Follow @ TIMEHealth
"My least favorite feeling in the world feels too big to be seen. I want to lock me up till I'm thin again. "This is a typical comment on the website Body Confessions, recently launched by novelist Diana Spechler.
Spechler, whose new book Skinny sort April 26, created the site to give people a place to express the true depths of their feelings about their bodies, anonymously to strangers. So far, thousands of people responded - from the United States to Saudi Arabia - and the results, which are sometimes disturbing and sometimes inspiring, offer a fascinating glimpse of women (yes, it is most women) attitudes about their bodies. (Or on the other women's bodies, "Sometimes when I see a woman bigger than me, I'm glad it made me look better.")
Healthland spoke Spechler on its own body image struggles and experience with search Skinny which is fixed in a weight loss camp.
Q :. Tell me about the genesis of the Confessions Corps
A: There are five or six years, I decided to write a book which took place in a weight loss camp. This always happens to me when I'm something new to write is that there are conscious and unconscious reasons reasons for my doing.
The reason was conscious [my thinking about how] everyone around me has body problems - I can not think of a single person I know who is healthy eating. And weight loss camps are microcosms of the way we speak to eat and our bodies, so it was a great place to study all my questions: what is wrong with us? Why are we obsessed with our bodies? Why can not we stop eating? Why can we not lose weight as a country?
So I decided to write the book and realized that I have to work in a weight loss camp to do. So I did - I asked all these camps to teach creative writing. This guy hired me, and I spent the summer there, and it was amazing.
Q: Did you tell them you've had an ulterior motive
I do not say my employer. I was covered. I asked all my friends if it were nonfiction Ö.K., if it was not unethical, and they said it was Ö.K. I do not want to tell people, so that they act differently. water, not creative writing. ". I kept telling my agent, "This thing is itself in writing." But then I came home and I could not write. I am blocked. I always have.
I was going to really open a vein and tap into my true motivation for writing this. And I do not want to look - I do not want to assign my own behavior to my characters. But what I wrote was really flat. Ultimately, writing trumped the need to hide. Everything came out. I thought, "I must not publish it," and that allowed me to write freely, I found myself writing a fairly graphic book on disorders of the body it was so liberating And I felt... better and will not be obstructed because I got my secrets.
I do not mean that I was cured, but I'm much better. I have more control over my hunger and satiety than I ever had before in my life. I feel so relieved, great. And I wanted to give back to this world. I want others to be able to confess anonymously (as assigning my own questions the characters, I did it anonymously).
the way I set up the site, nobody can comment [on other people’s contributions]. so everyone can have the advantage of writing without someone say, "It's gross." You know how the Internet is becoming a nation hole when there is a comments section. So the only option I had decided to add a button that you can click that says "Been There" -. Just something to support
Q: What was the response like
A: It was 99% positive. Denominations only come in a steady stream and now there are thousands, which shows that there is a need for it.
But there has been some controversy on blogs because of two things [eating disorder] recovery: Some people think [Body Confessions] triggers, which means it makes people fall back into their cloud food. The other [criticism] is that it is not good to focus on negative thoughts, and that negative body image focusing on perpetuating.
So regarding the first complaint, I feel that if there is something that is making you feel bad, you should not do it. Just do not do it. There are thousands of other sites out there.
The other concern that I totally disagree with because it's so misleading messages out there that come from the food industry and government: how we should look at food and our bodies. If we sit around and say we love all our bodies and how we eat, we lie to ourselves. If we say, "Oh, we love our body because they work and they allow me to walk," of course, there is a part of our brain that feels this way, but there is also much which can have negative thoughts. So it's almost like the morality police come and tell you that you can not have those thoughts. Frankly, that is much outbreak in my opinion -. Hide things, keep things in
I'll give you an example. We've all heard women say things like, "Oh, my God, I ate half a jar of peanut butter because of my PMS," and it's socially acceptable, even a kind of cute. but you'd never meet someone at a party or walking into work and say, "I just Binged a buffet all you can eat and I feel horrible about myself." It's too dark. And compounds hiding our shame.
The food lobby says, eat what you want, then go to the gym. If you can not do that, go for a walk every day. It's ridiculous. Then we gain weight because we eat when we are not hungry, just because it's all around us. Then there is the food industry to be, like, "Take this pill, take this potion, a walk to get some exercise." That will not work.
Q: the site has met your expectations
a: I did not know what to expect because I thought things that were really interesting to me would not necessarily be interesting to d other people. I was wondering if someone was going to post. one thing I thought was a more even distribution of men and women. There are many more women. I do not know why I thought men write when of course women are much more focused on issues of body image. [As for] content, I guess I do not know if I was surprised, but I am at the same time happy, because people write, and distraught to see how the pain is around these issues
. Q: Where do you see Body Confessions go from here
A: up this is the plan and I just hope to find more and more people to discover and use. I want to change the dialogue in this country: I do not want people to lie about it. There is an obesity epidemic, girls get younger and younger eating disorders, obesity starts young.
Something is very, very bad and I think [we need] voice that fight dishonest voices that say, "Take the stairs instead of the elevator" or "Use your will and will not eat this cookie ". These messages are not true. And they hurt us, and hurt women. My sort noble goal is to change that. People focus on these positive messages, but I have thousands of denominations that say otherwise.
Q: What advice would you see there instead
We need honesty against all the deceptiveness. For example, there is a great book called The End of Overeating - and similar books - that talk about how as a society, we had to work to burn cool, to repair the damage of smoking "cool" imagery (ie, the Marlboro Man), and how we need to somehow make the same with the industrialized food. If we can make people think "Yuck" instead of "Yum" when they see fast food, which is a step. But it is only a small step. I'm not a scientist, so I have great answers, but I think if we can move the national dialogue in some ways, like I said, and keep focusing on nutrition education for children and families, we 're on the right track. Or at least a better track.
0 Komentar