The Dangers of Compliment Culture
Hi!
So U.S. Thanksgiving is around the corner, and with it comes a potential litany of worries. Some may worry there won’t be much of the kind of food they eat(vegan, gluten-free, etc.) at family celebrations. Some worry about travel, and lost sleep, and being forced to take time off of work (Everyone is stressed out about an extra day off, right? Oh- so just me? DAMN).
I feel like the unspoken thing *so many* folks (especially female bodied folks) come up against when they see people that they haven’t seen in awhile is body talk. It can be negative body talk that throws you off your awesome-mental game, but sometimes it can be positive body talk too. In this article, Nichole, (whom I truly admire!) drops a little food for thought on the damaging nature of compliment culture. I think it is perfectly timed before Holiday family gatherings, and I hope you will, too. Enjoy!
—
The Dangers of Compliment Culture
Written by Nichole Dinato of Vegan Warrior Princesses Attack!
In the U.S., most successful college-aged women say they’d rather be hot than smart. It’s easy to see why. We all, regardless of gender, receive messages from a young age that our looks are important and remarkable, a lesson which is reinforced throughout adulthood.
Compliments and Disordered Eating
We have a strange compulsion in our culture to constantly comment on each other’s looks, to the point where it’s considered rude if we don’t mention a friend’s recent haircut or weight loss. But at what cost? In reading eating disorder recovery stories, and in living through EDs and body image issues of my own, I’m always struck by how many people mention that compliments were the trigger for their EDs.
Lacy mentioned recently that compliments on her weightloss after a difficult breakup were a driving force behind her restrictive eating morphing from a symptom of her grieving to an eating disorder.
I started dieting in 8th grade after noticing that I seemed “bigger” than other girls. I was more developed than them, with large breasts and curvy hips, which was especially difficult to process because I was a year younger than everyone else. I remember the feeling of my self-image warping, distorting my view of myself in the world, which persists to this day.
When I began losing weight, instead of asking me how I was achieving this all my own, or why I was choosing to diet at such a young age, my mother, my teachers and other students all told me how great I looked. As a kid who preferred to be invisible but who also had been neglected for most of her life, I started to crave this external validation. No one noticed that something had changed in me, something I desperately needed help with. I started to believe if I hit my goal weight, I would achieve happiness and ultimate control. I would be worthy of love and attention. What started out as a diet became a monster that still lives under my bed.
Compliment culture shows us that people mistake how you look with how you feel, which is an extremely dangerous lesson for someone who may be self-harming. It teaches us it’s easy to hide the dysfunction by putting on makeup or nice clothes. We learn that people will only look at the surface and not see the uncomfortable truths underneath, allowing us to escape detection and get further into our dark places than we may have otherwise.
Creating Obsession
I think most of us in the Super Strength Health community understand the potential dangers of complimenting someone on their weight loss, especially if we don’t know their mindset, and of representing weight loss as the end-all-be-all achievement.
Remarks on our weight can trigger eating disorders or body image issues, but constant remarks on our appearance, even in a positive light, can also create weird fixations that we wouldn’t necessarily have had otherwise.
I’ve developed a fear of looking old because I receive so many compliments on looking younger than my age. Counterintuitive? Not when you think about it. I never cared how old I looked, until I hit my late 20s, early 30s, when (apparently) I crossed a threshhold where looking young became the ultimate goal. Now I have dreams where gray hair grows in pairs on my head overnight, and plucking them just makes them grow back stronger. It’s shameful to me that I care, but I do, because I have been taught that my youthful appearance is an asset in the public eye.
When we receive a repeated compliment on our looks, we learn our value, and we fear losing it.
Reinforcing Obsession
For those of us who have struggled with EDs, body image issues, and body dysmorphic disorder, there is a real danger in receiving physical compliments when trying to discuss our disorders.
Obsessing over your weight, looks or a physical feature is unhealthy. Hard work has to be done to escape from that snake pit. One thing that is very hard for me, and was impossible up until recently, is talking openly about my dysmorphic demons. To my disappointment, those hard won steps have been met with well-meaning but intensely dangerous compliments about my appearance.
I’m sure I’m not alone in this. If you have an ED and you try to speak about your struggle, loved ones probably are quick to let you know that you don’t need to lose weight, that you look great, or that it “isn’t that bad.” If you have body dysmorphic disorder, you probably often hear that the physical feature you hate is distinctive, attractive or, again, not as bad as you think.
With this, everyone is reinforcing that your obsession is, in fact, every bit as important as you think it is. It implies that pain only belongs to those who don’t look good enough to opt out. It demeans the very real nightmare that these conditions can become, reducing them down to something that can be cured with a simple compliment and not something that requires courage, possible therapy and gobs of self-care to conquer. It undermines our struggles, dismisses them with the wave of a hand, instead of validating our experience and teaching us to move beyond obsession with the physical to address the underlying emotional and/or mental root cause.
Changing the Culture
As the holidays roll around and a lot of us will be seeing friends and family, keep in mind how you interact with your loved ones. Praise little ones for kind gestures, offers of help, and perseverance in problem solving. Encourage interests. Ask them questions and then thank them for talking with you. When they ask you questions, compliment them on their curiousity. Tell them that you love them, that you miss them, that you enjoy spending time with them.
Instead of telling the adults in your life that they look good, say you love their expressive sense of style, that their faces feel like home, or that they have always been a beacon of strength for you. Simply saying, “I’ve missed you” can be more than enough.
If you are on the receiving end of compliment culture woes, don’t be afraid to start having conversations with people around you. It will take a long time, but I’m hoping together we can start to change the world by creating safe spaces around us. It’s ok to let someone know you are trying a new thing, where you don’t talk about people’s looks and they don’t talk about yours. You can be honest and say comments on your body are scary and triggering, and ask them to help you feel safe by refraining.
That’s not to say we can’t ever give each other compliments on our looks, but I think we need to be much more careful about when, where and what value those compliments have.
Let people know their value in your life. Let them know that you are looking past the physical, to truly see them, and ask them to see you back.
Nichole Dinato is one-half of the Vegan Warrior Princesses Attack! podcast, a show she creates with her business partner, Callie Coker.
VWPA publishes one podcast episode every week that takes an in-depth, unflinching look at difficult vegan issues, and a weekly advice column that answers questions from vegans and the veg-curious alike. Dedicated to creating a welcoming community and being as intersectional as possible, the girls tackle tough issues with love, humor, brutal honesty and an open door policy to everyone.
When the Power is in the Resting.
Today I have a very special guest poster, my friend Molly Merson. She is here to talk to you a bit more about her personal experience with the power of rest days (in her case, three weeks of rest days post surgery.) She is wonderful, articulate, and clearly strong as hell. Here is her demonstrating that statement with a 200 lb. backsquat:
If that doesn’t get you pumped up, I don’t know what will. Without further ado, here’s Molly!
—-
On Saturday, I finally hit that PR (personal record, in case you’re not as obsessed with CrossFit as I am) I’d been training for over the last four months: a 200 lb. back squat. It took a while that morning– I cried, I hyperventilated, I felt the familiar butterflies of a panic attack tickle my chest and the bottom of my throat . I knew could do 185 lbs., but 200?? That was insane and huge and I’d never get it. My usual mantra of “just go down, then go up!” didn’t seem to be soothing me anymore.
After pacing in circles and a lot of encouragement from my coach, and figuring that even if I broke my back I was going to be in the hospital on Monday anyway, I went for it. And I made it. It was fucking awesome.
Two days later, at 8:15am, the anesthesiologist placed a mask over my face, and I went under for surgery.
Three hours passed before I woke up one hairy, toothy, ovarian cyst lighter- and was thrilled about my skilled and beautiful doctor having been able to keep both of my ovaries intact. (My back was fine, by the way.) She had warned me a month before the procedure that she might have to remove the ovary, and she might have to incise my abdominal muscles, rendering me unable to lift for six months. The anesthetic process (including the steroids they gave me to wake me) plus the good news—I have my ovary! I can lift again!—made me uncharacteristically ecstatic, even as I was knowingly staring down three weeks of very limited movement.
Leading up to the surgery, I did CrossFit three times a week, and was working on my second Hatch squat program twice a week. I was also offering personal training sessions to help make some extra cash and to help me gain skills and experience in what it was like to train someone. My gym had invited me to participate in their coaching intern program, and I was starting to build a second life out of movement. I considered this to be a “healthy” relationship with exercise, because I had learned to base my identity in part on what my body could do instead of how much it weighed or whether I had a belly pooch (I did) or whether my arms and shoulders could fit inside standard shirtsleeves (they couldn’t). It became ok for my body to just exist as it was, because I knew my pull-up numbers and how much I could power clean. I was using CrossFit as a way to regulate my punitive and disordered eating patterns, and it was fucking beautiful. I’d never been happier and more peaceful in my body.
The cyst was discovered in April, diagnosed as a dermoid (thankfully not cancerous- I have a family history of ovarian cancer, and that’s why I asked for the ultrasound in the first place) in May, and I went in for the surgery the last day of June. I had a month and a half to think about all of this, and what it could do to my life to suddenly not be able to lift heavy weights. That’s when I started realizing that I’ve still been actively dancing with my self-destruction around food and exercise.
Even though I thought we’d broken the relationship off, apparently we’d been Facebook-stalking each other, because here I was right back in the mindset of: “If I don’t work out, everything I eat is going to hurt me and make me feel bad. Other people will see I am bad. I won’t be able to do any of the things I want to do in my life and everyone will see what a shitty, lazy, horrible person I am.” As soon as I could identify that voice in my head, I realized I needed more than what I’d been giving myself. I’d simply assumed that because it was working for me to pay attention to my workouts and my body: taking real rest days where I lazed about in bed and barely even walked the dog; never ever pushing myself into the “red” zone in my workouts, always noticing my heart rate and breathing as a place to come back to mindfully; eating what I wanted when I wanted to (because food is fuel! And delicious! And not a punitive thing anymore!!); focusing more on getting strong than on metcons—all of this made me believe that I was Recovered from my disordered eating and body punishment. But what happens when what I do does not involve remarkable feats of strength? What if what I do is RECOVER from INVASIVE SURGERY? Isn’t that what this all is, anyway? Recovering from invasive and destructive messages about my self-worth, what belongs and what doesn’t belong, who I am and who I’m not?
Staring down three weeks of zero-to-limited movement reminded me that eating disorder and self/body-hatred recovery is a process, one that is very much life-long. While these parts of me may be lying dormant, they’re still very much living parts of me. They are of course here to protect me in their fucked up and toxic ways (for example, this part of me—so young!—still believes that I need to be small and easily overlooked in order to survive). But these messages are hurtful to the part of me that is learning to love myself. And yet, there is information here. When this internalized shame and oppression rears its head and starts to attack me, I know it’s time to dive into the parts of me that are feeling scared, lost, alone, and overwhelmed. Those parts are easy to overlook because they’re uncomfortable, and they can feel so expansive and make me feel so small and powerless. Like the child I used to be—small and powerless. Except that I wasn’t wrong to believe that all the work I’ve been doing—years of therapy, CrossFit, self-love and forgiveness work, and becoming a psychotherapist myself—is actually helping me. It is. It’s just that sometimes the things I used to do aren’t soothing in the same way anymore, and I need to pay a little more attention than usual to loving myself.
While I was in the first week of my surgery recovery, my sweet dog stayed close by my side, showing her fuzzy belly and reminding me to relax. I was surrounded with people who love me and want me to heal. People brought food, stayed overnight with me, cooked me meals and attended to me when I needed my pillows adjusted. They helped me pick things up and put them down again. They became my feats of strength.
I also picked up the book The Artist’s Way. It’s something I’d been meaning to read for years, and never found “the right time” to do it. Sitting on my bum in bed all day long seemed like as good a time as any. I started the practices outlined in the book, and already can feel my intuition and self-love growing. I also continued to process all of my feelings in my own personal therapy. And it hit me, again, this power I have: To touch the part of myself that feels powerless, and remind myself: I’m not alone.
That’s better than any PR, any day of the week: To know even while feeling deep into my fear, my sadness, my anxiety, and my shame: I am right here with me, able and capable of bringing love into the anger, and vulnerability—like my little dog’s belly—into the fire of self-hatred.
Bio:
Molly Merson, MA, MFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with a private practice in Berkeley, CA. She provides compassionate and thoughtful psychotherapy for people who are struggling with learning how to love themselves. You can find more about her at www.mollymerson.com. She is also an avid CrossFitter and is learning how to be a CrossFit coach. She loves movement, nature, gardening, walking meditation, her community, her puppy, and writing. She thinks Lacy is the bee’s knees, and that her blog and business provides a much-needed service to the world.
On health, marketing, and morality: a guest post by Josey Ross
Hi folks! Last time I was here on Super Strength Health I talked about the problematic nature of the “obesity epidemic,” the profound limitations of the BMI, and how, contrary to what the media and diet gurus tell us, the science linking health to weight is often ambiguous, sometimes contradictory, and very limited. This time I’m going to look at how health has become a moral issue and a way that we (are expected to) contribute to society, which has profound implications for the ways we understand the roles of food and exercise in our lives and our culture.
Okay, so it used to be that the way that we, as a society, thought about “citizenship” (not in the “what it says on your passport” way, but in the “what it means to be a fully participating member of society” way) involved both participation in the public sphere (voting, running for office, sitting on boards) and the dual contributions to society of both the production and consumption of goods. But as more and more production is moved overseas, the primary way that the citizen contributes to society is through consuming and thus supporting global capitalism. Thus, “we buy and eat to be good subjects”.[1]
However, as you all may have noticed, we society has a lot of issues around fatness. Unrestrained consumption doesn’t quite “work”, and so we are subject to this horrid, ever-present tension to consume more than at any time in the past, while striving to be thinner than at any time in the past. In the realm of these contradictory edicts, success is gained by the citizen who can self-sacrifice through deprivation and discipline in order to achieve thinness while simultaneously engaging in the hedonistic consumption of readily available, highly palatable foods.
Walking that tightrope is very, very difficult. It involves near-constant surveillance in the form of calorie counting, points counting, carb-eschewing, steps counting, and just generally being very vigilant about what goes in your body. This constant surveillance is a very, very good distraction. Because it’s hard to concentrate on foreign policy when you’re dreaming about the doughnut in the kitchen that your coworker brought in but you don’t feel like you “earned” it in your morning spin class. And this surveillance isn’t just expected of bigger bodies, because those who are currently “normal” weight are considered at risk of becoming overweight and then obese.
Remember all those issues we have around fatness? Well, here’s the really insidious part: those folks who are able to stay thin while consuming lots—and remember this doesn’t have to mean consuming lots of burgers and french fries, it can be $16 fresh-pressed juices and cleanses—are considered good, active citizens who are self-disciplined and rational (even though you and I know that self-discipline and rationality have little to do with body size) while those who fail to achieve the twin duties of eating and thinness are considered irrational and lacking discipline. And it’s no coincidence that those who are often unable to stay thin in the face of abundant consumption are usually poor and often people of color.
It is also no coincidence that we focus on individual efforts at health (or at least thinness) rather than structural issues ranging from economic inequality to lack of safe outdoor spaces to be active in. And there’s even a name for this single-minded, individualistic, focus on health via thinness: Healthism. Rather than improving health, this overwhelming focus on thinness is actually really dangerous for a lot of folks. From the lopsided social status of those who are and aren’t able to meet societal ideals of thinness to the disordered behaviors many (primarily—but not solely—young women) engage in while trying to get ever thinner, healthism does a lot more damage than good. And as citizenship has come to be represented by our ability to be thin in the face of overwhelming consumption, what we eat and whether we exercise become morally fraught decisions.
Though how I move my body should be about no more than how it makes me feel alive and grounded and energized, the choice to exercise is not morally neutral in contemporary North American culture. One way to think about the increasingly moral weight of exercising (or not exercising) is to look at the increasing secularization of society—as more of us split from organized religion (or are raised without it entirely) we no longer have one agreed upon set of morals such as, oh, say, the ten commandments. We are also an incredibly individualistic society, which has turned the moral realm into one of individual actions and consequences. In this context, the pursuit of fitness has become a morally positive act individuals can take not just for themselves but for the good of society as well. But the attitudes we see surrounding exercise—especially in health promotion—reinforce social separation since certain populations have lower rates of physical activity (due to less free time, for example, because of multiple jobs, and inadequate safe space to exercise) and are thus considered in need of governmental intervention (notably, though, that governmental intervention is never in increasing minimum wage or affordable childcare—factors that would very much improve the health of many economically marginalized people—but rather informational campaigns promising health in exchange for walking and vegetables).
We turn, now, to the politics of food. While those in the upper classes in North America have increasing availability to high-quality food thanks, in large part, to globalization, those living in poverty are largely limited to a diet of highly palatable, high fat and calorie, low nutrient foods. The fast food industry, in many ways, serves as the ideal case study for this. The increased availability of food, due in large part to government supports in the form of subsidies, as well as the deregulation of health and safety mechanisms allows fast food to fill the need created by the attack on living wages: profoundly underpaid workers can afford to eat (and thus contribute by consuming) substantial amounts of calories because hyper-processed fast food is so cheap.
Finally, I want to talk about “nutritionism,” [2] which refers to the focus of dieticians, nutrition scientists and public health authorities on individual nutrients rather than foods as a whole. See, the thing is, we know what a healthful diet looks like: largely plant-based, few processed foods, not too much. And recommendations along those lines basically don’t change. Yet the public is more confused than ever about what to eat: Paleo? Primal? Raw vegan? Gluten-free? Raspberry ketones? Bacon-wrapped-bacon smothered in bacon?
Nutritionism has also been heavily used in the marketing of various foods over the past three decades, often using the qualities of a single nutrient to imbue a sense of health into the product as a whole. As you can see any time you walk in to Whole Foods or (and I do not recommend this) watch Dr. Oz: every week there is a new “super food” that will cure all that ails you (because a small study found that a super concentrated extract of a substance found in that juice may be correlated with a slightly lower risk of some-scary-disease). Because there is a lot more money to be made in the supplement of the week than in living wages, affordable childcare, safe environments, and universal medical care.
[1] Guthman and DuPuis (2006),
[1] (Scrinis, 2008)
Please visit Josey’s blog Here
Illustration by the wonderful and talented Joanna S. Quigley
