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Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Allison Stewart. Hey, happy Friday. We made it to the end of the week. I'm super happy to be here with you on the show today. April showers, bring May flowers. Spring is in the air. Later on, we'll speak with experts on all that comes with spring, including dealing with seasonal allergies and looking forward to new books from both big names and up and coming authors. First, this hour, we revisit a popular series we call Mental Health Mondays, where each week we take on one topic that has to do with difficult emotions and life experiences. Let's begin with an important conversation about our misconceptions around disordered eating.

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From a young age, writer Emmeline Clein experienced disordered eating. For her new collection of essays, she decided to reflect on her struggles with her own body. The book is called Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm. In it, Clein takes a close look at our weight-obsessed culture. Drawing on extensive research, she argues how the media, the economy, even our medical systems perpetuate our concerns over our weight. Clein joined me recently to talk about the book and her research, and we also took your calls. Today is an encore presentation so quick reminder, listeners, while you'll hear callers during this conversation, we can't take your calls live right now.

One more heads up, we're going to be talking about disordered eating and self-harm in this conversation, so please do listen with care. I started by asking Emmeline about her relationship with her own body and when she first encountered the words anorexia and bulimia in her life.

Emmeline Clein: That's an amazing question. Honestly, I feel like it hasn't been phrased to me in exactly those words before. Something that's so distressing about our society, and specifically the way young girls are socialized, is that-- I don't even remember the first time I heard those terms, but I feel like they were always floating around. I'm 29, so I grew up in the very 2000's era, middle school culture, where you were constantly seeing the celebrities that you were watching on television shows and in movies be extraordinarily overtly bullied by mainstream media outlets for the way that they looked.

Up until they became so skinny that suddenly they were being bullied for trying to embody what they had just been told to be embodying. I feel like there was both a glut of, "She's scary skinny," tabloids articles in 2005 to 2008 that I was consuming in an amorphous way, whether I was actually buying them or just seeing them at the grocery store. At the same time there was a glut of lifetime movie-type content and teen girl, YA novels that were very glamorized [unintelligible 00:03:21] a lot and functioned often as unwitting manuals, even if that's not what the author intended.

I was growing up in this culture in middle school where I was seeing a lot of iterations of this skinny, sad girl trope that was very seductive and glamorous to me and to many other people growing up in that time. I first began struggling with these issues myself on a level that was affecting my behavior when I was around 12.

Kousha Navidar: It's interesting that you bring up the term that the handbook they didn't know existed. I understand that this book, Dead Weight, that you wrote, you started working on book in 2019, and it started as a very different book. I believe it was women's hysteria that you wanted to focus on. Can you tell us a little bit about your writing journey and how you ended up honing on this topic of disordered eating?

Emmeline Clein: Totally. One of the main impetuses for writing this book-- I will go backwards and answer your question, I promise, because it's related. I feel like disordered eating is just highly, highly demographically prevalent and incredibly dangerous. One of the most lethal mental illnesses besides opioid addiction in this country. When I was trying to do my own recovery journey, which involved a lot of self-education on the history of these issues, I couldn't really find a book that gave these diseases the very layered intellectual, social, cultural criticism, but also economic and political contextualization, that similarly prevalent diseases like depression and opioid addiction and alcoholism, that don't primarily afflict women, get pretty regularly in a literary non-fiction treatment.

I was looking for a book like that, and I didn't see one. I knew that part of the reason that didn't exist is because when a social force is primarily manifesting itself through the pain of young girls, it's not taken seriously. I was afraid to write a book that really centered disorder eating this way because I worried it wouldn't get taken seriously and would be misunderstood or overlooked. Part of the reason I started out wanting to write this book about female hysteria was because, it is a very interesting diagnosis to me, but I was interested in what did it mean back in the Victorian times and who might be our modern iterations of it.

I was using that as a cover to write about eating disorders in a way that I had-- Because so many of the symptoms of Victorian era female hysteria, and then the characters I was interested in, in the modern era, whether that's me or Misha Barton or whatever, were people that were dealing with symptoms of disordered eating. I thought, "Oh, this is an issue that has been taken seriously because male doctors were writing about it for so long, and maybe I can Trojan horse in what I actually wanted to do." Then I just realized how truly pervasive this issue is and that it would be doing a disservice to so many stories that have been censored and silenced to not do the Trojan horse and just do it straight up.

Kousha Navidar: You're describing a process where you started out on square one and you found out, "No, actually, it's square three that I want." You're parrying back the onion until you found the core, and that frightened you. Is that fair to say? There was some fear there?

Emmeline Clein: Yes.

Kousha Navidar: You said the fear was about not being taken seriously. Is that fair?

Emmeline Clein: Yes. That's definitely what I said, so you understood correctly, but it's layered. In general, in literature, I feel like people with eating disorders have been either mocked or condescended to or maligned or just generally misunderstood. Because in a lot of academic studies people with eating disorders are cast as very stubborn and spoiled and these bratty types of patients. Then in self-help books, they're often cast as people who have misunderstood or let society's messages get too deep into their brain and taken them too seriously and gone crazy. Both of those readings are very reductive.

Also, individual narratives that really cast the blame on specific individual women for taking a message that they should have been able to reach into their own feminism and realize isn't as serious as they're taking it, or they're being cast as vain or simple or whatever. I just was really worried that in trying to-- As I say in that part that you read, I wanted to level with people who have for so long been either mocked or condescended to or just misunderstood by a medical establishment that in trying to treat their disease often reinforces its logic.

In fact, what I wanted to say to women was, "You're not crazy." You're not reading society's messages wrong. You've been locked into a room where we've been playing, on a feed, really cruel messages about your body and how you should manage it. You've been reading between the lines and really internalizing that because you are smart. The coping mechanism you've developed is, in fact, a disease that I don't think is going to get you where you want to go in the same way that you might think it is when you're in the throes of disease.

Kousha Navidar: You're listening to All Of It. We're talking to Emmeline Clein, author of Dead Weight, a book of essays on disordered eating. Emmeline, right before we go to break, I had one question about the book title itself. The title of your book is Dead Weight. That term works on multiple levels. One of them is economic. There's an economic term called Dead Weight loss, which looks at inefficiencies and hidden costs in a market. That term isn't a one-to-one translation of what you discuss in the book, but you do look economics and our economic system squarely in the face. In fact, at one point, you write, "Eating disorders are good for capital." What did you mean by that?

Emmeline Clein: What I meant by that is, both the weight loss industry and the obesity industrial complex are both profiting at a mass scale off of our epidemic of eating disorders. The weight loss industry is a multibillion-dollar industry, and we know that diets become eating disorders very often. The National Eating Disorder Association statistics are that 35% of diets become pathological, and then a quarter of those progress into full eating disorders. Often with both eating disorders and extreme diets, which I often think are extreme diets, usually can fade into eating disorders.

These terms are very much like spectrumy, and they're spectrums more than they are like separate silos. Diets we have known since obesity first began being researched in the '50s don't work, and 95% of them lead people to gain the weight back pretty soon after the diet ends. The concept of a restrictive period, whether that's shading into the level of anorexia or whether it's just to adjust a diet, which I think itself is a misnomer and part of the problem and the rhetoric of where we talk about. These often lead people into a binge cycle, which then they're dealing with so much shame about that they'll circle back to the next diet company and start paying for that one.

People get trapped into these binge-and-restrict cycles of paying for expensive diet plans that don't work. We know they don't work, and the companies know they don't work. There was a leaked Weight Watchers memo where the CEO said that, of course, people usually come back at least four or six times in the course of their Weight Watchers journey because that's part of the business plan. Then on the flip side, eating disorder treatment is one of the most expensive forms of treatment for any mental illness that we have in this country. Yet it is also the form of treatment, besides opioid addiction, that has the highest relapse rates and usually requires multiple rounds of treatment.

This cyclical return to these residential centers that aren't really solving the problem. You have two industries that are hugely profiting and have no incentive to try to change anything.

Kousha Navidar: It's a lot like the system is put in place specifically to perpetuate the cycle we find ourselves in. I'm talking to Emmeline Clein, who's author of Dead Weight. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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You're listening to All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar, and I'm talking to Emmeline Clein, author of Dead Weight, a book of essays on Disordered Eating which is out now. Emmeline, I want to dive right back into it. You talk about the media a lot as well in your book. As a teen, you were an observer in the pro-ED community. It's online blogs and websites that promoted disordered eating. You said this was the first time you read other girls' candid experiences about food and eating. What did that feel like, reading these very real stories for the first time?

Emmeline Clein: It felt just like I'd finally found-- To the point I was making before when you're struggling with disordered eating, it's so easy to feel like you're crazy and you're the one person that can't handle society's messaging and you're taking it and you're taking all these things way too far and you're wrong in some way. To find a community that was fostering this sense of solidarity and validating each other's experiences and telling each other that, "You're not crazy and you are so smart." It was just extremely cathartic, even as it also inspired, especially as I returned to it during the research in this book, so much mourning in me.

So much sadness for how many people have been harmed by this beauty standard and the way that this beauty standard is perpetuated by capitalism, as we were talking about before. This book is a project of amplification and of attention because the story we've been told about eating disorders is so slim and centers on this specific stereotype to the listener who tweeted about the binge eating disorder, for example. It's been so centered on this one stereotype of the thin, white, anorexic girl.

I wanted to really break open that incredibly narrow sculpture of a small, thin body story, "As narrow as the bodies we've been taught to want," and listen to stories of people in all shapes and sizes and genders of bodies, who have experienced disordered eating in various different ways that are so articulately and eloquently described in these spaces, but often get censored in the mainstream narrative. To the question of media also relates to what we were talking about moments ago about capitalism. Because the media industry is yet another industry, in addition to the obesity medicine industry, the eating disorder treatment industry, and the weight loss industry that is hugely profiting off of our eating disorder epidemic.

Not only is the main media profiting off of selling us this beauty standard, they're also profiting off of really sensationalizing stories that demonize young teenagers with eating disorders that were in these forums. You saw in the Ought’s era, a lot of coverage of these pro-eating disorder forums that were really casting young girls as dangerous vectors of illness and demonizing forms of female friendship that were really people's only outlet for care. Especially in a vacuum of care, because a lot of people couldn't access care because they weren't considered thin enough.

Kousha Navidar: You know what you're talking about. The phrase you used was, "Narrow narratives and narrow bodies that match." We actually have a caller online too that I think can bring in a personal perspective here. We have Michelle from Long Island. Hi, Michelle. Welcome to the show.

Michelle: Hi. Thank you. I'm really interested in reading your book. It sounds terrific, and it'll put a lot of things medically in perspective for me. I grew up, and I'm old, and I grew up in the days of Twiggy, who destroyed my life.

Emmeline Clein: Oh, my God, totally.

Michelle: She was lovely I'm sure she's a nice person, but I remember being in elementary school and other girls were wearing mini-skirts, and I couldn't. I've been fighting the whole battle of the weight thing for a million years. I was saying that it's weird what can help you. I've gotten much better over the years, and I'm more or less under control, but I still have it in my head about, "I don't look good enough, blah, blah, blah." I read this book recently. It's a fiction book called Once Upon a Time in Beverly Hills. It was about a TV star who was told she had to lose weight or get fired.

It really helped me, I don't know, it was almost magical. In the book, the TV star wishes on a magic ring, and she loses all the weight. It's all about what happens to her life when she gets really skinny and how her life turns topsy-turvy. It's just a fun book, but it was the moral of be careful what you wish for. It put in perspective like, "Oh, my God, my whole life I've been wishing to be thin. You know what? Is it really going to change my life? No, it's not." Am I in a healthy way now? Yes, thank goodness I am. It's just interesting what can help you and how the book just eased my mind.

Kousha Navidar: Michelle, thank you so much for that call and for your story, and sharing that experience with us. One thing that stood out to me was how this goes beyond generation and how this is a long time that multiple generations have gone through this. You mentioned, Michelle, towards the end about being able to get to a healthy weight. Happy to hear it. We have a text that I think I'd love to hear your reaction to Emmeline. "This topic is very relevant to me, and my heart goes out to people that are hurt by this. If diets don't work and therapy doesn't work, what is the answer? It feels like it's a trap where the only answer is an unhealthy one." Emmeline, what do you think?

Emmeline Clein: I really have found for myself that the only avenue-- To Michelle's point of it is surprising sometimes what will help you, but for me, it's been so galvanizing and liberating and cathartic to find community and to truly just be open and honest with other women about these issues. I really think that we've had a culture of silence around eating disorders for a long time, to your point about this being an intergenerational issue. Even that culture of silence is such that we only allow that one narrow story to be the one that's told. A lot of other people think, "Oh, I wasn't as sick as my friend, so I shouldn't talk about this."

Whatever it is that there's so much shame around talking about these issues, whether it's the way I just described it or because you think it's not feminist to admit you're struggling with this or whatever it is. I truly believe that pretty much every woman I've ever met, and almost every person I've talked to about this, has had some form of emotional journey with what eating food has meant for the way that their body is received by the world. When we can talk about that with each other and realize, honestly, pardon the pun, the crushing weight of pain that has been enforced on women by capitalism's obsession with this beauty standard, it can be so inspiring to recovery because of this sense of solidarity.

Sometimes it's hard to motivate yourself on just an individual level because it can seem like being thinner, your life will be easier. When I think about it instead as, "I don't want to bring my body into closer alignment with a beauty standard that I politically disagree with," but that every time I do some disordered eating to get closer to, I'm teaching my younger cousin or a friend that I love, that is possible without self-harm. If we can motivate ourselves through solidarity, it can be really, really inspiring to recovery. I've heard that from people who have said that they wished their treatment had more space for talking in an uncensored way, and who wished that they had more political education in their treatment.

Kousha Navidar: Let's make that space right now. We've got a couple more callers I want to go to back to back. First, Andrea from New York. Hi, Andrea. Welcome to the show.

Andrea: Hi. Thank you for this subject. I found after being in many different treatment programs and rehabs for eating disorder, that going to 12-step programs were really helpful. Not just the OA type meetings, but AA because realizing that it's really an addiction and keeping the focus away from body, but also, this is a disease, an addiction and whenever there is a tough feeling, you result into going to the addiction. Part of the solution is service. I would imagine by doing this book, you talked about community, all of these ways of doing service really helps take the focus off the problem and focus on the solution. I have found that that has been the solution. I really am free of this.

Kousha Navidar: Andrea, thank you so much for sharing that and talking about that community. Let's go to Susan in Manhattan. Hi, Susan. Welcome to the show.

Susan: Hi, how are you doing? I just wanted to bring up that I'm 74 and I have been dealing with an eating disorder since I was 12. At that time, they were putting kids on Metrical diet pills, that kind of stuff. There's a lot of societal reasons as we know for people being overweight, whether it's being immigrants, family habits, or whatever. The one thing that I still cannot get in touch with is how you do not pass it on to the next generation. I've seen it in my family that it started with the grandparents perhaps, and then the parents, and then the children, and then the grandchildren.

My approach was to be very honest with the niece about what my struggles are and also about what it meant to me to be overweight. I carried a lot of weight for most of my life. I got a response in the end that that encouraged her to feel bad about her body and encouraged her to have an eating disorder. It seems to me it's confusing and just want to know if anybody had any similar experiences or ways of dealing with it.

Kousha Navidar: Susan, thank you so much for contributing that as well. Emmeline, I'm looking at the clock, we have about 20 seconds left. As you listen to that question about what's next. Impossible to answer in 20 seconds, but what are you hoping readers take away with that respect from your book?

Emmeline Clein: I applaud to the last listener's honesty. Even if it ends up not being taken in the correct way, I think there's no way to speak about this perfectly. Being open and honest and trying to create community around it is so important. Something that I would like to say in my last few seconds is, a big part of this book is neither demonizing nor glamorizing people who are suffering from eating disorders. I think, to the listener who mentioned Twiggy, to the listener who just spoke who felt like they accidentally encouraged something, all of us have been victims.

Whenever we beat ourselves up too much for the way in which we've tried to survive a society that wants us to do self-harm, we are actually ignoring the most important question, which is who taught us to behave this way and who taught us to think this way? I think if we shift the frame to try to demonize the structures rather than each other, we can find a really beautiful community with each other that relieves a lot of these questions of blame that I think blind us to the real driving forces under these issues.

Kousha Navidar: I said we had a few seconds left, but this feels like such an important conversation and we actually just had, I think, a really important call come through as well because this goes beyond gender roles as well. We're talking about women so far, but men have an important conversation to play in here too. There's a caller, Andrew from Essex County. Andrew, thanks for sneaking in right at the end here. Welcome to the show.

Andrew: Yes. How do you do? Thanks for having me. I have a young teenage girl who, thankfully, is doing a lot better but struggled with an eating disorder for a year or so. Ultimately, she wound up in a residential program out of state. That ultimately really did the trick for her. I'm not so sure that it's the practices and methodologies behind the treatment, but I know that she hated being in residential and being so far away from us that she was determined to do anything she could to never go back there again. What's most troubling about this is it is a disease and it's affecting so many young people, but there's no real medical treatment for it.

We wound up for many, many months seeing a series of different social workers who claim to have experience and treatments and it was really difficult. I do have one question, however. My daughter, although she is recovered and doing quite well, recently, she's had this experience where she finds any kind of food, like the textures of food and the smells of food, to be really off-putting. It hasn't been a speed bump in her recovery, but it is something that's developed in the last few weeks or a month. She's educated us, my wife and I, and said that there's a type of condition for people that are recovering from eating disorders where-- have you heard of this? I can't recall what the name of it is, but she--

Kousha Navidar: Andrew, thank you so much for sharing that. For the question, Emmeline, I'm going to bring it back to you just as we wrap up here. The question was about textured foods but also we're getting a lot of texts that are coming in that are saying, "Please quickly talk about community. How do we create community?" Let's bring this all together and Andrew, really appreciate your call. Here's how we're going to approach this. For all the people that are listening, man, woman, otherwise, that are thinking about where do I go to next, can you suggest any resources or any next steps for people out there?

Emmeline Clein: Yes, of course. Thank you, Andrew, for sharing that, and I'm glad your daughter's doing better. I'm sorry we don't have time to get more into the details with your question. I know this sounds oversimplified, but I think if you ask people in your life about their relationship to food and to what it's meant for them as they move through the world and how their body is received, you can have a lot of really cathartic conversations. I think in terms of specific resources, Project Heal and the Fed Up Collective are two really great nonprofits around eating disorders that are incredibly inclusive and are incredibly aware of that narrow storyline we've been talking about and are trying to disrupt it.

Both of them run Zoom support groups that are really great. There's also eating disorder anonymous Zoom groups online that are available. Unfortunately, a lot of it hasn't gotten back to in-person post-pandemic in the way AA have. I'm hoping that happens more in the future but those are a few that I would recommend.

Kousha Navidar: That was my conversation with author Emmeline Clein about her new essay collection. It's called Dead Weight Essays on Hunger and Harm. It was part of our ongoing Mental Health Monday series.

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