Jane Vinocur

Jane Vinocur

The sections of “Perfect Girls Starving Daughters” we read dealt with eating disorders in a way that I had never really been presented with before. Instead of talking about the habits of girls solely diagnosed with an eating disorder, it talked about the habits of girls across the country. Through personal memories and stories of girls from everywhere, you’re introduced to many girls with little habits that alone might not be considered “strange” or “warning signs”, however, when they’re put into context, you realize that while anorexia and bulimia are mental diseases that have a genetic predisposition, it’s also been worsened by societal pressures. These pressures come from a plethora of places. Daughters feel pressured to excel in sports to bond with their fathers, team members compete not only on the court, but also with each other about their eating patterns, and girls get so used to limiting their food to get healthy and get in shape that it suddenly becomes a dangerous pattern.

My freshman year of high school, I joined the crew team. I was really surprised with how quickly my entire team bonded. You didn’t just become sisters with your boat or grade, but with every girl on the team. My best friend on the team was short for a rower – about 5’3 – but she was strong. She wasn’t super skinny, but she definitely was not at all overweight. If she displayed any warning signs our first year on the team, it was just chalked up to freshmen-year-jitters. It was normal for freshmen to be self-conscious, and if she changed her eating patterns, everyone probably just assumed that she was doing so to get in better shape for crew and she was left alone about it. Freshmen year came and went and by sophomore year we were still really good friends. Fridays were a light practice and Saturday’s we would have all day regattas, and on Saturday nights after our races we would hang out and she began to joke that we should “binge” on Saturday nights. I guess I didn’t really know the negative connotations that went along with that so we would go out and buy any kind of candy we wanted to eat and make popcorn and eat ice cream and basically eat anything and everything we shouldn’t have been eating during the season.

One day at practice our junior varsity coach was talking with her and said that if she weren’t “built like a rower” she would have made an excellent coxswain. As is said in the introduction to “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters”, 90% of high school girls think that they’re overweight, and my friend proved to be part of this statistic. I think she interpreted this comment from our coach to mean that she was “fat”, and this is where she started to limit some things she did. As the season went on, I began to notice that with our usual “binges” on Saturday nights, she had almost completely stopped eating lunch or dinner on race days to “balance out the calories”. I confronted her about it and she began to eat carrots and celery at races instead. I finally stopped “binging” with her on Saturdays after her incessant comments like “I’ll only eat ice cream if you do” or “how many Kit-Kats have you eaten? I don’t want to eat more than you” became annoying and overall worrisome for me. I talked with other people on my team about it, and they noticed it too. Her arms and legs became too skinny and she pushed herself harder on runs. That summer after she began dating a boy in our grade her weight returned to normal. They would go out to eat and she would eat and she seemed really happy again. A little bit before school started they had a horrible breakup and in a huge fight he implied that he was glad they had broken up because she was ugly. Her weight dropped even faster, her grades dropped, and she didn’t become happy again until our coaches, upon seeing her strength rapidly diminishing, allowed her to be a coxswain instead of a rower. Her grades returned to normal but her weight didn’t. At team dinners she would barely eat claiming she didn’t want to “weigh the boat down” during the race the following day. At this point we were teammates, not even on the same boat, and we weren’t really friends anymore, so I didn’t think it was my place to intervene. Instead I spoke with mutual friends and they brought it up with her parents and the coaches. After becoming so obsessed with her desire to be “thin”, she started receiving treatment for depression. Although we hardly speak anymore, she’s a coxswain at college now and I can only imagine the pressures she feels to feel thin now.

As was said in chapter nine, “this slippery slope from dedication to disease is too often ignored”. While my friend might have started off dedicated to getting fit for crew, it turned into an obsession to be perfect. She already had perfect grades, a really close group of friends, and a team that was willing to do almost anything for one another. Because she didn’t have a similar body to other girls on the team, she began to try to get thinner, which was ridiculous because she was already a healthy weight. She was the only person I knew in real life that would talk about her “thinspiration”, saying that if she wanted to make it to be a coxswain, she wouldn’t eat breakfast or snacks. She once got sick after a 2K-erg-piece and admitted to the coach that for lunch she had only eaten a couple of Doritos and a cheese stick. However, she also got a personal record on her 2K, so along with a warning that she should be eating better, she was also congratulated by all the coaches and other members of the boat.

In chapter nine from “Getting Your Body Back”, women trying to get back to their pre-pregnancy body are discussed. Although it says that it should take you another nine months after giving birth to get back to where you were, baby magazines offer many workouts to “get your body back sooner”. They use celebrities like Beyoncé who got her body back in just five months as examples that if they can do it, so can you. On the show The O.C., one of the older characters gets pregnant again just after her son goes off to college. To stay in shape during her pregnancy she goes to a yoga class with other pregnant women. While she’s there she sees some girls who went to school with her son are pregnant and she talks with them. These girls are represented as very superficial and blissfully ignorant, as well as self-absorbed, and one admits that she told her husband that if she got above a certain weight during her pregnancy, she would induce labor immediately. Although this is presented as unrealistic, it’s not something to be entirely ignored as it shows that some women in our society are more concerned with their image both during pregnancy and after than with the health of their baby, and themselves. Your body has already gone through so much during pregnancy that to rapidly take off all the weight you’ve gained is unhealthy.

The introduction and chapter we read from “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters” and the chapter from “Getting Your Body Back” all reflect that girls in our society are killing themselves trying to reach an unattainable level of perfection. They feel that if they make themselves thin, they’ll be perfect in every way, when in reality the dedication and disease will create more problems than it will fix. Health in America has to be presented in a more natural way. As it says in chapter nine, “we are either fitness nuts or sedentary TV watchers”. Where in other countries they will bike to work or take the stairs, we binge on food and then binge equally at the gym, working out for over 8 times the recommended time in a day. These habits need to be seen as something to be changed and an emphasis on healthier workout and eating habits must be presented. Instead of being at two extremes, health and fitness must be balanced.