{"id":70,"date":"2005-05-06T16:10:00","date_gmt":"2005-05-06T16:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading2\/?p=70"},"modified":"2005-05-06T16:10:00","modified_gmt":"2005-05-06T16:10:00","slug":"fat-girl-and-wasted-two-books-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/2005\/05\/fat-girl-and-wasted-two-books-on.html","title":{"rendered":"Fat Girl and Wasted – two books on eating disorders"},"content":{"rendered":"

The irony is that Fat Girl<\/a> made me hungry and Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia<\/a> made me feel ashamed to eat<\/p>\n

Judith Moore’s unhealthy relationship with food is so lovingly recounted that it can’t help but make you crave the very foods that made her fat. “I’d like some of that,” you think, as she stuffs herself in misery, somewhat missing the point which is not the food but the misery. <\/p>\n

I’ve never been severely overweight. I was looking for a book to help me understand how it feels, but this book concentrates more on why and how she developed a weight problem, rather than on what it’s like to live with one, although you do get snippets of that. <\/p>\n

So Moore had an unhappy childhood. It’s a pretty sad story, but you can’t be sure that it contributes as much to her weight problem as she thinks it does. She eats a lot during the few periods when she’s happy too. She also has an obese father, which is just as likely to be the culprit in my opinion. Both genetics and the culture of eating to excess are passed down. <\/p>\n

Marya Hornbacher doesn’t do any better a job explaining how exactly she came to develop bulimia. It started so early for her, it seems like she can barely remember a time before it. As though bulimia just happened. The transition from bulimia to anoxeria is far more clear because it was intentional. She saw anorexia as a higher plane.<\/p>\n

She does such a good job explaining her thought processes that you almost buy into them. I’d feel ashamed about the cookies I was munching as I read about the cookies she refused to munch. I had the strangest feeling that she was right and I was wrong. Of course, it’s the middle ground that’s right: eat, but you don’t need so many cookies. That middle ground is hard to achieve, as both writers have shown. <\/p>\n

How do you stop obessing about your weight without allowing it to get out of control. And even then, they don’t stop obsessing. Both Marya at the bottom of the scale and Judith at the top spend way too much time thinking about what they’re eating and how much they weigh.<\/p>\n

And here I am in the middle and I do too sometimes. To stick in the middle you have to keep flirting with both ends. Sometimes I yell at myself for being fat and lazy and having a cookie, like Marya, and other times I comfort myself with food and reassure myself that eating is human nature and I can diet later like Judith. Sometimes I look at my butt and worry about the way it sags even though I’m at my target weight and sometimes I congratulate myself with a cookie for losing two pounds when there’s a lot more to go. So I’ve seen it both ways, though certainly not so extremely.<\/p>\n

Both interesting books, both well written, and a good combo read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The irony is that Fat Girl made me hungry and Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia made me feel ashamed to eat Judith Moore’s unhealthy relationship with food is so lovingly recounted that it can’t help but make you crave the very foods that made her fat. “I’d like some of that,” you think, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,7,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-addictionmental-illness","category-biosauto-biosmemoirs","category-non-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}