Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (155 page)

Nevertheless, almost all women (myself included) have been brainwashed at some point in their lives about what they should weigh. So each of us lives our life, usually beginning in adolescence, with an ideal weight etched deeply in our brain. This ideal weight is almost invari ably five to ten pounds less than what we really weigh.

TABLE 9

USDA S
UGGESTED
W
EIGHTS FOR
A
DULTS

1. Height is without shoes.

2. Weight is without clothes. The higher weights generally apply to men, who tend to have more muscle and bone than women. The lower weights more often apply to women, who have less muscle and bone.

Adapted from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
Nutrition and Your Health: Dietary Guidelines for Americans,
3rd edition (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1990).

FIGURE 20: BODY MASS INDEX CHART

DETERMINE YOUR BODY FRAME SIZE

To reach optimal health and your optimal body composition, you may need to rehabilitate how you have been programmed to think about your size. To determine whether your frame size is small, medium, or large, take your thumb and third finger and encircle your opposite wrist with them right at the point where you would normally wear a watch or bracelet. If the tips of your fingers overlap, you have a small frame. If they just meet, you have a medium frame. If your thumb and third finger don’t touch, you have a large frame. Finger length has nothing to do with this—your finger length will be propor tionate to your wrist size. Studies have shown that large frame size in and of itself is often associated with repeated unnecessary and unsuccessful attempts at dieting. So if you have a large frame, bless it and get on with your life. You will probably never weigh 115 pounds and there’s no reason to think that you ever should—being too thin is not healthy, either.

If we are to constantly judge ourselves by the ideals of our media, we will always be at war with our bodies. The average Miss America’s weight dropped from 134 pounds in 1954 to 117 pounds in 1980. The ideal fashion model twenty-five years ago weighed 8 percent less than the average American woman at that time, but today the ideal fashion model weighs 25 percent less than the average American woman.
²²
Thus, the current media image of the “ideal” body is unachievable for most women—unless they take laxatives daily, are anorexic, or use exercise addictively as a form of weight control.

Magazines written for teenage girls are full of dieting and weight information that simply serves to hook young women into a lifetime obsession with weight and food that keeps their energy and their power tied up until they finally find the courage and the guidance to get off this road to nowhere, freeing up enormous creative energy in the process. The statistics on eating disorders speak for themselves. As many as 7 to 10 million women (and 1 million men) of all ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, and ethnicities have eating disorders, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Eating Disorders.
²³
Currently, 1 percent of the female population has full-blown anorexia nervosa.
²⁴
This condition is one of the most common psychiatric diagnoses in young women and has one of the highest death rates of any mental health condition, according to the National Eating Disorders Association.
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Bulimia, which consists of binge eating, self-induced vomiting, laxative use, diuretic use, or exercise to try to lose weight, is present in up to 20 percent of college students. It occurs mostly in young women age thirty or younger. Less than 5 percent of cases are in males.
²⁶
Even so, most bulimics don’t lose excessive weight but weigh slightly more than they would like to.

The medical profession reinforces these addictive behaviors by serving as “weight police,” having women weigh in and admonishing them to lose weight year after year without actually telling them how to do it and without addressing the complexities of self-nourishment for women.

Most women have bodies that are meant to be larger than the cultural ideal. Women’s bodies have more fat on them than men’s, nature’s way of ensuring that the energy needs of childbearing and lactation will be met even during times of famine. The much larger amount of testosterone men’s bodies produce contributes to a leaner body for men and a much higher metabolic rate than women have. Men also have proportionately more muscle than women, which is another factor that leads to a higher metabolic rate. Since cultural expectations of women are that we can never be too thin, and since being thin is associated with self-control, a lifelong struggle with food and body weight is a cultural norm. Our bodies and their weights are the barometers by which society measures how good we are, how attractive we are, how worthy we are.

How much self-control and body abuse must women go through before it dawns on us that there is something deeply wrong with our entire approach to the “weight problem”? Willpower and self-control are exactly the opposite of what we need. We need to see media images of normal, healthy women who are strong and lean but not anorexic. But as it turns out, even women with culturally “perfect” bodies never seem to be happy with themselves. Regardless of our body sizes, self-respect and self-acceptance are the starting points for making peace with our sizes. We must know that we have the power to get off the weight treadmill and start enjoying our lives, no matter where we are. I find it fascinating that I and many other women age fifty and older now like our bodies more than we ever did in our twenties. This is great reason for celebration! Healing one’s body image is definitely possible regardless of the cultural messages.

Step Seven: Find Out If You’re Fit or Fat

Excess body fat is not just unsightly but also a serious health risk. But weight itself is truly a meaningless measure of health. Why? Because lean body mass weighs much more than fat. Muscles are 80 percent water, while fat is only 5 to 10 percent water. Muscle is more than eight times heavier than the equivalent amount of fat.
²⁷
An individual can be at “normal” weight, or even less than that, and be overfat. Others may weigh far more than they “should” according to the weight tables, yet be at an ideal body fat percent- age. Some women will actually gain weight when they start to build muscle (which is lean body mass), but at the same time they will lose inches. This is because six pounds of fat takes up almost a gallon of space—much more space, proportionally, than muscle occupies.

One of my patients, whom I’ll call Mildred, was a former marathon runner who had believed for years that she was shaped “like a knockwurst.” Although Mildred wore a size 8, exercised regularly, and looked wonderful in her clothes, I could not convince her that she should stop trying to get down to 125 pounds. Her friends always thought she weighed a lot less than she did because she had a very sig nificant amount of lean muscle mass. It wasn’t until we measured Mildred’s body composition—which revealed that her body fat percentage was only 25 percent—that it finally began to dawn on her that her weight range of 136–140 pounds was both healthy and ideal for her.

Get your body fat measured. It’s one of the most helpful steps you can take to break out of the “I weigh too much” tyranny. You can do this at many doctors’ offices, or at almost any fitness center or Y. You can also purchase devices that measure body fat. A healthy percentage of body fat for women ranges from 18 to 28 per cent. Currently, the average American woman’s body fat is 33 percent.
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For the sake of comparison, female competitive runners’ average body fat is 18 percent, while anorexic women may be as low as 10 percent—so low that their bodies must consume their internal organs as fuel. On the other hand, a healthy body fat percentage for men is 15 percent, and competitive male athletes may be as low as 3 or 4 percent. Body fat percentage is one area where it can be deadly to imitate men, however, because a woman’s normal hormonal cycle can be interrupted at body fat percentages lower than 17 to 18 percent. (This is the level of body fat required to have “washboard” abs or a “six-pack”—it is altogether too low for many women and girls.)

If your body fat is currently in a healthy range, congratulate yourself and keep on doing what you’re doing. If it is too high, know that by reducing it, you will not only look and feel better but also lower your risk for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and fluid retention. In fact, increasing your lean body mass and decreasing your body fat percentage is one of the best treatments for these conditions if you already have them.

Step Eight: Retrain Your Eyes

We’re all aware that the cultural icons of beauty—today’s supermodels— seem thinner than almost anyone we know or see regularly. We also know that the images in magazines are airbrushed and manip ulated so much that even the supermodels don’t look like themselves. How can any of us feel at- tractive at a healthy body fat percentage when all the supermodels must be about 18 percent body fat or less?

The answer is that we all have to retrain our eyes to see the beauty inherent in a healthy woman with a healthy body composition, whose image is not an airbrushed, computer-enhanced, quasi-anorexic body that looks something like that of an adolescent boy with big breasts. Once you start looking for it, you’ll see this kind of beauty everywhere!

Step Nine: Rehabilitate Your Metabolism

Exercise

As women age, muscle mass is often replaced by fat because of lack of exercise. Exercise reverses the trend toward fat gain and muscle loss no matter at what age you start. Women who exercise regularly can look forward on average to twenty more years of productive living than those who don’t. Regular exercise also decreases insulin resistance, which helps your body burn carbohydrates more efficiently, making fat storage much less likely. Because glycemic stress begins in skeletal muscles, regular exercise helps prevent it. The best way to increase your lean muscle mass is by doing weight-bearing exercise regularly. Miriam Nelson, Ph.D., has shown that a weight-training program that exercises all the major muscle groups for forty minutes twice a week helps women lose excess fat and gain significant muscle mass—thus resulting in a higher metabolic rate and ability to burn calories effectively.
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Ae1robic exercise also increases your metabolic rate. (See
chapter 18
.) The more exercise you do, the faster your metabolism speeds up. Fast walking works very well, as do stair climbing, bike riding, treadmills, and similar forms of exercise. The increase in metabolic rate lasts for up to twenty-four hours after exercise is finished.

Drink More Water

Research by the late Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, M.D., author of
Your
Body’s Many Cries for Water
(Global Health Solutions, 1995), in dicates that most pain and sickness that we experience is actually the result of chronic dehydration. For many of us, he believed, the caffeine and sugar in many of the beverages we drink (including coffee, tea, soda, and juice) actually deplete the body’s water supply because they draw water from the body’s reserves as well as cause us to lose our natural thirst for water. (For more information, visit Dr. Batmanghelidj’s website at
www.watercure.com
.) The chronic dehydration that results commonly leads to fatigue (particularly in midafter-noon), as well as conditions including dyspepsia (heartburn), arthritic pain, back pain, headache (in cluding migraine), colitis pain and associated constipation, pain from angina (from the heart), and leg pain (when walking). One of my long time colleagues, an internationally known expert in food and healing, told me that her chronically splitting fingernail problem healed with one month of starting to drink more water! I recommend drinking filtered water processed by reverse osmosis (e.g., Aquafina) because in many places tap water is not pure enough, and neither is spring water. Drink half your body weight in ounces per day. If you weigh 140 pounds, for example, you need to drink 70 ounces of water each day.