Thrive at Any Weight: Eating to Nourish Body, Soul, and Self-Esteem

208 Pages·2019·7.951 MB·English

by  Nancy Ellis-Ordway

Thrive at Any Weight

Thrive at Any Weight
Eating to Nourish Body, Soul,
and Self-Esteem
Nancy Ellis-Ordway
Foreword by Harriet Brown
Copyright © 2019 by Nancy Ellis-Ordway
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a
review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2019945443
ISBN: 978-1-4408-7023-1 (print)
978-1-4408-7024-8 (ebook)
23 22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5
This book is also available as an eBook.
Praeger
An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC
ABC-CLIO, LLC
147 Castilian Drive
Santa Barbara, California 93117
www.abc-clio.com
This book is printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
To my husband,
Frederick Stephen Ordway,
who taught me to believe in myself

Contents
Foreword by Harriet Brown ix
Preface xiii
Chapter 1 Where Are We, and How Did We Get Here? 1
Chapter 2 The Science of Weight and Health 13
Chapter 3 Finding Peace 31
Chapter 4 Eating 2.0: Upgrading Your Relationship with Food 57
Chapter 5 Healing the Self-Hate Injuries, Reclaiming Body Joy 75
Chapter 6 Dealing with the World: Weight Stigma, Part 1 85
Chapter 7 Social Justice: Weight Stigma, Part 2 101
Chapter 8 Going to the Doctor (and Other Adventures in
Medical Care) 123
Chapter 9 But What about the Children? 129
Chapter 10 What Now? 141
Chapter 11 Final Thoughts 149
Notes 151
Bibliography 167
Index 183

Foreword
Not long ago I gave a talk to a group of pediatricians. The subject was
anorexia and specifically how pediatricians could and should screen more
aggressively for the disease. I presented them with research on how out-
comes improved with early diagnosis and treatment and suggested the
importance of tracking adolescent growth curves to make sure teens were
not losing weight or—harder to notice—failing to gain weight as they grew.
It was a subject that resonated deeply with me because it had happened to
my own daughter, who was diagnosed with anorexia at age 14.
I will never forget the 50-something male doctor in the front row who sat,
arms folded, and glared—there’s no other word for it—the whole time I was
speaking. During the Q and A, he was the first to raise his hand.
“Do you know how many obese kids I see?” he challenged. “I’m way more
worried about type 2 diabetes than anorexia. A little weight loss would be
good for most of them.”
I wish I could say his attitude was unusual. I have encountered it repeat-
edly from not just pediatricians but all sorts of medical professionals who are
deeply invested in the idea that fatness is the worst thing that can happen to
a person. As a culture, we conflate thinness with not just beauty and good
health but goodness itself. We equate thinness with virtue, righteousness,
and morality.
At the height of my daughter’s illness, when she was gaunt and hollow-
eyed and sad, she routinely got compliments on her body. Acquaintances
who found out she was sick would say, self-deprecatingly, “I could use a little
anorexia myself!” A saleswoman in a clothing store, where I was trying on
clothes, once said to her, “Aren’t you lucky—you got the thin genes!” The lab
tech doing her EKG on the day she was diagnosed asked her for diet tips.
I was horrified by these kinds of comments. Does everyone in the United
States have body dysmorphia? Can we not see the difference between healthy
and sick, between thin and skeletal? My daughter was not a model; she was
visibly dying.