The last time I saw Charles Ferruzza, The Pitch’s long-time former restaurant critic, he gave me some advice. “Stay thin,” he said, in the low, conspiratorial voice one might use to say “the bouillabaisse is poisoned” or “beware the Babadook.”
I knew he was thinking about health—he’d dealt with more than his share of medical problems and wanted to spare me the pain. But I was thinking about the Frisbee-sized chocolate chip cookie I’d just eaten and the skinny jeans embossing a seam pattern into my thighs.
It’s hard to avoid comments about weight when you’re a semi-professional eater. When I tell people I’m a restaurant critic, I get a lot of fatphobic variations of “If I did that, I’d weigh 300 pounds.” The “300 pounds” is ostensibly a joke, the punch line the hyperbole of it all—300 pounds! Me! Can you imagine?
Laced into the subjunctive mood is the implication that our bodies are fragile, that any change in circumstance or lapse in vigilance could dramatically alter them. Like, say, a global pandemic.
When COVID-19 made landfall—hurricane metaphors seem appropriate here—nearly everyone’s routines were disrupted in some way. We may not have been eating in restaurants, but many of us were eating (and drinking) more than usual. For my part, I started eating handfuls of chocolate chips from a bright red, pillow-sized bag while staring out the window like a passenger on a halted train. My nightly cocktail became plural. I worked out when I wanted to, which was almost never.
And as if through a trick of targeted advertising, my social media feeds seemed to proliferate overnight with guilt-soaked memes about gaining (or avoiding) the “COVID 19.”
“People have this deep-rooted fear of weight gain, and that’s coming through in the Twitter jokes and memes,” says Cara Harbstreet, a registered dietitian. “And it’s perpetuated by a lot of really influential voices, too, which is creating additional stress.”
Harbstreet owns Street Smart Nutrition, a business that takes a “non-diet” approach to health. That approach was a natural extension of her time as an athlete and sports nutritionist, where she was exposed to disordered eating and a singular focus on the number on the scale. And those hang-ups, she says, can be counterproductive. “Chronic dieting rarely leads to healthy outcomes in the long term. And when diets fail, other healthy behaviors—exercise, sleep hygiene—tend to fall by the wayside as well.”
