Katie Plus One: Our Society’s Disordered Eating with Emmeline Clein, author of Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm and co-host, Carrie Monahan

00:00:04
Speaker 1: Hi everyone, I'm Kitty Kuric, and this is next question. Today. We're exploring a topic that has a lot of relevance to me and to my plus one today, who happens to be my daughter. Carrying onahan, I had an eating disorder when I was in my late teens and early twenties. I was blimic. I was always on a diet. If I deviated even slightly from what I thought were the right foods or good foods, for example, having a piece of gum that wasn't sugarless, I would then binge indiscriminately and make myself throw up. Now there's some evidence that this disease may be hereditary. We'll be asking our guests about that. But Carrie, you had an eating disorder, not once, but twice. Can you just tell us a little bit about your experience.

00:01:02
Speaker 2: I think I was in sixth grade when I started to feel uncomfortable in my own body. I was in a so called early bloomer, which some people are proud of being. I certainly was not. I really wanted to stay a little girl, and I was very upset about am I allowed to say. I was getting breast buds.

00:01:24
Speaker 1: Yes, on this pood. Yes, I think that's allowed.

00:01:28
Speaker 2: And I even remember going to a checkup, maybe in fifth grade or maybe it was even fourth grade, and I thought I had breast cancer because it felt hard under my knippall and I had told maybe our babysitter, and she said, oh, we should ask the doctor about it. I don't know why she wasn't just like you're getting boobs. Anyways, I think the onset of puberty. I think this is very common, made me feel very ashamed of my body. Used to say to me, Oh, it's normal to grow out then up or something, which I did not like to hear because I was like, well, what if I never grow up?

00:02:09
Speaker 3: And you know whatever? And so I think in.

00:02:11
Speaker 2: Sixth grade I started because I was on, you know, consuming a lot of thin people in media, watching the oc et cetera.

00:02:21
Speaker 3: I started to.

00:02:22
Speaker 1: Diet in sixth grade.

00:02:24
Speaker 2: In sixth or maybe seventh grade, I started to lose weight, stuff getting my period. Eighth grade, I think I had a touch of blimia.

00:02:33
Speaker 3: And laxative use. Is this too graphic?

00:02:37
Speaker 4: Okay?

00:02:38
Speaker 2: And then ninth grade going to a co ed school where I felt like I didn't get attention from boys. I kind of tried to model my body after a girl I was friends with who I think I wanted to be or maybe want to be with.

00:02:55
Speaker 3: That's something maybe want to discuss.

00:02:57
Speaker 2: But and then it became kind of as I think we'll talk about this addiction to the external validation. I don't know if addiction is the right word. I think we'll talk about that again. But and then became kind of like an orthorexia wellness thing. And I think I'm mostly fine now. I mean, I think about food and my body like all the time, but I think the behavior is more managed.

00:03:23
Speaker 1: And you got very very thin in high school, to the point it was really quite scary. You were very underweight, and do you remember how you wouldn't eat anything. I think you were actually anorexic during that period.

00:03:39
Speaker 3: You know, I still ate.

00:03:40
Speaker 2: I just ate the same things every day, and I was I think I must have had mercury poisoning or something, because I ate tuna fish every single day at lunch. And I was very afraid of gaining weight, even to the point where being at Sleepwoy Camp, a place that I'd love for like eight years. When I read not being able to go back to camp, it was like this dialectic in my mind, like I really want to be thin, I'm really afraid of gaining weight, but I also want to be normal and stop thinking about this all the time. So yeah, of course I remember all of that. But I think it's also important to note that there were a lot of moments in my adolescence or young adulthood when I wasn't necessarily thin, but I was still struggling. And when you're not underweight, you can still be having an eating disorder, and often those people don't get the attention or care that's needed because their body doesn't happen to be clinically underweight.

00:04:35
Speaker 1: Well. Our guest today is Emmaline Kline, and Emmaline has written a new book called dead Weight Essays on Hunger and Harm, And in many ways it feels like the definitive exploration of eating disorders, the cultural history, the economic triggers, and the stories we're told and have told ourselves for decades. It's both deeply personal and meticulously researched, fast eight and insightful. Emmaline, thank you so much for coming to the podcast.

00:05:05
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here and talking to you guys.

00:05:09
Speaker 1: Now we should mention how do you all know each other? You have a mutual friend in Carrie's high school friend and your college friend Matt Malone.

00:05:17
Speaker 5: Right, we have a mutual aubacity. Shout out to him. We'd be lost without him.

00:05:21
Speaker 3: Yes, Emline and I are new friends.

00:05:24
Speaker 5: But it's going really well so far.

00:05:25
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:05:26
Speaker 2: Emmaline and I met for the first time only in maybe late November, but we really bonded. I think over a lot of the content of the book and Emmaline and her book invokes her sisters often, but I do feel like I'm part of this sisterhood with her, and I think that's made us become fast friends.

00:05:46
Speaker 1: Totally agree, Emline. So tell me. I was going to say I devoured your book, and then I thought maybe that's not the right verb to use. But tell me what made you want to write this book.

00:06:00
Speaker 6: So I started struggling with my body and the way that feeding it seemed to affect its appearance, and the way that I was received in the world based on my parents when I was really young, like how old, like eleven twelve. But the first time I became severe enough that I needed to get medical care for it was in around seventh grade, so I've been thinking about that, and then I was struggling with it on and off through high school and college, but it was mostly at a sort of manageable EBB. So I've been thinking about these issues for a really long time, and I've just always felt in my own journey to attempt to recover that educating myself.

00:06:39
Speaker 5: About the history of these diseases.

00:06:41
Speaker 6: And finding models of other women who have been able to recover was incredibly healing for me. But I found that most of the books I was reading were very siloed and limited in the range.

00:06:58
Speaker 5: Of narratives about these diseases.

00:07:00
Speaker 6: Is that we're being told often eating disorders in our culture are discussed either through pure memoir or a self help book or just a highly academic sort of medical book.

00:07:11
Speaker 5: And I felt like I.

00:07:13
Speaker 6: Was looking around at the world and thinking to myself, Well, diseases that are just as demographically prevalent as eating disorders, like opioid addiction, like alcoholism, like depression are understood as clinical diseases, yes, but they're also understood as microcosms of a lot of cultural and social and economic and political forces, and looking at them that way can foster a sense of solidarity among people who are suffering from them that I think isn't often available to eating disorder sufferers who feel that this is a very individual failing and then a very individual journey through recovery. And so I wanted to create a book that would give eating disorders that sort of layered intellectual and historical treatment, while also acknowledging that the messages girls received from a very young age are coming from a lot of cultural sources like team television shows and why fiction and stuff that is not necessarily usually analyzed as influential as it can be on us.

00:08:07
Speaker 1: Before we talk about those cultural influences, because as you all being contemporaries, I want to kind of dive into some of the TV shows and magazines and etc. That really impacted you all growing up. But how widespread is this problem? Because I think people really don't have a full understanding of well, we'll talk about the spectrum of eating disorders in a moment, but how many people are impacted by this?

00:08:34
Speaker 6: This issue affects far more people than we generally imagine it affecting, and not only at a fully clinical diagnosable level, but pretty much any woman I've known in my life has had some symptom of disordered eating over the course of their adolescence, teenage years, and womanhood.

00:08:53
Speaker 5: Many men I know have suffered from it.

00:08:55
Speaker 6: It's hugely widespread, and I think our general understanding of food and beauty and bodies is itself disordered, and the prevalence of diet culture sort of creates a world in which it's pretty much impossible not to have an eating disorder, and the eating disorders that we think of as the main ones, anarexi and bolimia are actually less prevalent than binge eating disorder. And then on the other end of the spectrum, eating disorders and obesity are often talked about like totally separate, even dueling epidemics, and in fact I think they're both sort of symptoms of our larger disordered eating culture.

00:09:29
Speaker 1: You two have a lot in common in terms of the shows you were consuming as teenagers. Can you all talk a little bit about the shows and how they impacted your sense of self and the way you looked at your bodies?

00:09:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think Emmaline and I were clearly both very enamored of Marissa Cooper on the OC played by Misha Barton, who, as Emmaline writes about, had to get her character killed off in order to heal herself, the actress she later wrote about. And I think not only were we consuming the same shows like Gossip Girl, and Emmeline writes about Blair Waldorf's bulimia, which is somehow never brought up again after one episode.

00:10:13
Speaker 1: But it's very much in the book Gossip Girl.

00:10:17
Speaker 2: Yes, so from Gossip Girl to the OC, you know all of these CW TV shows, And I think also Emmeline and I, as contemporaries and both struggling with disordered eating, were visiting all a lot of the same web forums, a lot of pro anorexia websites and tumblers and looking at what you know, was called the inspiration or thinspo or there's also a reverse spo which I didn't really know about until reading your book, which is like when somebody gains weight like supposed to discourage you from eating, which is really disturbing.

00:10:53
Speaker 1: So these websites and such were all ubiquitous even when you all were like twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old.

00:11:01
Speaker 6: I think that there's actually really fascinating overlap between what was depicted on these shows, and then the actresses in these shows were being covered by the tabloid media, and then both the actual shows and the tabloid imagery were being used on these sort of inspiration forums. I think often perhaps the creators of some of this media thought they were writing cautionary tales and ended up providing.

00:11:28
Speaker 5: Role models for a lot of young girls.

00:11:30
Speaker 6: And then at the same time as you're seeing this depicted on the show, you're seeing those same starlets being picked apart in US Weekly every week. And then as soon as they developed and eating disorder, likely because of the way they were retreated in the media, you have like them being called bad role models because they're inneraxic.

00:11:45
Speaker 5: On this cover of the same magazines.

00:11:47
Speaker 1: It was very and still is. I think it's not as if so much has changed, but it's so many mixed societal messages, and I thought it was interesting that you write this book for the victims of our cultural obsession, which turns out to be all of us. Let me read you the following. The skinny, Sexy, sad girl silhouette has haunted so many of our dreams. She hawks her six sort of beauty, purring false promises, from just over the horizon line, but someone stranded her at the vanishing point where she recedes even farther into the distance. The closer we get, and they don't want us to reach her, because then we might save her, convince her she's been lied to. Like the rest of us, I'm trying to row a lifeboat and write a love letter and learn to swim. I am writing this for the living girls hiding in their bedrooms, obsessing over the dead ones, the hungry girls and horny girls and hidden girls, the dead girls who thought the only way they'd be remembered was by sliding into their place, and the cannon come mausoleum for all the girls who weren't wrong and all the girls who were. It's clear to me that throughout this book, you don't want to demonize anyone, and you wanted this to feel like an inclusive look at this issue. It's not like the skinny girls, the perfect girls were the heroines and the girls who didn't look like them were the victims. They're all victims. All of these women are victims. Why did you want to make sure that you approached it this way?

00:13:29
Speaker 5: Thank you for.

00:13:29
Speaker 6: Asking that question, because that decision was really central to my sort of ethical considerations as I was writing this book, because I wanted to highlight the way this very specific, misogynistic and racist beauty standard of this extremely skinny white girl has given so many of us eating disorders or symptoms of disordered eating.

00:13:55
Speaker 5: And yet I don't think that it's her fault.

00:13:58
Speaker 6: The girl that embodies that beauty stand actually probably had to suffer so much to a body it, and I feel like often in the discourse around eating disorders, the different diagnoses become hierarchical, the way that people look becomes hierarchical, And what I wanted to do was parse out the ways that we've all felt the same way, and we've all shared this incredibly intense form of suffering, and it actually isn't as important who was getting closer to the beauty standard versus who wasn't able to, because we were sharing the same pain. And I have read so many books myself that ended up manuals or bibles or something that they weren't intended to be, and so I wanted to write something that was very clearly not instructive and was not glamorizing that beauty ideal, and was sort of dissecting it from inside out, while also coming from a place compassion and sort of saying to any girl out there who's ever hurt herself to embody that beauty standard, like I have two and I completely understand that impulse.

00:15:09
Speaker 1: Carrie and I both commented on how interesting it was to really look at eating disorders in a hierarchical way, the fact that anorexia is sort of the noble one and bulimia I think you even described it as well. The British Journal of Psychiatry called the disorder Anorexia's ugly sister in two thousand and four. I was surprised that an expert finally named bulimia just fifty years ago, a pretty recent diagnosis. And then, of course there is binge eating disorder. So it seems like you divided up into these three categories, but people can go from one to the other, and they can be kind of a mishmash. Can you just talk about how this hierarchy was established and is it part of our society's obsession with thinness that we elevate people who are emaciated to a higher level.

00:16:12
Speaker 6: Yes, I mean short answer, yes, I definitely think it is. But I think part of the reason anarexia exists at the top of this hierarchy is because of our societal obsession with thinness. So in the book, I really try to look at it from a perspective, that is, looking at the way that the hierarchy exists in the medical field, but also how it exists in our culture. So in movies and in books, often aner exx are depicted as sort of taking the good girl archetype too far, wanting to be too perfect, following society's rules too well. She knows she shouldn't take up so much space, like she's.

00:16:46
Speaker 1: It's perfection on steroids exactly.

00:16:49
Speaker 6: And there's and it's this fetishization of discipline that we also have in our culture, and of being able to follow a lot of rules and of being able.

00:16:57
Speaker 5: To control your bodily needs.

00:17:00
Speaker 6: It's also often very much hyper intellectualized, whereas Bulimia gets constructed as sort of the disease of the like spoiled Brady girl, and you see that in terms of the character and Gossip Girl, the way she's depicted in the books and in the show, but also in medical journals, with a medical journal calling Bolimia anarxia's ugly sister. There's articles from the eighties when it was first becoming added to the DSM and widely understood as a disease that you were seeing in like mainstream newspapers would be saying bolimia usually starts as after a male rejection, or like the doctor Gerald Russell, who just who first came up with the diagnosis, was writing things in his notes like that anorexis and bleimix differed mainly in that beliemix were often more sexually active and also fatter. So this dichotomy has been constructed from both an academic perspective and a psychiatric perspective and is replicated in our culture. And then that separation serves to make beliemix suffer a lot of shame and makes it make anerrex feel sort of superior, superior, but also like that is not that is a very shaky pedestal that you could fall off at any time, because forty percent, I believe of people who are diagnosed with anorexia eventually suffer binge eating disorder symptoms. And then binge eating disorder is taken even less seriously than bolimia and anorexia by both the medical profession and by our society at large. It's often mocked and it's also just much much harder to get treatment for it's much harder to get your insurance to take it seriously.

00:18:29
Speaker 1: And yet it's super dangerous. You know, you talked about people dying from binge eating disorder and the cycle of starvation and binging and shame, and it really does kind of take over people's lives completely.

00:18:47
Speaker 5: And there's just so much diagnostic crossover.

00:18:51
Speaker 6: There's one study I've found that was called Pride before a Fall colon like diagnostic crossover is in Shame or something like that, and it was interviewing people who move between anarexia, blimia, and bingeating disorder diagnosis diagnoses. And the shame that people feel when their diagnosis has changed from anorexia to one of the others is just so heartbreaking. And the diagnoses don't really serve much of a curate ative purpose beyond giving insurance. And the treatment center is a way to categorize you, to simplify, you know, charging and how you're thinking about it. And so when so many of our symptoms are the same and so many binge eaters go through huge restrictive periods that truly are simply narexic periods, but we just won't validate their disease with the same name we.

00:19:40
Speaker 5: Give other people.

00:19:41
Speaker 6: How do we ever expect somebody to recover when that when these diseases are so rooted in shame, and then the actual diagnostic structure only often reinforces that shame.

00:19:53
Speaker 1: We have to take a quick break. Then we'll be back with Emmeline Kleine and my favorite plus one yet Caring Mine. If you want to get smarter every morning with a breakdown of the news and fascinating takes on health and wellness and pop culture, sign up for our daily newsletter Wake Upcall by going to Katiecuric dot com. We're back with Emmeline Klein m I plus one, Kerrie Courric Monahan.

00:20:25
Speaker 2: Emline to your point about people cycling through different diagnoses or different disorders, and how dividing into different categories and subcategories not only promotes competition, but it also is unrealistic in that people often move between them and one often will trigger the other. So I know that for me personally, my bolimia was caused by the so called recovery from inarexia. And I found this really interesting that in nineteen fifty five, doctor Albert Stunkard coin the term mourning and which was when you know, a patient would not eat all day in pursuit of thinness or dieting. And then understandably at twilight you write something like would follow the light of the refrigerator or something and binge eat and that would obviously cause a lot of digestive problems and like a cycle of shame. And I think a lot of people don't understand that binging often is the result of restriction. I mean, Mom, I know we've talked about this before, that when you would feel like you'd been so good all day but then you you know, quote unquote messed up, then it would lead to you eating I shouldn't say crazy amount of food, but a lot of.

00:21:41
Speaker 1: Food, or over eating or eating kind of forbidden foods. But I think what Carrie's getting at is this whole idea you explore in the book that diet culture, restrictive eating, which hey, it makes people hungry, has actually led to the prevalence of eating disorders.

00:22:01
Speaker 5: Yes, completely, And I think that was one of the most sort.

00:22:04
Speaker 1: Of aha moments.

00:22:05
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, It was just really transformative for me, even in my own recovery, because it helped me realize the extent to which I was upon and this wasn't an individual failing. So we have a culture that is obsessed with diets and selling us diets and convincing us that diets work. Which diets we think work in a given era are constantly changing, despite the fact that or on a grand scale, like ninety five percent of diets quote unquote fail in that people gain back the weight, whether even if they originally lose it.

00:22:35
Speaker 5: But this is because human bodies have a.

00:22:38
Speaker 6: Set point and there is a not that large range which your body wants to settle at.

00:22:45
Speaker 5: And so when you go on any diet.

00:22:49
Speaker 6: Whether it's extreme restriction or just a low level restriction which often spirals into extreme restriction, your body is sort of thinking it's in a famine right to be really hungry after the diet is over.

00:23:03
Speaker 5: And we have seen this since literally the fifties.

00:23:08
Speaker 6: As Carrie was mentioning, there's a really interesting study that was run by Ansel Keys called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment that was genuinely its purpose was to investigate what was going to happen when people who had been forced to eat very little due to wartime rations after World War Two, we're going to start eating normally again. So they had conscientious objectors start eating half their normal calories and then eventually start eating freely again. And they wanted to see what would happen. And basically what happened is that before there was even a diagnosis for binge eating disorder, these people all developed what are very clearly the symptoms of binge eating disorder in the wake of what was basically forced anorexia, right, And so they were eating in huge quantities. One man was hospitalized because he binged so much. And the period in which they wanted to binge lasted much longer than they expected, Like, it wasn't just the initial couple weeks where they were eating food again.

00:24:03
Speaker 1: So what did this show?

00:24:05
Speaker 6: So what this showed is that pretty much anytime you embark on a restrictive diet, your body is going to want to overcompensate because it's afraid that that's.

00:24:16
Speaker 5: Going to happen again. Right, It has no idea.

00:24:18
Speaker 6: And so this is one of the reasons that actually repeated dieting is correlated. And there's this obesity researcher Jranet Tomayama who said this repeated dieting is actually correlated with a higher weight in the end than with a lower weight, because your set point moves up because it's trying to avoid the famine.

00:24:37
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly.

00:24:38
Speaker 6: And so basically, despite the fact that we've known that since like the fifties, and despite the fact that also the rations that were being given to these men to mimic literal starvation was very similar to the calories that were being given out at weight loss treatments.

00:24:55
Speaker 5: At the time in the fifties.

00:24:56
Speaker 1: Right, it was something like sixteen hundred calories.

00:24:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean then it is prolong.

00:25:01
Speaker 6: Yeah, the rations were higher than what an app like my fitness Pal was telling me to eat when I was entering in my desired vision, right, you know. So we have all of this information, and we also know that weight cycling, which is when your weight changes significantly, is hugely correlated with so many with both ending up at a higher weight and also with a lot of very dangerous things like heart disease.

00:25:25
Speaker 1: Right, Like yo yo ing is supposed to be really bad on your body.

00:25:29
Speaker 2: Right.

00:25:29
Speaker 5: Weight cycling is one of the most dangerous things you can do for your body.

00:25:32
Speaker 6: And we live in a society that's constantly telling us to yo yo diet. I even I talk about in the book this phenomenon on TikTok that's called hashtag last night eating, which is when people will be like, well, I failed. My last diet failed because I couldn't stick to something to nourishing my body much less than what it wanted. So now I'm going to start another one next week. But before I do that, I'm going to do a crazy feast and I'm going to film it. And so this is a very clearly binge eating disorder right followed by a restrictive period. And yet we're not calling that behavior disordered. We're just calling it dieting, which is part of what then further entrenches the epidemic of eating disorders because people are just taking all of this this messaging.

00:26:18
Speaker 5: To somewhat of an extreme right. But then because we silo that extreme.

00:26:22
Speaker 6: Off from the rest of diet culture and we say eating disorders are separate from diet culture, we can't see that diet culture is what gave us the eating disorders in the first place, and instead we try to treat it in ways that aren't successful, in extremely medicalized ways that refuse to engage with really much sort of politics or history or feminism.

00:26:45
Speaker 2: I was interested in how you write about dieting disordered eating, is this kind of normalizing force, especially for queer people and for women of color. I remember this piece maybe in The Economists last year about the biness is good economics for women. So you write, living in a body of color in a world that worships white beauty standards can disturbingly render disordered eating in assimilationist coping strategy. So I think that was true when writing about queer people with eating disorders, and also black women with eating disorders. Do you want to expand.

00:27:20
Speaker 6: Throughout my research, I found a lot of stories of people of color and queer people who felt shame about the way their body appeared in society. And when people are feeling this shame and simultaneously receiving these messages about this very slim beauty standard, then using disordered eating behaviors as a mechanism to sort of bring yourself into alignment with the normative standard can feel very alluring, and it can feel like a genuine economic proposition. As Carrie said, there is evidence about thinner women getting better salaries and better promotions more quickly, et cetera. And so you see black women and people of color suffering from these issues in huge numbers, but they also are being underdiagnosed on mass, which is part of why it took so long for this handbook to exist, because even though large scale studies that are just surveying people about their symptoms would find out that black women were really suffering from this issue, a lot of those interviews weren't with people that were necessarily getting diagnosed explicitly and getting treatment right. It's just knowing that you're having the symptomatic thoughts and behaviors. And then when black women are diagnosed, they're often diagnosed only with binge eating disorder because they don't always even if they're going through an anaoxic period or suffering from bolimia, don't always hit the BMI standard that itself was mostly based on studies of white people's bodies, So it's just very difficult to get the diagnosis if you're not in the body that we associate with the diagnosis. And on top of that, for low income communities, there's a lot of widespread food scarcity that forces people to live in a state of hunger that then when food becomes accessible, can lead to a binge, and especially when that food is highly processed food that is the cheapest food and the most accessible food, and that food is also designed to incite binges on top of the way that your body also is very hungry in that state, highly processed foods that have been shown in like MRI scans to light up the similar opioid receptors as doing drugs. So it's basically just a really perfect storm for these communities where the messaging that people are receiving about beauty standards, the food that is available, and the funds that exist to access it are creating binge and restrict cycles and also creating specific binge and restrict cycles that often lead people to end up in a.

00:29:53
Speaker 5: Body that is a higher weight.

00:29:54
Speaker 6: And so then all of those people are then demonized using the language of the obesity epidemic, when in fact fact many of them are not suffering from obesity, but are suffering from an eating disorder, or they're suffering from both at the same time, and often the eating disorder caused the obesity, and we can't actually treat that issue effectively now because we haven't treated the underlying issue and we're even refusing to acknowledge it.

00:30:18
Speaker 1: The same sort of restriction binge cycle that is so prominent in diet culture is prominent in these underserved communities because of food scarcity and then food abundance and kind of going back and forth between those two extremes.

00:30:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this quote from Emmeline sums it up. The food insecure, fast food consuming, fat person is perennially cast as the problem, entrenching the lie that bodies are built by individuals instead of systems, rather than recognizing that food insecurity, the temporal structure of low wage workers' days, and the addictiveness of processed foods render poor people especially vulnerable to binging and obesity alive fat and poor people are demonized, imagine to make bad choices and prefer unhealthy.

00:31:05
Speaker 1: Food, and it's really the system that's setting them up for this vicious cycle completely.

00:31:12
Speaker 6: And then to just kind of circle back a little to the hierarchical topic we were talking about before, like whether you're being set up to have an eating disorder in a low income community for all the reasons we just described, or if you're just being set up to have an eating disorder in a completely separate environment while watching a CWU television show. In both cases, the issue ends up getting individualized, and then the diagnostic hierarchy makes us unable to see the similarities that we just aligned between our two positions and understand the way that our economic system and weight loss companies and many other corporations that make food, for example, are really profiting off of the eating disorder epidemic and the obesity epidemic alike, and the way that the two end up motoring each other and revving each other up is really just making a lot of these issues get worse and worse.

00:32:09
Speaker 1: They're sort of symbiotic in a way.

00:32:11
Speaker 2: And the investors themselves in you know, these weight loss apps, whether it's my Fitness Pal, I don't know if that's one of them, but the investors who are funding the weight loss apps or even you know, Wagovy and ozempic are also funding I'm not sure if it's for profit eating disorder centers, but certainly the treatments and the apps and so neither really has an interest.

00:32:40
Speaker 1: In solving the problem.

00:32:42
Speaker 2: Solving that problem because often the person using my fitness Pal.

00:32:46
Speaker 3: Maybe this wasn't one of the apps, and none.

00:32:48
Speaker 5: Of those is it.

00:32:49
Speaker 6: It's like the person, so the person using a weight Watchers app or my fitness Pal app often might end up getting an eating disorder and then receiving treatment at a center that, unbeknownst to them, invested in a weight loss app. The example I used in the book is I think Noom because that's just one of many apps that has sort of shared investors between both, Like they're investing in the treatment center and they're also investing in the weight loss app, and so it's creating this sort of cycle, which I don't even think is a conspiracy on the part of the investors. But it's just that this is so entrenched, and we're so our society is so unwilling to see what you said, Katie about the fact that the society has the eating disorder, that we're still deluding ourselves into believing that the weight loss industry can exist in the way it exists now without creating eating disorders. So we want to believe that a weight loss app could exist, and so could a eating disorder treatment app, and that those two things could have nothing to do with each other.

00:33:52
Speaker 5: But that just isn't the world we live in.

00:33:54
Speaker 1: I want to ask about solutions in a moment, but before I do, I want to ask you about the mas messages we're getting right now. You know, it seems like we were getting real traction in this body positivity movement that people come in all different shapes and sizes. You know, some people are tall and willowy and some people just aren't. Like you know, you have ectomorphs and mesomorphs and endomorphs. I think I'm a mesomorph morph. Oh, those are different body types like no, no, no, not so much fruit, but like just you're naturally tall and thin, or you're very muscular, or you're heavier, right, I mean this, maybe those things are outdated too, But my point is it seemed like we were accepting different bodies and appreciating different body sizes. Along comes ozembic, wigovy whatever and all these weight loss drugs, and suddenly we're hearing, no, you don't want to be a certain size because everyone wants to be thin. And you see people who were appreciated for their weight, like Mindy Kaalen because she represented a certain segment of the population, or Oprah suddenly becoming thin, and I'm it's just very confusing I think for the average woman.

00:35:19
Speaker 6: I completely agree there's so many mixed messages, but I think, well, I think one thing that it reveals is that a lot of the body positivity messaging, while valiant, and it's just not working. Well, it's just it's not that it's not working, but it's it's sort of what I was saying before, where it's like the fact that so many people that were like beacons of body positivity clearly like once becoming thin via a syringe was accessible, then they might not want.

00:35:50
Speaker 5: To be a beacon of body positivity anymore.

00:35:52
Speaker 6: Indicates that while that messaging was beautiful and valiant, it wasn't necessarily breaking through the centuries of message that we'd been given around thinness. And we have seen and the executives who make these drugs will readily admit that the minute you go off it, you start getting weight again. All of these executives will say that they see this as a chronic right and you have to be on it for the rest of your life. So if somebody doesn't want to be on it for the rest of their life, or they can't afford to be on it, for the rest of their life.

00:36:23
Speaker 1: Or they don't really know the impact exactly of a long term use of the drug thyroid cancer.

00:36:29
Speaker 2: To quote this person in the Gea Tolentino, Yes, yes.

00:36:32
Speaker 6: You know, like the animals, the long term sidies that have done on animals, many of them have thyroid cancer. Like people report a lot of stomach pain and really bad things, but also future side effects we don't know about that might involve losing an organ, and we still think it's worth it to get these the benefits that society gives you for being thin, and so I think the question that that should make us ask is why do we allow thinness to hold this power in this society? And how can we start asking ourselves that question? But instead it seems like the question we're asking is like how many people? How will insurance start paying for everyone's zam big, which is depressing.

00:37:06
Speaker 1: Just to put a button on that. I think it's very interesting that weight Watchers has joined forces with wa GOVI or with these weight loss medications. I think weight loss companies are afraid they'll go out of business if they don't embrace medical options.

00:37:24
Speaker 6: I think that that's true, and I think they also know that because these drugs do not work at all. The minute you're off it, many people are going to be going on journeys with their doctors where like they do lose enough weight that then they're no longer eligible for the ozembic they were on, right, and so now they need something like weight watchers in that interim period to.

00:37:45
Speaker 1: Like to stabilize their weight after losing it right medication.

00:37:51
Speaker 6: If they go off it, they'll start experience experiencing that extreme hunger and then like many of us in those moments, will reach for a rigid diet plan that can help us control what feels out of control but is actually our body just trying to nourish us and get us back to where it wants to be.

00:38:05
Speaker 1: And this cycle may continue, right and unless they get back on the drug, and it's unclear the long term, and they.

00:38:12
Speaker 6: Can just cycle back and forth because the weight watchers won't work, and then they'll have a bench period and then they'll be eligible for the ozombic again.

00:38:17
Speaker 2: And Emmaline even cite this leaked weight watchers memo or me, yes, this is that part of their business model is that it doesn't work.

00:38:27
Speaker 3: Yes, there's just coming back.

00:38:29
Speaker 6: There was a like leaked memo where the CEO was saying that because there's there's a really the average weight watcher's customer, does it like four to six times the whole like the if you're like a paid program member, and the CEO is saying, well, yeah, of course that's our business model.

00:38:42
Speaker 5: If it worked, we would be out of business.

00:38:50
Speaker 1: We'll be right back with Emmeline Kleine and my plus one, my daughter Kerry Couric Monaghan. We're back with Emmeline Klein and my co host du Jour Carrie Monaghan.

00:39:10
Speaker 6: Speaking of all of this weight cycling and the sort of ways that anarexia for so long was understood as the pinnacle of this disease hierarchy, and many of the other disorders that I'm now talking about being very much invalidated or associated with shame just weren't even understood or around or recognized as diagnoses. And in the book I write about Karen Carpenter, who died of anarexion one was one of the first public figures to do so, and cass Elliott, who died of what was then considered an obesity related heart attack but was very likely due to her lifelong struggle with disordered eating and very restrictive dieting that she would talk about very publicly, but was never recognized as disordered eating because she was large, And so I was just wondering what those figures meant to you at the time as a young woman.

00:39:54
Speaker 1: I write in my book how Karen Carpenter's death had a huge impact on me, and I realized even though I was bleiemic and she was anarexic, although I think she might have been beliemic as well. I think a lot of times you can be anorexic and beliemic, but bliemic and anorexic is less common, right.

00:40:14
Speaker 5: Well, you can, I mean, there's just so much crossover between all of them.

00:40:17
Speaker 7: And you had ans, yes, and also that weaing disorder, not otherwise And I always wanted to be anorexic, which is so sickond and of itself.

00:40:28
Speaker 5: Oh I did the I was the exactly.

00:40:30
Speaker 6: I mean, I when I first in seventh grade got my first diagnosis, Like it's something I write about in the book, I was.

00:40:36
Speaker 5: I'm ashamed to say this.

00:40:37
Speaker 6: Now, but I was so disappointed when I got my eating disorder not otherwise specified diagnosis because I was like, so you're just telling me I'm not good enough at anorexia. And then that was obviously and then that diagnosis often ends up being motivating, and it made me sicker because I wanted to feel like I was you know what I mean. And so it's just very scary. But anyway, back to back to Karen and Casson, I agree with you that there is I mean, Karen died using something that makes you throw up, right, so she clearly did suffer from bolimia as well. That was just not talked about as much because we're so obsessed with talking about inerexia.

00:41:10
Speaker 1: I just think that cass Elliott, who was as talented as Karen Carpenter and I love them both musically, was mocked. Of course, the rumor was that she died she choked on a ham sandwich, and I think that was a way too honestly, was so cruel and people, I'm sure late night comedians made fun of it.

00:41:37
Speaker 6: Well, there's an incredibly cruel joke that was made that I mentioned in the book in like literally like a movie in the two thousand and five where somebody is the character says is talking about Karen Carpenter, and cass Elliott, and is like, if they could have just shared the ham sandwich, they'd both be alive today, which I think is so cruel and also so emblematic of so many of these issues, because it's serving to put these two women who were suffering from the same pain at odds and also and spit them against each other while also mocking them both simultaneously. And it's also wildly oversimplifying the issue and implying that, like, you know, women are idiots.

00:42:15
Speaker 1: I think you're right. I mean, I think cass Elliott, knowing what we know now, deserves as much sympathy as Karen Carpenter. I mean, they were both tragedies and both I think manifestations of societal expectations of what a beautiful or attractive woman should look like, and they were both trying to achieve it, but obviously with very different outcomes, and yet the source of their pain was very similar, and.

00:42:48
Speaker 3: Yet they both ended up dying from it completely.

00:42:51
Speaker 6: And it brings me back to the sort of first of the first question you asked me about why it was so important to me to make sure that sort of story had no villains and also was attempting to create this sort of ghost sisterhood or Coraline and also and destroy the higher arps exactly, yes, because I you know, like it just is so sad. Like I wish that Karen Carpenter and cass Elliott could have gotten in a room together and talked about how it felt to be a woman in the public eye whose body was constantly being analyzed, And I wonder if that conversation could have helped both of them, and instead they were understood as suffering from completely different issues.

00:43:29
Speaker 2: But I feel like there are villains in the book. The villains are the executives and oh yeah.

00:43:33
Speaker 5: But the villain. There's no people that right, There's.

00:43:35
Speaker 7: No girl villains, right And in fact, you say, except for the girl bosses.

00:43:39
Speaker 6: Yeah, okay, but they're being manipulated too, Okay.

00:43:42
Speaker 1: Okay, Emmeline, you right. I'm trying to find out what might happen if we blamed someone other than each other and ourselves for a change. So that leads to this question, who is to blame and what can we do as the society about it? Or is it just too ingrained in our culture?

00:44:05
Speaker 6: I think that it is very ingrained, sadly, but I don't think that it's impossible. I think the weight loss industry is largely to blame. I think the medical establishment, while in many ways well intentioned, is in its current iteration exacerbating the issue rather than genuinely creating models that I think aid in true recovery. But I think that it made me really happy to hear you say right at the beginning of this conversation, like, Oh, this whole society has an eating disorder, and how are we going to deal with it? Because I think that the first step is literally saying that sentence allowed, which for so long people haven't wanted to say. And a lot of the companies that benefit from this issue want to keep eating disorders understood is the clinical issue and not a political issue or an economic.

00:44:54
Speaker 5: Issue at all, and not a social issue, because.

00:44:56
Speaker 6: If we can keep it siloed off in the medical establishment, then everything else can keep on running. And so I think, just even as earnest and simple as it seems, I think having really honest conversations with people in your life about what nourishing, what consuming food has meant to you and the ways in which we've all engaged in self harm in order to come closer to a beauty standard that many of us don't even politically believe in but are still subject to. Like the whims of I think can change our perspective so much.

00:45:33
Speaker 1: How do we destroy the concept that beauty equals thinness? You know, I interviewed a Harvard's psychologist named Mazarin Banagie. Mazarine Banagi wrote a book called blind Spot, and it says how our brains are wired to make connections from the time we're very, very young, and so I think when you're accosted by all these images of supposed beauty and they all look the same, They're all thin, they all have the same body type. Oftentimes they're the same color. Although we're seeing more diversity and what is considered beautiful now, we have to break that connection. And you know, I'm sure when you were little, when I was little, fashion magazines, billboards, etc. All these visual images just reinforce these unrealistic beauty standards. What if from a very early age, from children's books to all the visual stimuli we're faced with every day, showed that that wasn't necessarily the case if we broke that connection, I totally agree.

00:46:43
Speaker 6: I mean that would I don't have tons of faith in this society to do that.

00:46:47
Speaker 5: But I completely agree with you, and I believe it.

00:46:49
Speaker 6: And there's a book called Unshrinking by Kate Mann that just came out that's about fat phobia and is really amazing, and she talks about being a fat woman and feeling so much shame about it her whole life, and suffering from any eating disorders, and then having a daughter being what was one of the things that really helped her finally recover, not wanting to teach her daughter to understand beauty in the ways she was taught to understand it. And she talks about being isolated in the pandemic and actually being like, maybe a silver lining of this is that I actually have an opportunity to not expose you to like the billboards and to the magazines and to the TV, but to curate an Instagram feed that I've made and just show you all different types of bodies when your mind is still very fertile and.

00:47:39
Speaker 5: Able to make those connections.

00:47:40
Speaker 6: And I, you know, was like crying when I read that, and I thought that was really beautiful, and I think that is a really amazing model. But what makes me really scared is that most young people are on TikTok and on Instagram, not getting that type of feed.

00:47:55
Speaker 5: At the end of the book, I call it a feminism of attention.

00:47:58
Speaker 6: Like I wonder if if we listen, we've for so long the stories we've told about both beauty and about eating disorders are as narrow and as slim as the bodies that we've been taught to want. And if we tell if we listen to a wider range of stories and let the stories twist and turn, I and also look back farther than we have and really historicize this beauty standard and it's like deeply misogynistic, deeply racist, deeply capitalist roots, then I do think we can start to unlearn it, because I know, at least for me, like once I realized how many companies were profiting off of the pain that I've been taught to feel about the way I looked, it did start to change some of what I think of as beautiful.

00:48:47
Speaker 1: There's so much more to this conversation. People really need to get your book, which is profound in so many ways. It's called dead Weight Essays on Hunger and Harm. Emmaline, Thank you for writing it, and thank you for talking with us about it. Today, and Carrie, thank you for being my plus one.

00:49:07
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for having me.

00:49:09
Speaker 6: This was an amazing conversation and I think maybe we were starting to do some of the amazing unlearning I was talking about.

00:49:16
Speaker 4: And I was honored to be here.

00:49:30
Speaker 5: Carrie.

00:49:31
Speaker 1: I think Emmaline's book is really revolutionary and that I've never read something that is so expansive on this topic. How did you feel when you were reading this book.

00:49:44
Speaker 2: I felt liberated and seen in a lot of ways. I say liberated because you know, just the whole crux of it is that bodies are built by systems and to understand, you know, we've been lied to instead of demonizing myself or you know, glorifying past versions of myself when I was thinner, and just to feel a little bit of personal responsibility taken off of my shoulders for the way I have felt I was crazy when it comes to food, eating, exercising, anorexia or the exia, bolimia, all of that, just to you know, I think I knew at some level, yes this is baked into our culture, all the images, etc. But just like the level of collusion going on, it was very satisfying to discover that through reading the book.

00:50:44
Speaker 1: Did it remove some of the shame and some of the kind of feelings you've had about your appearance or your weight, or being less than or more than.

00:50:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think to see it describes so eloquently the hierarchy of disorders. The sort of worshiping of Thinness made me feel vindicated because I have worshiped or glorified past thinner versions of myself. But then when I think back to how I was doing at that.

00:51:17
Speaker 1: Time, iel miserable.

00:51:19
Speaker 2: I was really unhappy and so lonely. Just to know that that's a societal problem, like the society is colluding with the aneractic thinking, it's not just on an individual level, and just to understand kind of the etymology of all of it was really helpful for me, much less so than it and it wasn't in a way that was triggering to intellectualize all of this.

00:51:53
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening everyone. If you have a question for me, a subject you want us to cover, or you want to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world, reach out. You can leave a short message at six h nine five P one two five five five, or you can send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to hear from you. Next Question is a production of iHeartMedia and Katie Kuric Media. The executive producers are Me, Katie Kuric, and Courtney Ltz. Our supervising producer is Ryan Martz, and our producers are Adriana Fazzio and Meredith Barnes. Julian Weller composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my newsletter wake Up Call, go to the description in the podcast app, or visit us at Katiecuric dot com. You can also find me on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,