By: Leslie Goldman

Oct 20, 2009

The scene: Manhattan, 1998, Carrie Bradshaw's rent-controlled apartment. Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha and Miranda are kvetching over Chinese takeout and wine. The topic of convo: Big is dating a model and no one can understand why.

Miranda: “When did all the men get together to decide they would only get it up for giraffes with big breasts? [We] live in a culture that promotes impossible standards of beauty.”*

Charlotte: "It doesn't matter how good I feel about myself, when I see Christy Turlington, I just want to give up." Miranda: “I want to hold Christy down and force-feed her lard."

Charlotte: “I hate my thighs."

Miranda: “I’ll take your thighs and raise you a chin.”

Carrie: “I’ll take Miranda's chin, and raise her a nose.”

Samantha: Silence. When pressed, she defensively admits “What?! I love the way I look!"

Carrie: “Well, ya paid enough for it."

This, my friends, is fat talk. It’s actually a fairly mild form of fat talk, considering some of the punishingly self-hateful garbage I’ve hear friends and strangers (and, admittedly, myself) spew. Things like, “I’m a disgusting, fat cow.” “My ass looks like cottage cheese.” “I need to make myself go throw up after eating that cake.” We say things like this about ourselves – things that, if a parent were overheard saying it to a child, they’d be rightfully accused of verbal and emotional abuse, but when we say it in our minds or while looking in the mirror, it’s just considered “being a girl.”

October 19 to October 25 is National Fat Talk Free Week. It’s a week dedicated to silencing the chorus of self-deprecating, hateful comments we think or make about our bodies. It was dreamt up by Delta Delta Delta sorority (you may have seen this video they helped create, which highlights feel-good stats like “54% of women would rather be hit by a truck than be fat” or “1 in 4 women have avoided engaging in a physical activity or sport because they feel badly about the way they look.”

While here in Denver for the annual American Dietetics Association meeting, I spoke with Dr. Kenneth L. Weiner, co-founder and medical director of a local eating disorder clinic called the Eating Recovery Center.  He called fat talk “insidious,” “pervasive” and “damaging,” and says his goal is to encourage women to start taking note of just how many fat talk comments we make in a given day. I tried it today – a day, I might add, that began with a 7am wake-up call, after which I stumbled out of bed, made my way into my Denver hotel bathroom, flipped on the light, saw myself in the mirror wearing a red thong and nothing else and, stretching my arms overhead, actually chirped out loud, “I look good!” (I swear, I did, and I know it sounds corny and ridiculous and maybe even obnoxious but I felt it so I said it.)

But how swiftly things can change: This afternoon I went jogging along Cherry Creek (It was a beautiful, unseasonably warm 78 degrees today), wearing a sports bra/tank combo and shorter shorts. I haven’t run in quite a while and as I began jogging, I could feel the area from my waist to my upper thighs, um…jiggling. And I thought, “I wonder if all these people I’m passing can see my butt jiggling underneath my shorts? And are they grossed out by it?” It didn’t help matters that I’m pale and have been munching Cranberry Almond Kind Bars and Jell-o pudding cups and antioxidant-enhanced Mesquite BBQ chips and Actifry fries for the past 48 hours. And apparently it didn’t help that I’m a body image blogger and wrote Locker Room Diaries, a book about overcoming an eating disorder. I can rationally understand that I’m beautiful as I am, strong and fit and not overly jiggly and even if I were overly jiggly, who the hell cares? And yet…these fat talk thoughts still weasel their way in.

I snapped myself out of it by thinking of Dan and how incredibly and fully he loves me – for me, not my hips or my abs. And I thought about how embarrassing it was that I had just interviewed a doctor for Fat Talk Free Week a mere three hours prior and yet here I was, jogging for only the second time since injuring my neck a year and a half ago, and instead of wholeheartedly reveling in my success, I was fretting over whether the dude with the dreadlocks and a lipring was put off by my thighs. And now, here I am purging myself via blog, to eject the bad thoughts out of my mind and into the ether. Tomorrow, I’ll try harder.

For fun: Madonna sings What it feels like for a girl. I love this song and feel like to speaks to the struggle we all feel to live in our skin.

*paraphrased...but not by much!