As a tween girl (only we weren’t called that in the early-80s–they just callled us “kids”) I watched reruns of “One Day At A Time” in syndication and I thought Valerie Bertinelli was the prettiest girl in the world. I wanted more than anything to look like her. All long dark hair and big eyes and sweet smile. She was also in one of my favourite made for TV movies in 1981–The Princess and the Cabbie. She was SO pretty!
So last week when I needed a brain break from George Martin I decided I’d read her “biography”Losing It.
It’s been thirty years since I first made her a mental role model of sorts, and I’m glad to have those decades under my belt. Because as I trudged through the book I found myself incredibly sad. Here’s a person who, at a healthy weight for middle-aged women of her frame size, thought she was fat. As I read her book, which is sadly subtitled “gaining my life back one pound at a time”, I was struck by the reality that even though she was a Teen Beat pinup, a beautiful young woman with a loving family and a successful career in a VERY competitive industry she always thought she was “fat” and “ugly”. There is a lot of talk about comparing herself physically to gaunt Mackenzie Phillips, a girl drugged and raped by her own father but still enviable because she’s SKINNY.
Yep. That’s the world we live in. Doesn’t matter that you’ve been high since you were eight. That your father considers you a preferable sex partner and that you have been at death’s door since you were twelve. You are a role model because you are a thin person. Never mind that you are thin in part because your parents would rather roll you a joint than cook you a hot meal.
It makes me so upset when I think about this book in retrospect, and even more so when I read the numerous Amazon reviews (heh. Amazon reviews by women who would find actual Amazons distasteful…) by women who say they bought the book for FREAKING GUIDANCE of all things. Not curiousity. Not a desire to learn. Guidance.
I am well past the age when I sought guidance from actressess and pop stars. But thankfully, right about the same time I started thinking how much I wanted to look like Valerie Bertinelli, I also heard a tune on the oldies radio station that jarred my world and burned into my senses. I missed the name of the song–it was buried in one of those blocks they would play–and spent weeks (pre-Internet) trying to track it down. When I finally found out what it was I looked in vain for the 45 and then waited by the radio for weeks with my tape recorder.*
It’s been one of my life anthems ever since. I wish someone had played it for all those other girls, the ones who think that they will be someone only if someone else says so.
But it’s all right now, I learned my lesson well.
You see, ya can’t please everyone, so ya got to please yourself
God bless Rick Nelson.
*Stories like this are what drive home to me just how much of a boon the Internet and iTunes are in a way, but just how much of our hunter-gatherer instincts must go unfulfilled now. Because those hunts of my youth for songs and articles were a lot of what made me.
Does that subtitle refer to losing weight, or to learning not to obsess over it?
Most definitely to losing. The book is governed by a sense of eternal despair, with a sort of bleak praise for Jenny Craig, without whose overpriced portion-controlled nutrition such liberation would not be possible.
Because being pounds over the norm is just *exactly* like being enslaved.
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
Oh dear. Poor woman.
Two things: if you have a smartphone, you no longer need internet searches. Add the Soundhound app. Much better than Shazam, which used to be the gold standard of “name that tune” apps.
Miss the days of when you had to CALL THE DJ to ask the name of the song.
Secondly and on a more serious note, I can totally relate to placing thinness above anything else. I had been there myself. I think there was little to no character/career development going on in my twenties because I thought being thin was about the only thing that mattered. I focused on nothing but that. I could have been a total loser (wait a minute, I WAS a total loser!) but that would be OK as long as I was thin. The irony: I have found pics of myself in those days and I was, indeed, thin. But I did not have a perfectly flat stomach, so I did not believe myself to be thin. I thought I was a blimp. About ten years ago, I remember talking to a personal trainer who informed me that if I was telling him the truth about what I weighed back in the day then I had been underweight during those years that I obsessed about how “fat” I was.
@Liz, yeah, soundhound is great. You can even sing or hum into it if you have a melody stuck in your head and don’t know what it is.
Blog post comes at an interesting time for me as I’m actively beginning a rather rigorous routine to build lean muscle (and I won’t lie, I desire it for sheer vanity’s sake). At the risk of my rambling causing somebody else’s blood to boil, I’m not suggesting I have answers, just stuff I’ve been thinking about lately. Being somebody who believes that everybody should be comfortable in their own skin, it does present a bit of cognitive dissonance for me when I set out to change my body to make myself look (what I perceive as) better. But then we all do things to make ourselves look better (from the clothes we buy, hair styles, etc.), so there seems to be a line somewhere that one has to cross before wanting to “look better,” becomes an unhealthy thing. So where is the line? I think it’s one that’s harder to find when you’re considering it for yourself than when you are considering it for others. I think it has something to do with health, realistic perceptions, relative importance to other aspects of your life, etc. But I’m finding it a blurry line to try to nail down.
Anyways, almost 1, so it’s time to go eat Lunch, Part II.
Dolphin, that’s the interesting thing about appearance. Because everyone should strive to look the best they can. I would never go around saying “god gave you hair that gets greasy so washing it betrays the truth of who you are.”
That is just stupid.
And so many fat-acceptance writers sort of go the same way with that thinking. That “if you’re fat, it’s as God made you and there’s no reason you should change.”
Well, I am fat, but I know I look vastly better at Overweight Point A than at Overweight Point B. So even though I’ve accepted that I will never be able to be Weight Watchers Goal Weight, I strive to keep myself at Point A. When I start to slide toward Point B, I rein it in a little, foodwise and try to step up my activity level within my paradigm of wellness. But I do it because I like the way I look at A. Not because I hate myself at B. Not because I walk around thinking that at B I am a total failure and completely unlovable.
To me that’s the difference. To claim that your life is “over” or “not yours” or “out of control” just because of your body weight is to grant way too much power to what is essential an external force. Because no matter what they say, a great deal of overweight IS caused by external forces, whether they be money, time, genetics, illness, etc.
If being what I’ve become has taught me anything it’s this. You can never fully control everything. So strive to make yourself the best possible version of you, the one that is the best reflection of your inner self. Beyond that, you can’t let it kill you.
For me, it’s so much more a question of whether my body feels good, resting and moving, within my general level of health and unhealth. So I will exercise more, or stop eating so much, or whatever, based on my comfort level.
But it’s the determination of what my general level of wellness is that’s the challenge. I’m still doing therapy for my back/leg problem from months ago, because they have told me that it could eventually all go away and I could be 100% (for me) if I keep this up for months and months. So it’s worth it, for me, to get up early and spend 45 minutes lifting various parts of my anatomy off the floor at specified angles in specified ways. And this morning I kept falling into a doze in between reps, and I ended up doing only about half of what I should have. I find that accepting that the heat affects my general wellness is more difficult than doing the damn exercises.
One thing the fitness guru I am largely basing my routine on now likes to emphasize is striving to achieve the maximum potential of YOUR body. I think part of the unhealthiness is when people want to look like celebrity X or whatever, when that’s just not in their body to do. He suggests that you make realistic performance goals instead of objective goals. Say “I want to be able to do X” instead of “I want to lose X lbs” or “I want my bicep to be X inches around.”
I think the problem with defining your self-worth by your appearance is that you can ALWAYS, ALWAYS find things wrong with your appearance, so if that’s where you look to determine you’re worth, then you’ll never actually be able to find it. I used to hate getting told how “lucky” I was to be naturally “thin” (or more accurately, scrawny). Without additional exercise, I kinda settle at about 4.5% body fat. But I have to work my ass off (scratch that, I have to work hard to have much of an ass to speak of) to achieve even a little tiny bit of muscle mass. While I am now setting out to build some muscle, I don’t for a moment think that if I get X amount of muscle, that, were I too look to my appearance for my own value, I wouldn’t be able to find plenty of things to complain about.
Valerie is v fat now, April 2012. She should be ashamed of pushing a weight loss program when she can’t do it herself. Stop eating crap. It’s that simple.