The hot new advice book by Venice A Fulton, Six Weeks to OMG, is the latest fad diet sporting an internet-age title. It claims to use a mix of nutrition, biochemistry, genetics and psychology to help you lose weight – leaving one to wonder how a person uses genetics to diet anyway. It also instructs readers to take ice-cold baths and skip breakfast.
But beyond the ludicrous guidelines, the bit I find really telling is the book's tagline: "Get skinnier than all your friends". I'm not sure a diet book has ever been this "honest" about the root of the motivation that a lot of women (and men, who seem to increasingly be falling prey to this) feel for dieting. This book is indeed using psychology – but it's using it against its readers.
My electricity company has started doing something similar. Once a month it mails a ranking of the people in my neighbourhood. There are charts and a line graph with multiple lines, so it looks very official. They give you your rank compared with the top 20% "energy-efficient neighbours". They also add tips to reduce consumption, which are not actually all that useful. Much like this diet book, actually.
When I got my initial electricity-usage ranking the first thing I did was go round the house and turn off all the lights. Every competitive urge I have lit up and in the blink of an eye, I determined to crush my more energy-efficient neighbours through the power of my own refusal to use – well, any power. Of course, it's averaging just about 30C in Florida these days, so that plan didn't actually work out very well. Nor was it well considered to begin with. It was based entirely on the idea that I loathe losing.
Competition has long been fostered by society – the "survival of the fittest" is a competitive mantra.
It's also typical among women, and if you're a feminist, you have plenty of theories about why. The idea is that, as a woman, you have to beat out all the other women around so that you can win (though what the prize is supposed to be gets rather fuzzy). In theory, you win a man. Even if you don't want one. And if you've already got one, you don't get to stop competing. You have to attract them all. It's rather like telling a sports champion that even though they've got one world championship under their belt they've not achieved anything unless they win all the other championships, too.
Like my electricity company, Fulton – or perhaps more accurately Fulton's publishing company, because authors don't always develop their own subtitles – is playing on perfectly predictable competitive spirit. Psychology in action! Heaven forbid you make friends with someone who is just naturally really thin. Avoid those people, or you will never win!
But if I win at the electricity game, the worst that can happen is my husband and pets complain of the heat. If you win at Fulton's game, you might actually endanger yourself, especially depending on how skinny your friends are. That's not a commentary on Fulton's ludicrous diet; it's a commentary on the idea that women must constantly reduce the size of their body. But as much as I suspect some people would really rather that be the outcome, you don't just disappear once you get small enough.
There's no stopping point for this competition; there's no "you weigh this little" certificate of completion. There is only the never-ending cycle of getting skinnier than your friends until you all completely disappear. By which I mean potentially die.
My solution is to avoid the competition entirely (electricity consumption rankings aside). Instead, I play video games, and when I triumph over the most recent level I know I've won for the moment. It's better than an ice-cold bath.
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