7 Quotes by Harriet Brown

I’ve never had anorexia, but I know it well. I see it on the street, in the gaunt and sunken face, the boney chest, the spindly arms of an emaciated woman. I’ve come to recognize the flat look of despair, the hopelessness that follows, inevitably, from years of starvation. I think: That could have been [me]. It wasn’t. It’s not.

It's so easy to focus on the anguish and the misery; it's harder, somehow, to acknowledge the positive, maybe for fear of jinxing it, bringing the nightmare back down on our heads.

Dieting and the fear of food have made us fatter, sicker, more depressed and more obsessed.

Fat or thin, the entire American population has internalized this idea about fat being terrible,” Averill told me. “They’re overexercising and undereating and living in a constant state of fear and panic about this horrible, hateful thing we must avoid at all costs. So if they allow someone else to say ‘It’s OK to be fat and you should stop being mean to fat people,’ their entire life of self-torture is a waste.

How many evenings did I stand in the middle of grocery store aisle, paralyzed with fear and indecision? It’s not just the time I regret; it’s the loss of who I might have been if I wasn’t so consumed. It’s who I might have loved, how I might have lived, what I might have accomplished. I might have been a force to be reckoned with.

Obviously we’re not in prison; we’re free to turn off the TV and step away from the smartphone. But to do that is to cut ourselves off. Our need to belong, to be part of our community, makes us vulnerable to the power of our culture’s ideals. Our need to compare ourselves to others, which in turn helps us survive and thrive in a hostile world,32 makes us susceptible to anxiety about every aspect of our selves, from how we look to how much money we make to how many friends we have.

What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn’t much better than tedious disease.” – Alexander Pope, eighteenth-century English poet.