By Alison Conway
A year ago today, I posted a blog here about the jarring effect of seeing a very thin Brie Larson, playing the lead role in Lessons in Chemistry, preparing food that she never seemed to eat. I was not alone in trying to puzzle through the strange effect that her appearance had in relation to the show’s rich stylization of food. FIFI stats tell me that at least 5489 readers clicked the link to open that post in 2024.
The nerve that the blog touched, perhaps, is the nerve hit, repeatedly, by the horrible lessons served every day to North American women for dinner and dessert. “You should be perfectly thin. If you are perfectly thin, we will adore and praise you.” But also, “You must not be imperfectly thin. If you are imperfectly thin, scaring us with intimations of death and disease, we will shame and shun you.” Putting food near the perfectly thin celebrity reminds us of what she eats, or maybe doesn’t eat, to look the way she does. We see the food, we see the body, and the red flags appear. The imperfectly thin body, we fear, serves as the star’s understudy. It’s like the optical illusion that has us looking at a duck—no, wait, a rabbit! The mind is not quite sure what it’s perceiving. Should we clap or hold the applause?
The trouble with making all of this explicit is that drawing attention to the problem may look like blaming the victim. I see the jutting collarbones and hear the rumours and turn away out of respect for the privacy of the woman whose life is so mercilessly mined for entertainment and exploitation. She may be naturally tiny or she may be suffering. It’s none of my business. Except it is, insofar as her body elicits a visceral response, reminding me of my own vexed relation to the story it tells, or doesn’t tell.
I started thinking about Brie Larson again because I’ve been thinking, lately, about elite women runners and the price they may pay to achieve their goals. Last year, I wished them all happy holiday eating in my post. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult, for me, to ignore the problem of disordered eating and running excellence. In some ways, it’s even harder to have this conversation than it is to talk about Hollywood celebrities. There might be a world in which actors could all gain weight and continue to play characters in movies, but could women marathoners carry any weight and still be competitive? And, if we want to respect both their professionalism and their boundaries, should we not simply agree that they are born lean, mean, running machines and move on? Only, reports concerning college women athletes suggest that it’s probably not just all good nutrition and good genes, all of the time. The idea that a decade after graduation, North American runners have grown out of whatever food-related issues they might have had as young women—well, I wonder. (A brave post by Kelowna runner Christy Lovig addresses this subject head on.)
Recently, I wrote here about a marathon that went sideways. One of the stranger thoughts I had, in the final excruciating hour of that race, was that donuts were to blame for my lack-lustre performance. In the cacophony of nasty voices that I had to listen to, one was louder than the rest: “Too many donuts.” To be clear, this was not a reflection on whether my nutrition plan might have failed me—that more protein and fewer simple carbs might have made for more muscle and less fat. No, this was a moral judgement: “You are a bad person because you eat donuts and now you are being punished for it.”
I feel lucky in not having had to struggle with disordered eating since brushing up against it as a teen. But like most women I know, I carry an internal critic quick to judge and shame my appearance and the appetite that has me relishing donuts whenever I can get my hands on a good one. Most of the time, I ignore her. But when I’m sad or vulnerable, there she is, observing that I want too much, whatever that “too much” might be—wanting to run a marathon or to eat a second piece of pie. I had better prove it’s all worth it–by running a BQ every time I take on the 26.2 distance, for instance–or make myself small.
So, this holiday season, I wish everyone enjoyment of their favourite festive food. But I also wish for honest conversation, at the family table, about the damaging lessons we learned as girls about appetite; about the casual comments made by friends and family that reinforce these lessons, decades later; about the runners, including me, who work to maintain the illusions of control and self-discipline that our culture values
so highly, at such great cost.
Alison Conway lives and works in Kelowna, British Columbia, on the traditional and unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan people.