Oprah’s back on the weight-loss bandwagon. “How did I let this happen again?” she asks in the January issue of O. From a low of 160 pounds, she’s climbed back up to 200. And she’s determined, once again, to get them off.

After reading the moving and sometimes funny essays in Feed Me!: Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Weight, and Body Image, edited by Harriet Brown, I couldn’t help wondering if Oprah wouldn’t have served women better–make that all of us–by saying, “That’s it. I’m through with dieting. I’m through trying to be someone I’m not. I love my ample self. Hallelujah!”

The 23 essays collected in Feed Me! tell a sad and sometimes even tragic story of women who, buying into current cultural images of feminine beauty, come to despise food and hate their own bodies. Joan Fischer, in an essay called “Take This Cake and Shove It,” goe so far as to wish she could have her taste buds surgically removed. “Who needs a desire that cannot be satiated?” she asks. “Our culture has ruined food for me.” Unattainable images of beauty and sexiness have also almost ruined sex, she continutes. “Small wonder that if my husband puts a hand on my stomach–maybe wanting a fistful for a sensually pleasurable squeeze–I respond as though electrocuted. The hand has learned its lesson: My stomach is surrounded by barbed wire, officially off-limits. Do not touch the tummy.”

Again and again, these essays movingly describe women caught in a vicious cycle of losing and regaining weight, accompanied by guilt and self-recrimination. “Through my twenties and thirties, I kept rigorous track of everything that went into my mouth and felt ashamed if I ate anything extra or fattening,” writes Sari Botton. ”I exercised religiously, punitively, and was hard on myself when I took days off.”

Harriet Brown compares suffering through diets and weight gain to a Biblical visitation of plagues. “Frogs. Boils. Darkness. Somehow this is the image that comes to mind when I think of my history with food: a story of slavery and suffering with something of a happy ending, though not the one I spent years fantasizing about.”

Sadly, even women who see the trap they’re in have trouble breaking free. “I’m still drawn to the gaudy promise and the happily-ever-after extravagance of diets, but I know that for me, at the end of each leap, there’s usually a fall,” Brenda Copeland admits. Still, she’s not ready to give up the promise. “So why diet? Why, indeed. It’s just that my dieter’s belief in transformation is proving hard to give up. Years (and many humiliating experiences) later, I’m not ready yet.”

Confessional, intimate, captivating, many of the essays are bouyed by a healthy sense of self-irony and humor–especially among those writers who have broken free of the prescribed media images and accepted themselves for who they are. “I am cute and healthy and pleasant-smelling (usually) and ambitious and smart and lovable and fun and stylish and friendly and outgoing and categorically not icky,” writes Kate Harding. “And I am fat–just like I’m also short, also American, also blond (with a little chemical assistance).”

In one of my favorite passages from the book, Harding playfully takes on the euphemisms that underscore the absurdity of our culture’s perspective on weight. “And although I know some people prefer euphemisms like big beautiful woman or person of size or voluptuous or plump or fluffy, I am really, really not one of those people. (I mean, seriously, fluffy? Are you fucking kidding me?)

What releases some of these writers from the trap of self-hate is the reflection of themselves they see in the eyes of someone who loves them unconditionally. “I’ve made tremendous progress–with the help of an adoring and now more evolved husband who, by the way, seems even sexier to me now that he appreciates my body the way he does,” writes Botton. Others become anti-dieting activists who turn their rage against the media and cultural machine that idealizes unattainable bodies.

Some of the most joyous experiences described in these pages, tellingly, relate to food. “It is with the small act of making a pie–a handful of ingredients, twelve minutes of preparation, max–that I most consistently locate peace of mind,” writes Joyce Maynard in the closing essay. “Something happens when I make a pie, and something else happens when I take out my pie server and cut a piece and set it on a plate for a person I care about, with French-vanilla ice cream on the side. It is a small act but, in its way, one of the more satisfying parts of life….Pie is simple. Easy as pie. Pie is something a person can count on when so much else in life may seem to be in question. Pie is the place I go where I know I will feel nothing but love.”

Love, when you finally get down to it, is really what this book is about. Wanting to be loved; wanting to feel deserving of love; trusting in love. An obsession with weight gets in the way of love and all the things about life most worth loving: intimacy, sex, trust, food, your own body, thin or fat. The message is hardly a new one. But in these essays it feels fresh and urgent.

© 2009 PDQhealth

Tags: body image, dieting, Feed Me, food, Harriet Brown, weight