Power of words on weight gain during COVID

Whenever someone begins with “I usually love your columns,” I know I’m in trouble.

At the same time, I’d like to say I welcome feedback — whether it be negative or positive. I was struck when writer (and former Greenwich resident) Jiayang Fan was interviewed by The New Yorker about her mother’s insistence on only reading her daughter’s negative reviews, because she said there’s nothing to learn from the good ones.

Let me be clear: I love hearing positive feedback. A kind reader once wrote to tell me that I ranked high among other columnists such as Thomas Friedman; his email is still hanging off the side of my computer. I repeat these words to myself often, especially when I actually ended up speaking alongside Thomas Friedman (if anyone ever asks you to speak alongside Tom Friedman don’t do it — it’s a setup).

But it’s the negative feedback that always leaves me spinning. “That’s not what I meant at all,” I often say to myself, or “How could I not see that?” And usually that’s where things get interesting. It is kind of like raising children; you see it all when it’s too late.

Such was my experience after wrapping up last week’s column about my recent weight gain during the COVID-19 pandemic. I meant to write a lighthearted account poking fun at myself, and how weight issues can be a one-way ticket to Crazytown.

Then a reader wrote to me saying that “her old self” would have thought my column was hilarious, but the COVID-19 crisis had given her a crash course in “the power of language when it comes to weight, body image and acceptance.” She went on to tell me how grateful she was for my writing in general, how I had “an incredibly broad reach and a gift with words,” and suggested that I might consider writing a column on “how we can talk to ourselves and our teenagers in a way that doesn’t indoctrinate them with the body-shaming and foodshaming language” that so many of us grew up with.

But I wasn’t body-shaming or food-shaming, was I?

“You wrote a column titled ‘The Fattest Woman in Greenwich’,” my husband, Ian, told me, with that oneeyebrow-raised expression that makes me want to body shame him.

“But no one else in Greenwich is fat,” I told him. A friend of mine once joked that the weight station on I-95 wasn’t meant for trucks; it was used to monitor the weight of anyone entering Greenwich.

Yet that was my reader’s very point. The language we use around food and body image is so ingrained, we often don’t realize we are using it. Another mother told me that if she tells her chronically dieting teenager that she “looks good,” her daughter immediately assumes this means she has gained weight and freaks out.

“So I say nothing,” she told me.

I tell my 11-year-old Selma to hold off on her third brownie, and she immediately starts yelling that I am “body-shaming her.” My father used to announce that his children had “thunder thighs” to the entire fourth floor of Bloomingdale’s — are you kidding me?

But the problem with all of this is that it leaves a void. Lay that on top of a pandemic, and you’ve got a mother trapped at home with teenagers struggling with body image and no language to talk about it.

It’s little wonder, therefore, that the U.S. saw a significant spike in eating disorders during COVID-19, while doctors, therapists and treatment centers were overwhelmed across the entire country. “The National Eating Disorders Association reported a 41 percent increase in messages to its telephone and online help lines in January 2021 compared to January 2020,” Virginia Sole-Smith wrote in her New York Times article “Trapped in the House With An Eating Disorder.”

“On tough days,” one mother was quoted as saying, “it felt like the whole family was trapped in the house with my daughter’s eating disorder.”

In nonpandemic times, parents had support systems and communities such as schools that helped mediate — or even help notice — problems like these. But during the pandemic, it was like all rules were off; even defining what was an actual disorder was a little murky.

“Yeah, I binged on Netflix and carbs during those lockdown months, but so did everyone,” I tell myself. One friend told me she started making herself throw up after she ate too much, but she said, “That’s not really an eating disorder.”

I had an eating disorder, so I know first-hand how devastating the results can be. I’ve seen people die of eating disorders, and for those who continue to struggle I’ve witnessed how the illness literally robs them of their own life, as if they were living behind a glass cage watching everything pass them by. I live in constant terror that I am in some way sending unconscious messages to others, myself and most of all my daughter. I’m sure this is part of why I feel the need to talk about the dirty secret of self-image, of this absurd concept of “being fat” — and to try to laugh at myself about it.

“But I think we need to stop and consider the power words like ‘fat’ carry, especially with our teenagers,” my reader told me.

And you know what? She’s right.