I’ve stopped inviting friends to lunch at Au Bon Pain because we inevitably always end up having the same conversation. Each time I order a salad without dressing—a salad so stuffed to the brim with ingredients that its lack of dressing is definitely not obvious—I get asked the same question every time.
“Are you eating your salad without dressing? What’s wrong with you?” says my lunch partner on cue. This is, of course, accompanied by a cute laugh and an expression that says, “Please, I totally don’t care what you’re eating because I’m super comfortable with myself and my weight but, like, why would you try to eat less than me? That is so hurtful and, like, definitely against the unofficial girl code. Duh.” It’s amazing what a single look can communicate.
My original answer used to be simple—the truth. Yes, the salad has no dressing, and, yes, I was doing it because I wanted to watch my weight. But this answer did not suffice—it was the one my lunch partner expected and secretly wanted to tear down. Why my diet was not a private issue, especially since I had never brought it to their attention, I never understood.
So I took to changing my answer. Instead of the truth, I tell a white lie. “I don’t like dressing,” I say as my lunch partner gazes incredulously back at me. “I just don’t think it tastes good.”
While this quiet drama plays a small role in my daily life, it is indicative of a much greater problem on college campuses—issues with female self-image. According to a poll taken by Oprah magazine, only 43 percent of teens are happy with their body. But these body-image insecurities start much younger than our teenage years. Health research funding states that 42 percent of 1st through 3rd graders want to be thinner, while a shocking 81 percent of 10-year-olds are afraid of being fat. The same statistics suggest that these early insecurities may come from advertising and fashion, where 98 percent of models are thinner than the average American woman (5’4’ and 140 pounds). Mix all these present fears with the incredibly talented and attractive student body that is at our University, and it’s no surprise that my friends ask me about salad dressing.
But the quest for a healthy self-image is riddled with its own problems. The “healthy” girl stereotype has become inextricably linked with the “Cool Girl” complex, creating challenges for those of us who want to be healthy but can’t do it the “cool” way. The cool girl is an elusive breed—a Jennifer Lawrence-type who can eat ten cupcakes, a whole container of Ben & Jerry’s and five servings of fries, but still be as skinny as a fashion model. Popular culture has taken note of this sensation and captured it well, most notably in the famous rant from Gillian Flynn’s best-selling crime novel “Gone Girl.” “Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot.” The “Cool Girl” means being all things to all people, pretending to be so genuinely the person you want to be that you forget who you actually are.
The problem with this stereotype is that it leads women to feel that they must not only be thin, beautiful and smart, but they must do it effortlessly. I truly believe there are women who can maintain a healthy body-image without constantly thinking about it, but for those of us who do occasionally need to withhold our salad dressing, must we be constantly chided for it?
Although the idea of food-shaming is nothing new, what we still don’t seem understand is how much it actually affects our own eating cycles. An April 15, 2014 Women’s Health article discusses the unintended harm food-shaming can have on our own understanding of hunger signals. "If you're on the receiving end of a comment and you feel affected by it, that's going to disconnect you from your own signals of hunger, fullness, and satisfaction,” says author and doctor Evelyn Tribole in the article. “You're eating according to what others would have you eat…it becomes easier to eat in the absence of hunger, and it becomes easier to have cravings that aren't satisfied.”
If food-shaming has such detrimental effects on ourselves and others, then why do we do it? There’s no easy answer. Most experts agree that it comes from our own insecurities and need to validate our own food choices by criticizing those of the people around us. But how can we have a healthy self-image if our own confidence comes from tearing others down? The answer is, we can’t.
So next time you see your friend choosing a salad instead of a burger or stopping herself before eating a second cupcake or even going to the gym, consider the underlying implications of what it means when criticize others’ food and health choices. The end of shaming must start with us and our everyday interactions.
Elizabeth Djinis is a Trinity junior and the Editorial Pages Editor. This is her last column of the semester.
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