Her life is good now at 5 feet 1 and 209 pounds. No longer does she hide behind closed doors and baggy clothes. No longer does she fear catcalls and snide remarks, or loathe the flesh she inhabits.
Instead, Jennifer La Combe basks in self-approval while jogging, in-line skating, walking her dog, pumping iron, playing tennis-doing all the active things from which she once shrank.
“I just stopped looking in the magazines at all these thin women and thinking I needed to be like them,” says La Combe, 28, of Troy, Mich.
Instead, she adopted realistic goals and started exercising, then enjoyed a burst of self-confidence and a richer life. She also knocked off 50 pounds. But even if she never loses another ounce, she insists, “I’ll still be happy because I’ve accepted my body.”
If only the rest of us could.
Forget your body: Fix your thinking, some authorities say. Revise what’s in our brains, and what’s on our thighs likely will take care of itself.
The body image experts say we can be happier if we change how we think about our bodies. And we can be healthier if we ditch dieting, then exercise for better health. Odds are, we’ll end up in better shape after all.
Nearly 70 percent of U.S. women and 53 percent of men think they should lose weight, according to a recent national survey. Many are too fat, but not nearly in those numbers. About one-third of Americans are at least 20 percent over the ideal body weight. We can blame our sedentary lifestyles and the most abundant food supply in history.
Many find it’s tough to say no to food. “The drive to eat is almost as strong as the drive to breathe,” says Dr. Walter Willett, a Harvard nutritionist.
But we’re fighting more than our physiology. We’re up against increased social pressure and our own plummeting self-esteem. Also, the fitness revolution has popularized the muscular look. And mega-marketers, with a huge stake in making us feel ugly, constantly hawk cosmetics and shampoo, diet and fitness products, tummy tucks and breast implants.
Sociologist Christian Crandall, at the University of Kansas, says North American culture is uniquely biased. We view obese people as lazy and undisciplined, he says, because we generally attribute status to actions, not to fate, environment or heredity.
The chief victims of fat phobia are women. Survey after survey shows their worries are almost universal.
“We’ve screened hundreds of college women, and every one of them says they want to lose weight,” laments Karen Stein, an assistant professor of nursing at University of Michigan.
Stein is conducting a five-year study, examining how a poor self-image leads to deviant behavior such as binge-eating, fasting, induced vomiting, the abuse of laxatives and diuretics and non-stop exercising. But her research has been hamstrung by a lack of control subjects-women who are happy with their bodies. She can’t find any.
While obesity problems in men usually begin in middle age, women start suffering weight worries in puberty, when their psyches are much easier to scar, says Stein.
“One cannot menstruate unless your percentage of body fat is at least 20 percent, and some women won’t start below 25 percent,” says Stein.
The fitness revolution has fed a cultural shift, toward images of skinnier, more muscular women whose bodies look masculine except for their chests, often enhanced by cosmetic surgery, she says.
“Only a few models look that way, but at such a tremendous price. We know that many of these models and movie stars have terrible eating disorders.”
One doctor was so shocked by the torrent of patients with eating disorders that she founded a support group called WINS-Women Insisting on Natural Shapes. WINS recently began a newsletter and has a toll-free number (800-600-9467 anytime).
“I want to reach any woman who doesn’t look like Kate Moss, any woman who is sick of standards that are stupid,” says WINS founder Dr. Ann Gerhardt, of Sacramento, Calif. So she talks to schoolgirls and women’s groups, saying, “It’s OK to have a pear shape” and “Men do not want to be hugged by a stick.” Body-image studies support her contention that women are trying to be thinner than men want them to be.
Sure enough, according to a study from University College in London, women who exercised on a regular basis rated their bodies as more attractive than women who didn’t work out, even though the exercisers weighed an average of 12 pounds more.
Paradoxically, once people accept their looks, some finally succeed at shedding extra pounds. After rejecting diets and unrealistic goals, they take the best route to permanent weight loss-regular exercise.
