By Alison Conway

Recently I watched the series, Lessons in Chemistry, and I’m wondering: am I the only viewer struck by the extreme thinness of the character played by Brie Larson? For those who haven’t watched the show, Larson plays Elizabeth Zott, an aspiring chemist whose career is derailed by the misogyny of the 1960s science community. She becomes the host of a wildly successful cooking show and the mother of a daughter, Madeleine. I won’t say more to avoid spoilers.

Maybe it’s because Elizabeth is often baking a pie, or cooking a lasagna or a glazed ham but I couldn’t stop thinking, while I watched each episode: what does she do with all the food she makes? Because she can’t possibly eat more than a tiny, tiny portion of it if she wants to stay that thin, unless she happens to have the metabolism of a hummingbird. To be clear, I am not judging the actor, Brie Larson, here, but an industry that punishes women who fail to maintain its beauty standard. In this case, Hollywood wants to tell a story about food, drawing on the star power of a woman whose body suggests the
opposite of eating.

Brie Larson has the look of what the heroine, Rachel, of Melissa Broder’s recent novel, Milk
Fed, calls the “professionally skinny, the skinny-for-pay, the ultra-ultra skinny.” In Broder’s novel, Rachel lives on the edge of anorexia and she rates her own suffering “at about a seven-point-five.” She makes her comments about the “ultra-ultra skinny” when her job takes her to a party for a Hollywood cast, whose suffering she guesses to be at “a nine or ten.” The novel traces Rachel’s journey from disordered eating to a recovery that include getting away as far away as possible from Los Angeles and its cult of thinness.

In episode four of Lessons in Chemistry, the narrative jumps forward seven years and we see a plump little girl enjoying a delicious-looking lunch, clearly made by Elizabeth Zott. “How interesting,” I thought. “How does the super-thin mother relate to this chubby child?” But, of course, it turns out that this girl is not the daughter of Elizabeth. Her daughter is gamine, a little wisp of a child. Mad is surrounded by fabulous food, but we never see her eating it. In the last episode of the series, we learn that, like her brilliant father, she sometimes forgets to eat when she’s excited about an idea.

Myself, I can’t think if I’m hungry. In fact, my own brush with anorexia as a teenager ended
when I decided I’d rather be smart than thin—that dieting took too much time and energy
away from getting straight As, which I needed if I wanted to become an academic. But like
most women I know, I’ve never forgotten the moment when my body changed and food
took on a menacing aspect. I’ve been lucky since then, taking pleasure in food and my body, which has chugged along happily for decades, sometimes fit and sometimes less so.
Running after fifty has given me strong legs and a hearty appetite, both of which I enjoy
immensely.

But running, like Hollywood, has its own community of the “ultra-ultra skinny.” Professional marathoners have careers that depend on their lightness—an extra pound is just that much more weight to carry over a punishing distance. Where does the quest for the perfect racing body intersect with cultural fixations on women’s weight? Of late there has been a backlash against coaches pressuring girls and young women in track and cross-country to lose weight—food restrictions that put their health at risk, resulting in amenorrhea (loss of periods), which in turn can lead to stress fractures and other long-term health complications. And yet, as every doping scandal teaches us, the temptation to win at any cost is high—and for women, there’s a larger culture ready to applaud every food refusal as a sign of discipline.

As we approach the holiday season, then, I wish, for all the elite marathoners I so much
admire, joy in the holiday meals they consume after their long runs. And for all the women who have felt less-than when confronted by yet another size-zero celebrity on their TV screen, I have a modest proposal: keep a piece of pie close at hand while watching Lessons in Chemistry, and have a bite every time Elizabeth Zott and her daughter don’t take one.

Alison Conway lives and runs in Kelowna, British Columbia, on the traditional and unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan people..