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.

"Is that the apocalypse, or is it just my TV?"

I love when the media realizes how ridiculous it can be, and calls itself out. Or rather, when print journalists use some of their column inches to verbally roll their eyes at their TV cousins, as TIME's James Poniewozik - author of the title quote - does in the next issue, on newsstands August 10th.

Yes, this probably puts me over my quota of TIME references for the past month, but I had to laugh reading Poniewozik's "Media Freak-outs: Every Week is Shark Week" on the Metro this morning, and couldn't resist passing it along. (He starts with a quote from 30 Rock, but sounds like a professional throughout the column. What better happy medium between pop culture and serious journalism is there?)

In honor of this week being Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, Poniewozik relates our fascination with the fear, awe and occasional hysteria these animals inspire in us to the media's sensationalist treatment of issues that are not, in fact, the crises they're made out to be. "To live every week like it's Shark Week...might be a metaphor for living in our media environment," he says.

[T]o spend every week titillated by unlikely threats, getting whipped into frenzies, yawning over high-minded stuff like health-care policy and supping from the delicious chum bucket of hysteria. The President is a secret Kenyan who faked his birth certificate! Terrorists are coming to get you! And the world is going to end, six different ways! But first a word from our sponsor.

(This is where I started laughing, and attracted some nervous, sideways glances from my fellow Metro riders.)

And Poniewozik is exactly right. A lack of education and comprehensive health care will have a much more - and certainly much longer-lasting - negative impact on your life than the inability to buy your dream home for a time because no bank will lend you the money. But the housing market is where the numbers are crashing and burning, and things that crash and burn are what keep the ratings up. Our education and health care systems have been going up in flames for years; that crisis isn't interesting anymore. At least not interesting enough to convince people to stay tuned for the 11 o'clock news.

I rarely watch actual news broadcasts because I absolutely loathe this kind of mass hysteria-inducing reporting that the ratings game fuels. I frankly don't care what issue makes an anchor pull out their "now this is really, really serious, folks" voice. I want the most up-to-date facts so that I know what's going on in the world (which, like, OMG, so totally does not include the status of Jon and Kate Gosselin's love lives as reported on CNN!), and I want to decide for myself what my reaction is. It's the job of commentators like Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow to comment on the news; a news anchor's job is to report it.

And reporting is important. Even if the day's new record low or high percentage of whatever that the media is screaming about isn't high on my list of things to lose sleep over in the long run, it's still good to know. I could just do without the screaming.

Poniewozik recognizes that the media has gotten off track:

Ideally, the media should help us place our worries in perspective. But often they encourage the disaster mentality by focusing on the trendy menace - the sleeper cell, the Obama-conspiracy e-mails, the pandemic, the shark - jumping on hot-button distractions and rushing to label every new crisis the worst ever.

So in the world of the 24-hour news cycle, ruled by the cable networks, how do we get the media back on track and reporting on the issues that matter in the long-term, not just the crisis du jour?

How are blogging and social media affecting print journalism?

There's the obvious answer, given the closing of Denver's Rocky Mountain News in February and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's switch to online-only reporting in March, although I'd argue that has more to do with online news outlets than blogs and social media. But as bloggers and social networking sites become more mainstream, how else are they effecting print journalism?

My mom has subscribed to TIME Magazine for as long as I can remember, and recently took them up on an offer to send a gift subscription along with her renewal - so now I can look forward to an issue of TIME in my mailbox every Saturday (woo hoo!). My mom usually left her copy open on the kitchen counter and made her way through it as she cooked dinner in the evenings or ate lunch on the weekends, and I remember reading pieces of it from time to time as I was growing up. I felt so adult, reading an article out of a news magazine, and learning bits and pieces about what was going on in the world.

I've been receiving TIME in my own mailbox for about a month now, and really enjoy reading it - usually on the Metro, where it doubles as a fan on the stifling station platforms - but I've found myself blinking in surprise a few times over the writers' use of casual language. Writing tone and style are very individual, but there are basic standards that exist for most types of writing. I had to adapt the way I wrote for Honors English my junior year in high school because my teacher didn't like my style, I learned to take a journalistic, reporting tone when I wrote for GW's The Hatchet and had to shake myself out of a formal, academic style after I graduated and started writing email copy for the non-profit I work for.

As a blogger, everything about how and what I write is up to me. I can be as casual as I want, and most bloggers are, using interjections between hyphens or parentheses (I never do that!) and often writing their own opinion - blogging isn't about presenting the facts with a subtle slant.

So I was surprised when I started noticing the same techniques in TIME, in articles of varying lengths, from features to quick blurbs. In four issues I've only noticed it three or four times, but it's been enough to get me thinking about it: is this an effect of the more casual reader-writer relationship encouraged by blogs and social networking? Or is it just a natural evolution of journalism in a society where much of our interaction with others comes in the form of words on a page or screen?

I don't know that I have an opinion on whether this kind of change is good or bad. I lean toward the bad side of neutral, not because I think it does any harm as an occasional thing but because I don't particularly want professional journalists sounding like...well, me. At least not in columns that involve serious reporting rather than a point of view. I want the facts, along with whatever (hopefully minimal) bias is implicit in the news sources I choose to use, so I can make up my own mind about the issues. And then, of course, I'll inflict my opinions on you!

What do you think - what's the source of these snippets of casual intimacy in reporting, and are they okay or should they be a journalism no-no?