While environmental wellness expert Marisa Meltzer has always considered herself a feminist, her struggle with her weight caused her to doubt her beliefs. ‘By the time I turned 35 last year, I was living in Brooklyn, going through a break-up, and diagnosed with clinical depression for the first time in my life,’ she recalls. ‘Food was the most reliable comfort I could find: cookie-dough breakfasts washed down with Coke and the kind of delivery orders where the restaurant packs four sets of plastic utensils. The cocktail of pills I took—Lexapro, Abilify, Pristiq, Lamictal, Wellbutrin—helped lift me out of the dark fog, but they also elevated my weight. I hit 250, my highest ever.’
Meltzer details, ‘I tried to wear my heaviness with a certain hard-won pride. It was a kiss-off to the years of calorie counting my parents had subjected me to, I told myself. Dating while fat? A way to filter out shallow men. (Though after one potential online suitor inquired as to whether I was fat or “merely chubby”—evidently my picture didn’t spell it out clearly enough—I gave up on men altogether; my self-esteem couldn’t withstand further blows.) I flirted with fat acceptance, tried to believe that weight should not define who I am, that beauty comes in different packages. But the truth was that I was neither healthy nor happy. I weighed more than my father, who is seven inches taller than me; my blood pressure, taken during a long-delayed visit to my doctor, was becoming worrisome.’
‘It would be technically accurate to say that dieting was necessary for my health,’ says Meltzer. ‘But ultimately it came down to how I looked. I was scared of heart disease, yes, but was perhaps even more afraid of never fitting into Isabel Marant again. My shapeless Marni dresses were suddenly tight. I could no longer fit into certain pairs of shoes. My stomach grazed the table when I slid into booths. And my career was affected: A national morning news show invited me to pontificate about young feminists (my own adolescent riot grrrl years having made me something of an expert), but I turned it down because I didn’t like my appearance.’
So how did this affect her feminism? ‘The guilt I once felt about what I ate has been replaced by guilt over being the wrong kind of feminist,’ Meltzer admits. ‘Or maybe no kind of feminist: a woman pursuing something as pedestrian and frankly boring as losing weight. I fear that instead of fighting for a world where all bodies are admired, I’m pandering, reshaping my body to make it acceptable to the world around me. And I’m not alone: Jessica Wakeman, a writer for the blog The Frisky, recently came out as a dieter in a post called True Story: A Feminist Joins Weight Watchers. This is a woman who’s written casually about attending an orgy, but dieting required a lengthy justification.’
But why? ‘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,’ Meltzer explains. ‘Altering your body in any way that could read as conformity—that was different. Dieting, specifically, was choosing denial and self-abnegation over letting yourself enjoy all the lusty pleasures of life. It was selling out…By losing weight, I am putting more value on my thinner body, which becomes smaller every day as I continue to try to shed the last 30 or so pounds. I admit I feel more comfortable in this new body, which in turn has made me more confident in the choice I made to lose weight. What remains is for me to open up about it to the women I know; it’s a discussion I hope to initiate. Among my friends, the conversation is just beginning.’
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