Hungry and Angry

“I have lost and gained and lost again a total of 300 pounds, from prepubescence to my present age of twenty-six. My mother’s fluctuations were more vast and violent still. For as long as I can remember, one of us was always either rapidly shrinking or rapidly expanding.” These declarations belong to Mona Awad, whose essay “The Shrinking Woman: How Fad Diets Conquer Our Dignity, Not Our Fat” recounted her long, arduous relationship with food, dieting and body size. Aside from depicting the radical ups and downs of her and her mother’s weight-loss experiments in Montreal and Toronto, Awad’s essay, published in a 2005 issue of Maisonneuve Magazine, pointed to a reconsideration of what we know about the motives and doctrines of Jenny Craig, Dr. Atkins, and company: “The idea that a woman could never be safe from her flesh, even its ghost, is crucial to understanding why collective dieting is so successful. Thinness is discussed as a precarious condition, requiring eternal...