What I Learned From My Mother and Oprah’s Diet

I have never been what one would describe as skinny, except once when a patient called asking to make an appointment with me and described me to the receptionist as, “I don’t know her name…the skinny one.”

I still list this day as one of the best days of my life.

I am not overweight; I’ve just never been a stick. I’ve got some cushion for the pushin’ and have been fighting my natural tendency to plump up for as long as I can remember.

Being curvy was especially hard as an adolescent. I felt huge compared to the A cup waifs that hadn’t yet developed and the rail-thin Track and Field girls around me. In fact, I was twelve years old when I went on my first diet.

It was the summer before eighth grade, and my friend Shauna and I decided that we were going to lose five pounds before we started our last year in junior high school. I was determined to fit into a smaller size of high-waisted Gap jeans, cinch my braided leather belt a notch tighter and feel a little lighter in my Cole Haan loafers.

I would go over to Shauna’s house and watch episodes of 90210 admire Brenda, Kelly and especially Donna with her sixteen-inch waist, and then count out seven Sun Chips for a snack and drink diet Sunkist to fill up.

That Sunkist/Sun Chip diet rose and unfortunately never set. It was the first of many fad diets for me.

You name it and I have done it: Cabbage Soup, Atkins, Low Fat, Weight Watchers, Scarsdale, Grapefruit (Modification of Scarsdale), Fro Yo Diet, Two Protein Shakes and Chicken Diet, South Beach, The Six Day Body Makeover, Quick Weight Loss, Skinny Bitch (Vegan), Juice Fast, Paleo, and my friend, Heather, even created her own diet that I bought into for a while—the three bite diet, where you can eat whatever you want, but you can only have three bites.

As a physician I know this is not always healthy, but no matter how much knowledge I have about proper nutrition and exercise, I am still a girl looking for the fastest way to drop ten before that wedding, pool party, vacation, my new guy sees me naked, the day I see my ex, baby shower, birthday bash and so on and so on.

I would never judge another woman on her figure, but when I look in the mirror I see about ten things I could correct about myself. I mentally circle the areas in red marker like the sorority elders would allegedly do to the pledges back at my days at SMU.

I body shame myself.

Daily.

I have gotten better, but I do it. I rarely eat a meal without either mentally applauding or condemning myself. And this grading scale started before the Sunkist diet.

In the late 1980s, Oprah shocked viewers when she dropped 67 pounds drinking Optifast liquid meal replacement shakes. The Goddess of daytime talk came out on stage, tinier than ever and pulling out a bandwagon of fat. My mother soon jumped on that Radio Flyer; chugging shakes, skipping dinners, and weighing incessantly.

This was the first of many restrictive diets I witnessed my mother take part in, as well as witnessing that her success in them also determined her happiness with herself.

My mother did nothing but praise me as a young girl, but I didn’t just hear the words she spoke to me, I watched the ways she treated herself. I learned how to evaluate my weight from modeling her.

I passively learned that not only what was on the outside of a person, but what was also the number that lit up the scale, were true markers for self-worth.

Oprah, has now admitted that an all-liquid diet doesn’t work. Twenty-seven years later; I have not only learned that, but something else; that this is a societal problem.

Thousands of diet products flood the market monthly.

Magazine covers either praise a celebrity’s figure for recent weight loss or post baby-bod or they condemn it shamelessly.

We as women look at ourselves in comparison. We look at a cover with an ultra thin woman whose body we admire and then we quickly spend five dollars to get the tips inside.

It’s a racket based on self-scrutiny and it has become quite a lucrative one.

So as a physician, I have been asked about fad diets in the past, and I will give you the facts, but I am not going to endorse them and perpetuate this societal disease of body shaming. A disease that you can see even a physician is not immune to. A disease that although I am starting to understand, I still suffer from.

I won’t give you quick tips or tell you about the newest herb on the market that aids in weight loss.

Instead, I will give you the truth.

It isn’t about a quick gimmick. It is about loving yourself.

Because when you stop judging and start loving yourself, truly, you start treating your body right. You start giving it the nutrients it needs and the exercise it deserves. And that is really all it’s about. That is how we fight obesity and self-loathing.

I ask that as women we try to love our bodies, if not for us, for our daughters. Because I cant stand the idea of another precious little girl counting out her chips and comparing herself to TV stars. What I want to imagine is her loving herself enough to replace the chips with broccoli and the comparing with confidence.