Eat your words, Jenny Craig
The multibillion-dollar diet industry has a lot to gain from creating and reinforcing deeply held insecurities and fears, particularly in women. It also has a lot to answer for. Naomi Wolf's first book, The Beauty Myth, generalised this understanding in a new generation of women.
Each year 150,000 US women die of anorexia. Of 10 young US women in college, two will be anorexic and six will be bulimic; only two will be healthy. Yet the sheer magnitude of the "beauty" industry means we are not surprised to see anorexic models paraded in the media as role models, or to learn that women savagely mutilate their own bodies in the name of beauty, or to be confronted daily with the message that we really should "take better care of ourselves".
Diet industry businesses like Jenny Craig have spent years raking in the profits of marketable hunger. But their latest creation really does take the cake. It features a slightly unclear image of a woman swimming in a pool. The female voice-over sounds serene, almost unearthly: "Oh my God, I ate too much again", "I feel so guilty", "Why do I eat so much?", "Maybe I should leave my coat on" — the enunciation of so many women's daily ritual.
But wait. There's a fix-it. Yes, there is something you can do to change all this. All you have to do to "be rid of these voices for ever" is "ring Jenny Craig".
You'd be forgiven up until that point for thinking — as I did — that this was actually going to be an advertisement that promoted women's self-esteem. But it's not. It's insidious. It's also grossly untrue.
These words run through every woman's mind all the time. It takes a conscious effort not to listen to them. But getting thinner only makes them worse. One of the characteristics of eating disorders is an obsession with food: thinking about it, preparing it for other people, counting the calories in it, reading recipes — everything except eating it. So many of us have experienced that obsessiveness: lying in bed and planning what we will allow ourselves to eat the next day, and if we deviate from the plan, punishing ourselves by not eating for the rest of the day, or perhaps the rest of the week.
Nutritionists have strongly criticised the diet industry, and in particular businesses which accept women who are not overweight. They argue against the dangers, especially for young women, of not providing their bodies with sufficient food of high nutritive value.
Besides, the last thing the diet industry wants is for women to get thin once and for all. Ninety-eight per cent of dieters regain the weight they lost. For women, the diet industry is either a vicious cycle or a dead end.
By Kath Tucker