’ Home Journal (which in 1903 became the first magazine to hit a million subscribers) began a monthly series of domestic lessons written by one Mrs. S. T. Rorer that covered topics like indigestion and avoiding overeating rich foods. In 1910, the Chicago Daily Tribune asked, “Are society women literally killing themselves to keep thin?” In 1911, Good Housekeeping published a satirical essay by Maria Middlebury (possibly a pseudonym, given that the byline never again appeared in their archive of writers, which included Edna St. Vincent Millay and Virginia Woolf) called “My Week Without Food.” It began with a flourish: “Having been always a more than average healthy person, I found myself in middle age confronted with gouty conditions that culminated in arthritis in the finger joints, a disease which slowly but surely disables the hands.” This condition was incurable, her family doctor said. “From that moment dated my fall from the ranks of common-sense, normal women, to the army of cranks and faddists…I chanced upon some articles about fasting, and thought they pointed out a possible road to salvation.” The first day she had a tablespoon of coffee to prevent a headache; it didn’t work. The second day she stared into space and thought of nothing but food. After a brief respite of feeling “light and supple,” she felt like she was getting the flu. Apart from drinking some juice, she stuck to her no-food diet. Her weight went from 170 to 154. At the end, she wrote, “I printed out a neat little card reading: Yes, I’ve stopped now. No, not very bad. Sixteen pounds. Yes, I know I look ten years older, but I shall be younger in a week. No, I’m not eating more than usual now, etc.”
World War I was another turning point. The American government’s propaganda posters from the era encouraged consumers to buy food with thought and serve just enough; some exhorted civilians to observe a meatless day and wheatless days to help conserve food for the troops. Weight was quickly becoming a national concern. Bathroom scales had arrived in American homes soon after the First World War, and the maintenance of weight could now become a constant, at-home surveillance. The concept of the calorie was popularized by the doctor and health columnist Lulu Hunt Peters, whose book Diet and Health with Key to the Calories was a bestseller in 1918. Peters wrote of how she had lost over fifty pounds by counting calories and assured her readers that she knew firsthand the pain of being fat and the glory that awaited them if they could learn to resist temptation (15-7).
Chapter Six: When I Fall, I Fall Hard
Food has always been synonymous with breaking the rules for me, first my parents’ and now my own. I think of food in terms of moral value and order accordingly. Do I want to be good right now? Or am I being bad? Eating, for me, is really about transgression, a rebellion against myself. I’ve never understood it better than when I heard the psychotherapist Esther Perel talking about infidelity on a podcast. She said, “Something about breaking your own rules is intensely liberating. It makes you feel for the first time that you once again have a say, an agency over your life…not boxed in, even if it’s a box that nobody is holding, it’s just your own box” (81).
My parents are complicit in these schemes; they haven’t paid for all of my efforts, but they have paid for the majority. I think I saw it as punishment and they seemed to think of it as a kind of reparation. We were all three holding on to the idea that I could just lose the weight and be done with it. But no one is ever done with it. That’s the psychic burden we all feel about weight. Maybe what I should be asking myself is what kind of experience I want day to day. What kind of life do I want to give myself (90)?
Chapter Nine: The Message Is, I’m One of You
Jean sat on a table on a platform at one end of the room and called the meeting to order with a gavel. Happy to tell her story, and in an attempt to exert some control over the room, she started talking about herself. She was delighted to find that people listened. She asked if some of them ever got panicked over their size, if they couldn’t turn around in the confines of a phone booth or climb out of a two-door car. “What hurt you? You don’t have to share it with anybody but when you’re alone, looking at cookies, I want you to remember what hurt you,” Jean said, looking around the room. The primary question was whether they really wanted to lose weight. Somewhere along the line in life, someone had said that they couldn’t do it, it wouldn’t work. “Feeling in charge of yourself, the feeling that you’ve made it in the struggle, that I-Can-Do-It feeling,” does spread into other parts of your life, she said. “I’ve seen it over and over and over in work, in love, in relationships. I call it dignity.”
People started to contribute their own stories. A woman said that she went on vacation and gained weight. “What happened, did you eat the hotel?” Jean asked. Usually the truth came out as guilty confessions. In an early meeting a guy said he would stop by a doughnut shop and eat a dozen doughnuts in his car. A woman stood up and said, “That’s nothing. I once stopped at a roadside hot dog stand. A guy says to me, ‘How many?’ Out of me comes, Four. I got four hot dogs, four hamburgers, four bags of french fries.” No one was shocked at this story and nobody laughed. Jean never said it was ridiculous. She might poke fun but she had heard and eaten it all herself.
Another day the group was talking about their particular food passions, the topic closest to Jean’s Mallomar-loving heart. These were great years for worshippers of sweet treats and savory snacks; in a two-year span in the mid-1960s, Pop Tarts, Cool Whip, and Doritos all hit stores. But during that meeting, one woman said she just couldn’t think of anything in particular. The group moved on to other subjects. Then, right in the middle of the session, came a wail from the back of the room. “Pumpernickel!” It was that woman, enunciating each syllable. “You know why? It’s my husband’s fault. He works late and he brings home hot pumpernickel bread.” Jean looked her up and down. Pumpernickel bread on its own didn’t seem to be the offender. “Do you eat it dry?” she asked. “No. I put cream cheese mixed with walnuts on it.” Okay, Jean said, thinking she was on to something. “Do you ever eat just nuts?” “Oh, I love nuts,” the woman replied. “Where do you keep them?” “In the oven,” the woman responded. “So the kids won’t find them.” And that’s when Jean nodded-she had finally gotten to the truth. “It’s nuts,” she said. “Who can eat just one nut? I told her it’s better not to eat any.” Her other advice was to wash your cookies like fruit. “But they won’t taste the same,” someone would always protest. “That’s the point,” Jean would say. This was something Jean herself practiced. She no longer needed to tell the boys at the deli because they always remembered to wash her coleslaw so she could have it on her turkey sandwiches. Or she’d tell everyone to go home and gather up those potato chips or quarts of strawberry ice cream and take them out of the wrappers and really mash them into the garbage so it was gooey and smelly. Or hold them under the water faucet and watch them dissolve into nothing. “Down the drain and not down me,” Jean trilled. “How do problem foods get in your home? Do they float in? You have a magician for an enemy who likes to torment you?”
One of her favorite anecdotes was about how she stayed a bottle blonde. She loved brunettes, didn’t think there was anything wrong with them, it’s just that she didn’t want to be one. It was the same with being someone who put on weight naturally but who had to work very hard to keep it off. “Every three weeks I spend three hours in a beauty shop. It’s not any more convenient to work on the size of you than changing your hair color. Let your good, healthy vanity express itself!” Vanity was a good thing for Jean, as was constant vigilance. “One lapse leads to another. A person who consistently passes a red light gets careless. When you feel tempted to slip, do it in the presence of another human being. Look in the mirror, think of what you know about you and what you want to be. Really see yourself and ask yourself if it’s really worth the price,” she said.
Jean would show up in high heels with her hair always done, a fresh manicure and pedicure. She told her staff that they too were to look like impeccable “after” photos, to look the part of someone who had dramatically changed. “Be elegant but never above the fray,” she said. “The message is, I’m one of you.” Jean was possessed of an almost mythical relatability among her followers. She was just a fat housewife who got thin and wanted to talk about it (119-22).
By the mid-1960s, bariatrics, the treatment of obesity, had become a medical subspecialty, and by 1972 there were 450 members of the American Society of Bariatric Physicians (in 2015 the group changed its name to the Obesity Medicine Association) (123).
What Mark learned for herself was the gospel that Jean was trying to spread: the genius was in the meetings. “Nothing is as good as the meetings for inspiring you to persevere,” Jean said. “The Bible is in any motel room. Anybody can read the Bible, but there’s a certain benefit to hearing that recited, to hear the very words you know spoken to you. Likewise, to sit in a group with people who are on the same wavelength as you is crucial.”
It was the magic of the meetings that perhaps made the rigidness of the diet more tolerable. Jean thought the word diet suggested an easy way out; she preferred to call Weight Watchers an eating plan or a food-management program, which didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. In the earliest iterations of the program, not only was there no meal skipping and no way to swap one item for another, but quantities of food were to be measured on a postal scale, and, crucially, no calories were counted. (That’s the version of Weight Watchers another housewife, Betty Draper, attended on the “Dark Shadows” episode of the TV drama Mad Men.) One woman told Jean that she had proudly brought a scale to a friend’s dinner party and weighed out six ounces of roast beef and popped open a can of mushrooms to eat while the other guests helped themselves to potato salad. This was considered a success story rather than obsessive (125-6).
Chapter Ten: She’d Had Enough After One Bite
There’s a thread of old-school feminist thought that says taking pleasure in being admired for our looks is participating in our own oppression, minimizing our brains and power. One of the most nuanced takes on food and society and feminism I’ve read is in Judith Warner’s book Perfect Madness: “It was as though there were good and bad kinds of controlling behavior. The bad kind was the kind that played into the hands of the ‘patriarchy’-promoting thinness, for example, or anything else that conformed to what was generally considered male notions of female beauty. The good kind took on the patriarchy-in the form of challenging the medical establishment, the food industry, or anything else that smacked of convention.” All these behaviors, she argues, make us feel good; there is a self-reinforcing aspect to it. “Food-and-body control is an opiate. A highly effective and highly adaptive way of drowning out the angst of existence” (139).
Our bodies are more complicated than body positivity. The radical body-love movement is an essential counterpoint to the prevailing, persistent aesthetic of super-fit and slim, but it’s also unrealistic; it takes a rare pioneer to truly flout beauty norms. And I am no dissenter. I’m not sure it’s the answer for me if it means it is not okay to want to be not fat. My desire never wavers. Maybe my biggest problems are with the very words love and positivity and neutrality and acceptance themselves. As if trying to manage my body isn’t difficult enough, it presumes I am going to have a handle on how I feel. Loving my body still keeps the focus on my body. What I would prefer to have is the freedom not to think about my body at all (140-1).
Chapter Seventeen: Eat, Eat-but Not Too Much
The 1980s were a good time to be a diet company. The average weight of Americans started to rise around 1980. More than half of women worked outside the home by then, a fact that was blamed for the decline in home cooking and the increase in waist size. The expansion of Heinz and other companies like it created a huge industry of packaged and processed foods that Americans relied on more and more, as they did on fast food and takeout. Baby Boomers were becoming parents and the pressure for women to get the baby weight off helped fuel the fitness and dieting frenzy of the decade; by 1984, one-fifth of money spent on food went to diet food. Many of the same companies that sold high-calorie convenience foods began to introduce low-calorie and diet foods, such as Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine, Diet Coke, sugar- free Jell-O, and Bud Light.
In aesthetic terms, glamour was big. Or, rather, glamour was about being skinny, which ran counter to the trend of Americans becoming larger-thin, which was always aspirational, was growing increasingly coveted and extreme. The New York Times quoted Ivana Trump telling a reporter, “It makes me feel powerful to be hungry.” In his novel of eighties excess, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe wrote of the social X-ray, the lady who lunches but doesn’t consume much, her skinniness a manifestation of her soullessness. The thin and well-coiffed First Lady Nancy Reagan, a social X-ray if ever there was one, told Weight Watchers magazine she and President Ronald Reagan “plan our meals at home and choose moderate portions of fish, chicken, or lean meat with fresh vegetables and a salad of some kind. Occasionally, we have my husband’s favorite dish, macaroni and cheese.”
Fad diets abounded. In 1982, the New York Times wrote about the overwhelming overnight success (and possibly dubious claims) of The I Love New York Diet, a book coauthored by Bess Myerson, a former Miss America. Or one could try Judy Mazel’s Beverly Hills Diet, which focused on food combining and made such out-there claims as eating meat with potatoes caused the potatoes to ferment and turn to vodka in the stomach. She liked to say that she could peel and eat a mango while driving a stick shift and not get a splash on her white silk dress. Scarsdale, a wealthy suburb of New York City, had its own diet. So did Miami’s South Beach.
Fitness, jogging, and Jazzercise (which Judi Sheppard Missett launched in the late 1970s) became ubiquitous, and maybe nothing symbolized the decade more than Jane Fonda’s reinvention of herself in her forties as an exercise guru. First there was a bestselling exercise book and then, in 1982, the Oscar-winning actress released a VHS tape called Jane Fonda’s Workout that sold more than seventeen million copies around the world. In it, Fonda wore a striped and belted leotard and leg warmers and exhorted her at-home followers to feel the burn to a soundtrack of songs by REO Speedwagon and Jimmy Buffett. “Whether you’re fifteen or fifty, with the help of this album and a little hard work, you can achieve a well-proportioned healthy body-not to mention the outward glow that comes from feeling good inside,” she said on the video. “So be in harmony with your age. Learn to understand and respect your body. It’s your temple. And remember, discipline is liberation!”
Weight Watchers rolled out their own changes, allowing beer and offering a vegetarian plan in 1981. They launched a program in 1984 called Quick Start, designed to be more strict in the beginning for rapid weight loss within the first two weeks. It turned out to be a popular plan and Weight Watchers revenue doubled in two years. The magazine’s tagline changed from “The Magazine for Attractive People” in 1975 to “More Than a Diet Magazine!” in 1985 (213-5).
During this national diet craze, obesity rates increased from 12 to 14 percent pre-1980 to 22 to 25 percent by the late 1980s. There was no consensus on the reason. Some experts blamed low-fat or fat-free foods full of sugar, others corn syrup, still others processed foods. What they did know was that America wasn’t getting any healthier (217).
Chapter Twenty-Two: This Tastes Sad
I’d been pleased to find that Weight Watchers meetings weren’t places of self-hatred. None of the members seemed like they had unrealistic goals or barely hidden eating disorders. It was a lot of discussion of tips and tricks and jokes and real support. I had become a member, if reluctantly, of a community. I could walk into a Weight Watchers at a strip mall in Michigan or in a church basement in England and feel some kind of home, even if it was not where I was going to meet my next best friends or how I was going to orient my life. I’d been reluctant to join Weight Watchers because it felt like the lowest common denominator. But maybe it’s an equalizer. It’s no-nonsense. In meetings and online, you are forced to hear from people outside of your daily bubble. It made me realize I wasn’t all that special, which was in itself a huge relief (272-3).
Chapter Twenty-Three: Losing Weight Can Be Magic
Weight loss can change your whole character. That always amazed me: Shedding pounds does change your personality. It changes your philosophy of life because you recognize that you are capable of using your mind to change your body.
-Jean Nidetch
Losing weight for Jean was magic; it symbolized potential, and it had the potential to bring strangers together. “In Israel, the Jews and Arabs sit together at our classes,” Jean Nidetch said to an Australian newspaper in 1993, “and, you know, they don’t hate each other at all. They’re just interested in what they ate for breakfast” (275).
Prologue
Later Jean would write, “Most fat people need to be hurt in some way in order to be jolted into taking action and doing something for themselves. Something has got to happen to demoralize you suddenly and completely before you see the light.”
Introduction
But no matter how unattainable perfection may be, working toward it-as opposed to working toward self-acceptance-is satisfying in its own way. There’s action involved in inching closer to a goal, even one you can’t attain-counting calories, working out, weighing in. At least you’re aiming for something tangible (7).
Chapter One: I Was Even a Fat Child
Jean’s obsession with her body reflected the relatively new phenomenon of blue-collar families trying to lose weight, once the pursuit of the wealthy. By the World War II era Jean graduated into, being fat was deeply entrenched in American culture as bad-undesirable, lazy, and inviting mockery. Jean dreaded that fate for herself.
The urge to diet doesn’t come solely from vanity, or family, or habit, or the desire for better health, or society. The best summation I have found is in Hillel Schwartz’s book Never Satisfied, a history of dieting in America.
The desire to be slim is not simply a result of fashion. It must be understood in terms of a confluence of movements in the sciences and in dance, in home economics and political economy, in medical technology and food marketing, in evangelical religion and life insurance. Our sense of the body, of its heft and momentum, is shaped more by the theater of our lives than by our costume. Our furniture, our toys, our architecture, our etiquette are designed for, or impel us toward, a certain kind of body and a certain feeling of weight.
What is considered fat and thin is constantly constructed and updated, subject to the whims of society as much as anything else. While dieting sits at the center of so many seemingly unrelated movements and ideas, the fact is that it places a human being in the middle of these conflicts. Dieting holds out the promise that much can be solved by changing a single person (13-4).
Gradually, in the years from 1880 to 1920, there was a shift in cultural norms; if you were fat, you were not just undesirable; you were physically and morally bad, and that went for women as well as men. While being called plump was once considered a compliment for a woman, meaning she was robust and of optimal health for childbearing (a woman’s primary goal), that ideal changed. The new paragon was personified by the Gibson Girls in the pen-and-ink drawings of Charles Dana Gibson, idealized women with slender, hourglass figures. Being fat became about abundance of appetite, of wanting too much and being lazy on top of that. By 1898, the Ladies’ Home Journal (which in 1903 became the first magazine to hit a million subscribers) began a monthly series of domestic lessons written by one Mrs. S. T. Rorer that covered topics like indigestion and avoiding overeating rich foods. In 1910, the Chicago Daily Tribune asked, “Are society women literally killing themselves to keep thin?” In 1911, Good Housekeeping published a satirical essay by Maria Middlebury (possibly a pseudonym, given that the byline never again appeared in their archive of writers, which included Edna St. Vincent Millay and Virginia Woolf) called “My Week Without Food.” It began with a flourish: “Having been always a more than average healthy person, I found myself in middle age confronted with gouty conditions that culminated in arthritis in the finger joints, a disease which slowly but surely disables the hands.” This condition was incurable, her family doctor said. “From that moment dated my fall from the ranks of common-sense, normal women, to the army of cranks and faddists…I chanced upon some articles about fasting, and thought they pointed out a possible road to salvation.” The first day she had a tablespoon of coffee to prevent a headache; it didn’t work. The second day she stared into space and thought of nothing but food. After a brief respite of feeling “light and supple,” she felt like she was getting the flu. Apart from drinking some juice, she stuck to her no-food diet. Her weight went from 170 to 154. At the end, she wrote, “I printed out a neat little card reading: Yes, I’ve stopped now. No, not very bad. Sixteen pounds. Yes, I know I look ten years older, but I shall be younger in a week. No, I’m not eating more than usual now, etc.”
World War I was another turning point. The American government’s propaganda posters from the era encouraged consumers to buy food with thought and serve just enough; some exhorted civilians to observe a meatless day and wheatless days to help conserve food for the troops. Weight was quickly becoming a national concern. Bathroom scales had arrived in American homes soon after the First World War, and the maintenance of weight could now become a constant, at-home surveillance. The concept of the calorie was popularized by the doctor and health columnist Lulu Hunt Peters, whose book Diet and Health with Key to the Calories was a bestseller in 1918. Peters wrote of how she had lost over fifty pounds by counting calories and assured her readers that she knew firsthand the pain of being fat and the glory that awaited them if they could learn to resist temptation (15-7).
Chapter Six: When I Fall, I Fall Hard
Food has always been synonymous with breaking the rules for me, first my parents’ and now my own. I think of food in terms of moral value and order accordingly. Do I want to be good right now? Or am I being bad? Eating, for me, is really about transgression, a rebellion against myself. I’ve never understood it better than when I heard the psychotherapist Esther Perel talking about infidelity on a podcast. She said, “Something about breaking your own rules is intensely liberating. It makes you feel for the first time that you once again have a say, an agency over your life…not boxed in, even if it’s a box that nobody is holding, it’s just your own box” (81).
My parents are complicit in these schemes; they haven’t paid for all of my efforts, but they have paid for the majority. I think I saw it as punishment and they seemed to think of it as a kind of reparation. We were all three holding on to the idea that I could just lose the weight and be done with it. But no one is ever done with it. That’s the psychic burden we all feel about weight. Maybe what I should be asking myself is what kind of experience I want day to day. What kind of life do I want to give myself (90)?
Chapter Nine: The Message Is, I’m One of You
Jean sat on a table on a platform at one end of the room and called the meeting to order with a gavel. Happy to tell her story, and in an attempt to exert some control over the room, she started talking about herself. She was delighted to find that people listened. She asked if some of them ever got panicked over their size, if they couldn’t turn around in the confines of a phone booth or climb out of a two-door car. “What hurt you? You don’t have to share it with anybody but when you’re alone, looking at cookies, I want you to remember what hurt you,” Jean said, looking around the room. The primary question was whether they really wanted to lose weight. Somewhere along the line in life, someone had said that they couldn’t do it, it wouldn’t work. “Feeling in charge of yourself, the feeling that you’ve made it in the struggle, that I-Can-Do-It feeling,” does spread into other parts of your life, she said. “I’ve seen it over and over and over in work, in love, in relationships. I call it dignity.”
People started to contribute their own stories. A woman said that she went on vacation and gained weight. “What happened, did you eat the hotel?” Jean asked. Usually the truth came out as guilty confessions. In an early meeting a guy said he would stop by a doughnut shop and eat a dozen doughnuts in his car. A woman stood up and said, “That’s nothing. I once stopped at a roadside hot dog stand. A guy says to me, ‘How many?’ Out of me comes, Four. I got four hot dogs, four hamburgers, four bags of french fries.” No one was shocked at this story and nobody laughed. Jean never said it was ridiculous. She might poke fun but she had heard and eaten it all herself.
Another day the group was talking about their particular food passions, the topic closest to Jean’s Mallomar-loving heart. These were great years for worshippers of sweet treats and savory snacks; in a two-year span in the mid-1960s, Pop Tarts, Cool Whip, and Doritos all hit stores. But during that meeting, one woman said she just couldn’t think of anything in particular. The group moved on to other subjects. Then, right in the middle of the session, came a wail from the back of the room. “Pumpernickel!” It was that woman, enunciating each syllable. “You know why? It’s my husband’s fault. He works late and he brings home hot pumpernickel bread.” Jean looked her up and down. Pumpernickel bread on its own didn’t seem to be the offender. “Do you eat it dry?” she asked. “No. I put cream cheese mixed with walnuts on it.” Okay, Jean said, thinking she was on to something. “Do you ever eat just nuts?” “Oh, I love nuts,” the woman replied. “Where do you keep them?” “In the oven,” the woman responded. “So the kids won’t find them.” And that’s when Jean nodded-she had finally gotten to the truth. “It’s nuts,” she said. “Who can eat just one nut? I told her it’s better not to eat any.” Her other advice was to wash your cookies like fruit. “But they won’t taste the same,” someone would always protest. “That’s the point,” Jean would say. This was something Jean herself practiced. She no longer needed to tell the boys at the deli because they always remembered to wash her coleslaw so she could have it on her turkey sandwiches. Or she’d tell everyone to go home and gather up those potato chips or quarts of strawberry ice cream and take them out of the wrappers and really mash them into the garbage so it was gooey and smelly. Or hold them under the water faucet and watch them dissolve into nothing. “Down the drain and not down me,” Jean trilled. “How do problem foods get in your home? Do they float in? You have a magician for an enemy who likes to torment you?”
One of her favorite anecdotes was about how she stayed a bottle blonde. She loved brunettes, didn’t think there was anything wrong with them, it’s just that she didn’t want to be one. It was the same with being someone who put on weight naturally but who had to work very hard to keep it off. “Every three weeks I spend three hours in a beauty shop. It’s not any more convenient to work on the size of you than changing your hair color. Let your good, healthy vanity express itself!” Vanity was a good thing for Jean, as was constant vigilance. “One lapse leads to another. A person who consistently passes a red light gets careless. When you feel tempted to slip, do it in the presence of another human being. Look in the mirror, think of what you know about you and what you want to be. Really see yourself and ask yourself if it’s really worth the price,” she said.
Jean would show up in high heels with her hair always done, a fresh manicure and pedicure. She told her staff that they too were to look like impeccable “after” photos, to look the part of someone who had dramatically changed. “Be elegant but never above the fray,” she said. “The message is, I’m one of you.” Jean was possessed of an almost mythical relatability among her followers. She was just a fat housewife who got thin and wanted to talk about it (119-22).
By the mid-1960s, bariatrics, the treatment of obesity, had become a medical subspecialty, and by 1972 there were 450 members of the American Society of Bariatric Physicians (in 2015 the group changed its name to the Obesity Medicine Association) (123).
What Mark learned for herself was the gospel that Jean was trying to spread: the genius was in the meetings. “Nothing is as good as the meetings for inspiring you to persevere,” Jean said. “The Bible is in any motel room. Anybody can read the Bible, but there’s a certain benefit to hearing that recited, to hear the very words you know spoken to you. Likewise, to sit in a group with people who are on the same wavelength as you is crucial.”
It was the magic of the meetings that perhaps made the rigidness of the diet more tolerable. Jean thought the word diet suggested an easy way out; she preferred to call Weight Watchers an eating plan or a food-management program, which didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. In the earliest iterations of the program, not only was there no meal skipping and no way to swap one item for another, but quantities of food were to be measured on a postal scale, and, crucially, no calories were counted. (That’s the version of Weight Watchers another housewife, Betty Draper, attended on the “Dark Shadows” episode of the TV drama Mad Men.) One woman told Jean that she had proudly brought a scale to a friend’s dinner party and weighed out six ounces of roast beef and popped open a can of mushrooms to eat while the other guests helped themselves to potato salad. This was considered a success story rather than obsessive (125-6).
Chapter Ten: She’d Had Enough After One Bite
There’s a thread of old-school feminist thought that says taking pleasure in being admired for our looks is participating in our own oppression, minimizing our brains and power. One of the most nuanced takes on food and society and feminism I’ve read is in Judith Warner’s book Perfect Madness: “It was as though there were good and bad kinds of controlling behavior. The bad kind was the kind that played into the hands of the ‘patriarchy’-promoting thinness, for example, or anything else that conformed to what was generally considered male notions of female beauty. The good kind took on the patriarchy-in the form of challenging the medical establishment, the food industry, or anything else that smacked of convention.” All these behaviors, she argues, make us feel good; there is a self-reinforcing aspect to it. “Food-and-body control is an opiate. A highly effective and highly adaptive way of drowning out the angst of existence” (139).
Our bodies are more complicated than body positivity. The radical body-love movement is an essential counterpoint to the prevailing, persistent aesthetic of super-fit and slim, but it’s also unrealistic; it takes a rare pioneer to truly flout beauty norms. And I am no dissenter. I’m not sure it’s the answer for me if it means it is not okay to want to be not fat. My desire never wavers. Maybe my biggest problems are with the very words love and positivity and neutrality and acceptance themselves. As if trying to manage my body isn’t difficult enough, it presumes I am going to have a handle on how I feel. Loving my body still keeps the focus on my body. What I would prefer to have is the freedom not to think about my body at all (140-1).
Chapter Seventeen: Eat, Eat-but Not Too Much
The 1980s were a good time to be a diet company. The average weight of Americans started to rise around 1980. More than half of women worked outside the home by then, a fact that was blamed for the decline in home cooking and the increase in waist size. The expansion of Heinz and other companies like it created a huge industry of packaged and processed foods that Americans relied on more and more, as they did on fast food and takeout. Baby Boomers were becoming parents and the pressure for women to get the baby weight off helped fuel the fitness and dieting frenzy of the decade; by 1984, one-fifth of money spent on food went to diet food. Many of the same companies that sold high-calorie convenience foods began to introduce low-calorie and diet foods, such as Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine, Diet Coke, sugar- free Jell-O, and Bud Light.
In aesthetic terms, glamour was big. Or, rather, glamour was about being skinny, which ran counter to the trend of Americans becoming larger-thin, which was always aspirational, was growing increasingly coveted and extreme. The New York Times quoted Ivana Trump telling a reporter, “It makes me feel powerful to be hungry.” In his novel of eighties excess, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe wrote of the social X-ray, the lady who lunches but doesn’t consume much, her skinniness a manifestation of her soullessness. The thin and well-coiffed First Lady Nancy Reagan, a social X-ray if ever there was one, told Weight Watchers magazine she and President Ronald Reagan “plan our meals at home and choose moderate portions of fish, chicken, or lean meat with fresh vegetables and a salad of some kind. Occasionally, we have my husband’s favorite dish, macaroni and cheese.”
Fad diets abounded. In 1982, the New York Times wrote about the overwhelming overnight success (and possibly dubious claims) of The I Love New York Diet, a book coauthored by Bess Myerson, a former Miss America. Or one could try Judy Mazel’s Beverly Hills Diet, which focused on food combining and made such out-there claims as eating meat with potatoes caused the potatoes to ferment and turn to vodka in the stomach. She liked to say that she could peel and eat a mango while driving a stick shift and not get a splash on her white silk dress. Scarsdale, a wealthy suburb of New York City, had its own diet. So did Miami’s South Beach.
Fitness, jogging, and Jazzercise (which Judi Sheppard Missett launched in the late 1970s) became ubiquitous, and maybe nothing symbolized the decade more than Jane Fonda’s reinvention of herself in her forties as an exercise guru. First there was a bestselling exercise book and then, in 1982, the Oscar-winning actress released a VHS tape called Jane Fonda’s Workout that sold more than seventeen million copies around the world. In it, Fonda wore a striped and belted leotard and leg warmers and exhorted her at-home followers to feel the burn to a soundtrack of songs by REO Speedwagon and Jimmy Buffett. “Whether you’re fifteen or fifty, with the help of this album and a little hard work, you can achieve a well-proportioned healthy body-not to mention the outward glow that comes from feeling good inside,” she said on the video. “So be in harmony with your age. Learn to understand and respect your body. It’s your temple. And remember, discipline is liberation!”
Weight Watchers rolled out their own changes, allowing beer and offering a vegetarian plan in 1981. They launched a program in 1984 called Quick Start, designed to be more strict in the beginning for rapid weight loss within the first two weeks. It turned out to be a popular plan and Weight Watchers revenue doubled in two years. The magazine’s tagline changed from “The Magazine for Attractive People” in 1975 to “More Than a Diet Magazine!” in 1985 (213-5).
During this national diet craze, obesity rates increased from 12 to 14 percent pre-1980 to 22 to 25 percent by the late 1980s. There was no consensus on the reason. Some experts blamed low-fat or fat-free foods full of sugar, others corn syrup, still others processed foods. What they did know was that America wasn’t getting any healthier (217).
Chapter Twenty-Two: This Tastes Sad
I’d been pleased to find that Weight Watchers meetings weren’t places of self-hatred. None of the members seemed like they had unrealistic goals or barely hidden eating disorders. It was a lot of discussion of tips and tricks and jokes and real support. I had become a member, if reluctantly, of a community. I could walk into a Weight Watchers at a strip mall in Michigan or in a church basement in England and feel some kind of home, even if it was not where I was going to meet my next best friends or how I was going to orient my life. I’d been reluctant to join Weight Watchers because it felt like the lowest common denominator. But maybe it’s an equalizer. It’s no-nonsense. In meetings and online, you are forced to hear from people outside of your daily bubble. It made me realize I wasn’t all that special, which was in itself a huge relief (272-3).
Chapter Twenty-Three: Losing Weight Can Be Magic
Weight loss can change your whole character. That always amazed me: Shedding pounds does change your personality. It changes your philosophy of life because you recognize that you are capable of using your mind to change your body.
-Jean Nidetch
Losing weight for Jean was magic; it symbolized potential, and it had the potential to bring strangers together. “In Israel, the Jews and Arabs sit together at our classes,” Jean Nidetch said to an Australian newspaper in 1993, “and, you know, they don’t hate each other at all. They’re just interested in what they ate for breakfast” (275).