The paradox is that attempting to get rid of emotions is one of the biggest obstacles to our success. The more we try to eradicate or block our awareness of our feelings, the more resistance we build to what exists. This resistance is manifested in our physical bodies and emotions. Our intellectual processes also become less clear because our denial drains our vital forces.
Doris Helge, Transforming Pain into Power
Women have complicated and confused eating habits. Underneath some of us still believe that eating less will make us look more feminine and garner more love, attention and success. Others snub the magazines and commercials that hail slenderness as the feminine ideal and down their candy and icecream with feminist pride.
Susie Orbach writes, in Fat Is a Feminist Issue, that being fat is a rebellion only if you agree that being skinny is the feminine ideal. Similarly, some psychologists theorize that women eat compulsively as a rejection of traditionally feminine roles and expectations.
However, a 1985 study published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders contradicted this belief. The investigation, which examined the eating habits of 162 college women, revealed that compulsive eaters tended to perceive themselves as relatively low in feminine qualities even though they desired to be more feminine. Restrictive dieters, on the other hand, viewed themselves as being relatively high in feminine traits.
This is the type of emotional simplification that devastates dieting. Changing our image changes who we are, what we expect of ourselves and how others see us.