Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar, in for Alison Stewart. We are one month into our Public Song Project. Here's the gist. Create a song based on work in the public domain and submit it to us and we'll add it to our Public Song Playlist, alongside works from friends of WNYC like Rhiannon Giddens, Béla Fleck, Arturo O'Farrill, and many more. You'll also have a chance to get your song played on WNYC and be interviewed big time.

You don't need to be a professional musician to submit either, so just go to wnyc.org/publicsongproject for more information on resources and how to submit. Plus, you can listen to songs that we've released so far. It's wnyc.org/publicsongproject. Happy composing. All right. Now, let's get this hour started.

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Kousha Navidar: Emmeline Clein experienced disordered eating at a young age. As she became a writer, she decided to tackle her experience head-on in a collection of essays titled Dead Weight. In the book, she leaves no stone unturned. She investigates the dangers of our weight-obsessed culture, the media that we consume to perpetuate it, an economy that galvanized it, even the medical systems that claim to help people with disordered eating, but really fail to address the root causes.

Through personal essays and extensive research, Emmeline finds she's not alone in her journey. She's part of a larger community of sisters. Dead Weight is dedicated to them. She wants to "sit cross-legged and talk about the thoughts that almost killed us." The full title of the book is Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm. Emmeline Clein joins us now to talk about it. Emmeline, thank you for being here.

Emmeline Clein: Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. Before we dive in, listeners' heads up, we're going to be talking about disordered eating and self-harm, so please, listen with care. If you're listening and you have a story we'd love to hear from you, have you or a loved one experienced disordered eating? Did you run into any trouble accessing treatment, or maybe you remember the first time you faced issues with body image and weight?

Call us, 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC or you can tell us your story on our socials. Our handle is @allofitwnyc. Emmeline, let's get started. Your relationship and anxieties with your body started at a young age. When did you first encounter the terms anorexia or bulimia and what did those terms mean to you?

Emmeline Clein: That's an amazing question. Honestly, I feel like it hasn't been phrased to me in exactly those words before. I think 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 2000s 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 sort of, she's scary, skinny tabloids articles in 2005 to 2008 that I was consuming in amorphous way, whether I was actually buying them or just seeing them at the grocery store. At the same time, as there was a glut of lifetime movie-type content and teen girl, YA novels that were very glamorized diseases a lot and functioned often as unwitting manuals, even if that's not what the author intended.

I think 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 I think 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 that you didn't know existed. I understand that this book, Dead Weight, that you wrote, you started working on this 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. I think one of the main impetuses for writing this book, and then I will go backwards and answer your question, I promise, because it's related, but is that I feel like disordered eating is just highly, highly demographically prevalent and incredibly dangerous, one of the most lethal mental illness besides opioid addiction in this country.

I felt like 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 nonfiction treatment, but I think I was looking for a book like that.

I didn't see one, but I think 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 think I was afraid to write a book that really centered disordered eating this way because I worried it wouldn't get taken seriously and would be misunderstood or overlooked. I think 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 Victorian times and who might be our modern iterations of it.

I think 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 Mischa Barton or whatever, were people that were dealing with symptoms of disordered eating.

I think I thought like, "Oh, this is an issue that has been taken seriously because male doctors were writing about it for so long." Maybe I can Trojan horse in what I actually wanted to do, but then I decided that 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 paring back the onion until you found the core. 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, I think that's definitely what I said. You understood correctly, but I think it's layered. It's more like, 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 like 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, I think, reductive and 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 like they're being tasked as vain or simple or whatever.

I wanted to level it. 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. When, 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, but 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 we might think it is when you're in the throes of disease.

Kousha Navidar: We just got a tweet. Absolutely, it makes sense. We actually just got a tweet that says, "Please include binge eating in your discussion of eating disorders." Which you do. You actually delineate in this book between anorexia and bulimia, not to pit them against each other, but to show the wide spectrum of disordered eating, correct?

Emmeline Clein: Yes, I have a whole chapter specifically about binge eating disorder. Also one of the things I attempt to do in this book is to talk about all the eating disorders that we have currently existing diagnoses for. Also, I really try to question the diagnostic paradigm that we use currently because I think that it is incredibly hierarchical in that both in our treatment regimes and in most of the literature around eating disorder, which usually does center, not only center anorexia, like there's much more literature around anorexia than any of the other eating disorders, but it also casts the anorexia as this sort of, good girls disease, whereas bulimia gets cast as the spoiled brat version.

Binge eating disorder is even further demonized, often gets imagined as this eating disorder that is related to a lack of ability to control impulses, when, in fact, all three of these diseases are rooted in the same mindset, they're rooted in the same beauty standard. Also, most people experience multiple eating disorders in the course of their disordered eating experience. Over half of people with anorexia go on to have binge eating disorder, and so many bulimics go on to have anorexia.

There's so much shame associated with transitioning from one of the better to one of the worst diagnoses. I really wanted to lift that stigma by pointing out that we're all suffering from the same societal disease. It makes sense to develop binge eating disorder after you have anorexia, because your body, after you've been in a long, restrictive period, thinks it's in a famine and is going to crave a binge. That's a really natural response and one that, instead of understanding as reasonable, we demonize. Sorry, you look like you're about to explain.

Kousha Navidar: No, no, please finish your thought.

Emmeline Clein: I think, also, there's one diagnosis called eating disorder not otherwise specified, which is what I had. Which is basically like when you have all the symptoms of anorexia, cognitive, behavioral, emotional, but you're not hitting the body weight cut-off, and you're not thin enough.

That, I think, is just a really emblematic example of the way that all these different diagnoses and the subdivisions blind us to our similarities and to opportunities for solidarity and communion because then you have somebody with a disease defined by the dread of not being sick and of not being thin enough being told that they're not thin enough to be sick. Right? We have versions of that happening with all these different diagnoses.

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. Listeners, we want to bring you into the story. Have you or a loved one experienced disordered eating? Did you run into any trouble when accessing treatment, or maybe you remember the first time you faced issues with your own body image and weight? Give us a call, 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC.

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 deadweight 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 systems 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 that 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 at 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 sort of extreme diets, usually can fade into eating disorders. These terms are very much like spectrumy. Their spectrum is more than they are 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 a diet, which I think itself is a misnomer, and part of the problem, and the rhetoric of the way 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.

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, and yet it is also the form of treatment, besides opioid addiction, that has the highest relapse rates and usually requires multiple rounds of treatment, and 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 it.

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 the author of Dead Weight Loss. We're going to take a quick break. Before we do, listeners, if you want to be a part of the conversation, give us a call or text us, 212-433-9692. We'll be right back.

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Kousha Navidar: 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 promote 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 had 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 right, and you're taking all these things like way too far, and you're wrong in some way. To find a community that was fostering this sense of solidarity and saying to each other, validating each other's experiences, and telling each other that, "You're not crazy, and you actually 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 this story we've been told about eating disorders is so slim and centers on a specific stereotype.

To the listener who tweeted about binge eating disorder, for example, it's been so centered on this one stereotype of the thin, White, anorexic girl, and I wanted to break open that incredibly narrow sculpture that's like of a small, thin body, a 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, but also who've 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.

I think 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 because not only is the 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 aughts 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, I think the phrase you used was narrow narratives and narrow bodies that match, and 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'm old and I grew up in the days of Twiggy who destroyed my life. [chuckles].

Emmeline Clein: Oh my God, totally.

Michelle: I remember being miserable. Yes, she's lovely. I'm sure she's a nice person, but I remember being in elementary school and other girls were wearing miniskirts and I couldn't. I've been fighting the whole battle of the weight thing for a million years, and that 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 was a fiction book called Once Upon a Time in Beverly Hills, and it was about a TV star who was told she had to lose weight or get fired, and 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, and 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's put in perspective like, "Oh my God, my whole life I've been wishing to be thin and you know what? Is it really going to change my life? No, it's not. Am I at a healthy weight 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, Emmeline.

It's, "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 I think 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, and 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." Or like, "Whatever it is that there's so much shame around talking about these issues, whether it's the way I just described her," because you think it's not feminist to admit you're struggling with this or whatever it is, but 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, but 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 like, "Well, 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 that is possible without self-harm."

I think that if we can motivate ourselves through solidarity, it can be really, really inspiring to recovery, and 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, and 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 an addiction, and whenever there's a tough feeling, you result into going to the addiction.

Part of the solution is service. I would imagine by doing this book by-- You talked about community. All of these ways of doing service really helps take the focus off the problem and focus on the solution, and that 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 family, immigrants' family habits, or whatever, but 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's started with the pet 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, but I got a response in the end.

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 questions 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 really think just again, I applaud 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, and being open and honest and trying to create a 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 like to the listener who mentioned Twiggy, to the listener who just spoke, who felt like they accidentally encouraged something like, "All of us have been victims, and 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. Firstly, I really appreciate this segment. It certainly seems to be somewhat of a pandemic as it were, and something to that effect. 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. I want to say what's most troubling about this is that it is a disease, and it's affecting so many young people, primarily, young girls 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. We went from one to another and one PHP program to another. I do have one question however, my daughter although she has recovered and doing quite well, recently, she's had this experience where she finds any food, like the textures of food and the smells of food to be really offputting.

It hasn't been really 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 and said that 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 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, I really appreciate your call. Here's how we're going to approach this.

For all the people that are listening men, women 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. Again I just really think that truly 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 FEDUP Collective are two really great non-profits around eating stories 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 that things like AI have. I'm hoping that happens more in the future, but those are a few that I would recommend.

Kousha Navidar: We know this strikes a chord with listeners. Again, thank you all for contributing to it. We promise to continue the conversation. Emmeline Clein is author of Dead Weight a book of essays on disordered eating out now. Emmeline, thank you so much for your work.

Emmeline Clein: Thank you so much for having me. It was great to meet you.

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