Starving Body, Starving Soul

I had a small wooden statue of Mary in my room when I was a young child. She wore a blue veil and a warm smile, and she stood inside a maple case with two tiny doors. I liked to stand her up on a snack table, slowly open the doors to look at her, and feel her radiance, which I thought of as something like "goodness power." Those felt like holy times.

By the time I was twelve, I had put Mary away. My girlfriends and I hung out together in our rooms after school, leafing through copies of Seventeen. We knew Cheryl Tiegs and all the other models by name, and, awestruck, we read that they lived on grapefruit and steak and Melba toast. We passed around a measuring tape and compared our thighs, we tried spot-reducing exercises, and we frowned at what we saw in the mirror. None of the models were shaped quite like any of us. At five foot six and 110 pounds, I decided my body was all wrong. Fat.

Most American women, according to survey after survey, are unhappy with their bodies. Ten to 20 percent of female college students are estimated to suffer from anorexia or bulimia. That's why February 14-20, National Eating Disorders Week, is an important reminder for all of us who care about girls.

Why are we at war with our bodies?

There are lots of ways to answer this question, and there's a lot we don't understand. But some theorists are suggesting that here in the U.S. dieting has turned from a habit of healthy eating into a new religion of sorts. With its emphasis on strict rituals, like calorie-counting, its denial of the natural variety of women's bodies, and its promise of salvation to a blessed few who attain "perfection," this is a religion that judges women's desires for food as harshly as the Victorians did our sexuality.

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