Learning to Like the Girl in the Mirror

Body image and the unhealthy way Americans handle it is an issue I've been trying to figure out how to write about for quite a while. It's a touchy subject, one that we as a society often choose to ignore, although the havoc it's been wreaking for several generations is something that isn't going anywhere until we figure out how to deal with it.

Some people place the blame on the fashion industry with their tiny sample sizes and skin-and-bones teenage models. Some look at airbrushed Hollywood starlets with personal chefs specializing in fad diets and personal trainers on call. Both are part of the problem, but so are we, your average members of society. We've put the fashion and film industries on a pedestal and look at them as things everyone should aspire to, devoting our lives and our bank accounts to attaining the current definition of physical beauty.

It's an unhealthy outlook, and it's not okay.

I've struggled with my own body image for most of my life, whether because I grew up chubby in bikini-clad, Hollywood-obsessed Southern California or just because I'm a product of my generation, I'm not sure. I don't remember when or why my body started to bother me, but by the time I was in middle school it seemed like something that had always been.

I started my first diet - The Zone - when I was twelve, and although after a few months I was probably healthier and certainly skinnier than I had ever been, I didn't feel any better about my body. I look back at pictures from that time now and wonder why. Between dance and marching band, my weight stayed fairly stable through my first year of high school, but after that I started to gain weight, every pound feeling like another albatross around my neck, and my self-esteem began to plummet.

Sure, I was smart and articulate and mature for my age, a talented musician, a steadfast friend, a good daughter - a well-rounded, generally nice person. But my body was ugly, so what did it matter?

In class, I never sat with my feet on the floor, balancing just my toes on the ground to keep my legs from looking fat. After middle school, I stopped wearing shorts. Ever. Department store dressing rooms became my personal version of hell, and clothing sizes the demons that haunted me. I nearly broke down in tears two hours before my junior prom because my dress was beautiful, and my body was ruining it.

That was the year I'd started to hate my body with a desperate virulence that festered in the back of my mind, always whispering in my ear. If there was just some way to make that extra weight go away, I'd be so happy. If I could wear a bikini, all would be right in my world. The month before that junior prom, I ate as little as possible. Breakfast was a SlimFast shake. So was dinner, if I could get away with it. I ate the fruit and sometimes the string cheese my mom packed me for lunch, and handed everything else out to my friends - with teenage boys around, someone was always hungry. My caloric intake was probably less than 900 calories a day, a number that makes me cringe now, because I know how unhealthy it is. And still, I hated myself as I zipped up that beautiful dress.

In January of my senior year, I got on a scale. I don't remember why, because I usually avoided them like the plague. The number it registered, while nothing that would elicit more than a shrug and a recommendation for moderate exercise from pediatricians used to dealing with serious childhood obesity, finally pushed something home: wishing and starving myself were never going to make me either thin or comfortable with my body, and I was going to keep hating myself until I tried some other way to get there.

Not much of a revelation, but since I was done with marching band for the year and had some afternoons free, it got me to the gym a few times a week. At first, it was loathing for my body that drove me. Directing all of that frustration, disgust and anger at a machine was better than having nowhere to put it.

Still avoiding scales, I didn't notice a change in my body until I went - reluctantly, dreading what I might find - to try on my junior prom dress to see if I could wear it again to my senior prom. I couldn't - it all but fell off. I bought a new dress in a smaller size and felt pretty for the first time in years. Digging through my closet, I found that I fit into a lot of clothes from my freshman year - including the formal black dress my mom had made for my concert band's spring concert that year. I wore it again to my senior concert, and although I was still self-conscious, that desperate hatred had retreated.

When I went to the doctor for my pre-college physical in August, I'd lost 13 pounds since that awful day in January. The number on the scale was still frustrating, but after a few months away from the demons in my head ranting about sizes and weights and fat, I had the perspective to recognize it as a personal victory.

The next hurdle was college, and the dreaded freshman 15. I was terrified of that phrase, and vowed that I absolutely would not fall victim to it. I spent thirty to forty-five minutes at the gym three or four evenings a week, and by the time I went home for Homecoming in October, I'd lost another 10 pounds. By the middle of my sophomore year, I'd lost an additional 25 pounds and was wearing the clothes I wanted to, in sizes that were SoCal-acceptably small. My cardinal rules were a) that the number on the scale had to drop a fraction every time I went to the gym and b) strictly limiting myself to 1,000 calories per day (one of the most widely-accepted minimums for what it takes to keep a body more or less my size functioning is 1,200) was a good way to lose weight. I compared myself to everyone around me, and if I wasn't among the thinnest girls in the room, I was uncomfortable.

I panicked when I lived with a host family while studying abroad. If someone else was cooking, how could I keep track of how many calories I was consuming and keep the self-loathing monster in my head at bay? I mentioned my worries about gaining weight to some of my new friends. One of them said "Do your clothes still fit?" "Well, yes, but..." "Then what are you worried about?" Perfectly logical, but it took me by surprise and left me completely without a response. I had always avoided talking to anyone - with the occasional exception of my mom - about how I felt about my body. Now that the issue was at least partially out in the open, it suddenly didn't seem like quite the deep, dark secret I had always felt it to be.

That moment wasn't a magic bullet. It didn't make me see immediately that the way worries about my weight lurked behind my every thought was unhealthy. But it stayed in the back of my mind and when I was being so ridiculous about how I looked that even I was sick of myself, it helped me turn away from the mirror and go on with my day. It wasn't until I had been running seriously for several months and had to drastically overhaul my eating habits in order to not pass out that the way I thought about my body really began to change. Gradually, I was able to acknowledge that it was never going to be healthy for me to be rail-thin, because I'm just not built that way. And as I began to view my body more as a functional tool than a display window, I realized that what I looked like was secondary to how I felt.

I weigh more now than I did at my thinnest in college. I'll probably never be entirely comfortable with how I look in a bikini. I still sigh into the mirror sometimes, or fret over the fit of a piece of clothing. But I accept what I see when I face that mirror and a fair amount of the time, I like it. I understand my body better and rather than struggle against it, I listen to what it's telling me. I don't count every calorie I put in my mouth anymore, I don't skip meals and I don't obsess about the number on the scale (in fact, I generally don't even get on one except once a year at the doctor's office). I eat sensibly and stay active, and both my mind and body are stronger than they've ever been. I intend to keep them that way.

I've come a long way from despising that girl in the mirror because all I could see were her flaws. But I know there are too many women (and probably men, as well) out there who can't see anything else in their own mirrors. They starve themselves, exercise with nothing in their systems to burn and mentally compare themselves to cover models, thinking they should be able to look the same, even without professional photography and airbrushing.

The beginnings of an outcry for average-sized models are rattling around the fashion industry, and some actresses are asking magazines not to airbrush photos of them. But until we, as a society, can accept that health and Hollywood's version of it are not the same thing, we're going to continue raising generations of self-loathing women who spend their lives agonizing over numbers on a scale and scraps of cloth. Rather than what will make us healthy, we're told what will make us look better. Rather than seeing ourselves as we are, we're pressured into looking at ourselves through the lens of someone else's body and someone else's definition of what's attractive. Rather than being encouraged to be comfortable in our own skin, we're encouraged to be prettier, thinner, better. I don't know how we succeed in changing that, but I know we have to start by changing the conversation. I hope that sharing my own struggle with that girl in the mirror will move us just a little bit closer to being able to do so.

Bookshelf: Waiter Rant

I just finished Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip - Confessions of a Cynical Waiter by Steve Dublanica and if you eat out regularly or have ever worked in the food service industry, it's definitely worth a read.

I picked it up late last year because the title and the few pages I read while standing at the "New Non-Fiction" table at Borders made me laugh. It got pushed to the middle of my to-read pile during the holidays, but since today is the DC area's third consecutive snow day - the fourth, for some of us - I've had ample time to catch up.

"The Waiter," as Dublanica is known on the blog that launched the book, has been one since an unexpected career change at age 31. Waiter Rant is definitely a first book, with scattered typos and a lexicon that sometimes tries just a little too hard.  And if profanity offends you on principle, don't read it (or ever work at a restaurant).

That said, it's a great read. Dublanica's descriptions of the ups and downs of life as a restaurant server are sometimes poignant, often hilarious and always dead on target. (And although it's sometimes a little out of place in Waiter Rant, his descriptive style, particularly when it comes to the seasons and city streets, guarantees that I'll take a look at whatever he writes next.) Why do your expectations of a big, romantic meal on Valentine's Day fall short? Because there are five gazillion people who all want the same thing, and a limited number of hours and restaurant staff to make it happen. What's the big deal about tips? Well, in New York, where Dublanica works, servers make $4.60 an hour (in DC it's $2.77, unless it's gone up since 2007, when I waited my last table). That wage is there so the government has something to tax - servers are expected to make all their actual income in tips. Waiter Rant illustrates these and other restaurant industry tips and mysteries with anecdotes from the waiter's perspective that by turns amuse and impart wisdom (and possibly shock, if you've never been inside a restaurant wait station).

At the back of the book, Appendix A is (a sometimes tongue-in-cheek) "40 Tips on How to Be a Good Customer" that, if followed, will guarantee you never receive a server's death stare - or poor service - again. Some of my favorites (and personal golden rules):

7. Be polite. Say please and thank you. Be courteous to the hostess, bus people, coat-check girl, bartender, and waiter...
36. If you pay part of your bill with a gift certificate [or receive some portion of your meal for free because of a mistake that was not the server's], make sure you tip on the whole check - not what's left over after the certificate's been redeemed.
40. If you can't afford to leave a tip, you can't afford to eat in the restaurant. Stay home.

When I was waiting tables, full-time for one summer and part-time for another year after that, my muttered complaint on bad days was "Anyone who wants to eat in a restaurant should be required to wait tables first." Now I'll amend that: if you haven't waited tables but have read Waiter Rant, I'd be happy to serve you.