On judgement day: Anorexic and obese women’s phenomenological experience of the body,food and eating

Abstract

In contemporary Western society, both anorexic and obese¹ bodies are regarded to be “out of bounds.” Although scholars have enhanced our understanding of anorexia and obesity, these “disorders” have most often been studied in isolation from one another. In this article, we examine the similarities and differences in the embodied experiences of anorexic and obese women. Informed by the phenomenological research tradition, we follow in the footsteps of other scholars who have already begun to depart from binarized, polarized views by describing how women living with anorexia and obesity in two Canadian provinces experience the body, food and eating. Anorexic and obese women described a vast range of intense emotional experiences to characterize their relationship to food, the body and eating. Shame marked the bodies of these women. Family relationships also changed how the women experienced the body and food over time. The women ascribed a diverse array of complex meanings to the body and food. We hope that our study opens new phenomenological terrain to dialogue with and for anorexic and obese bodies in a relational way, recognizing that both of these bodies hurt in a remarkably similar manner. In a judgement day of sorts, both anorexic and obese bodies carry the heavy burden of culture’s expectations to fit within a narrow range of normative slenderness.

Keywords

anorexia obesity phenomenology emotions embodiment

Introduction: In Plato’s footsteps

The Greco-Roman distain for the body – postulated by Plato – is a historical legacy that has tenaciously persisted as a foundational co-ordinate for body-self relationships in Western cultures. In contemporary culture, we can feel the sticky residue of this historical stance towards our bodies (Bordo, 1993). Since the body is thought to be that “thing” which hungers for love and lust, its “excessive” desires require regulation. In patriarchal Western society, some scholars suggest that this particular orientation converges on women’s bodies specifically (Ferris, 2003). Bodies that depart in any way from the normative feminine expectation to be slim fall under the pressing glare of culture’s collective microscope (Malson, 1995). Anorexia nervosa and obesity are two such feminine embodiments that disrupt normative feminine body-culture codes, albeit in different ways.

Unpacking anorexia nervosa and obesity

In contemporary culture, both anorexia and obesity are viewed as pathological conditions. By attributing both extreme “dietary restriction” and “overly indulgent eating” to the “emotional whims and excessive tendencies of women,” some argue that both anorexia and obesity are coded as feminine pathologies (Smith, 2015). According to this dominant viewpoint, anorexia nervosa is conventionally understood as a psychiatric disorder that results in major bodily effects. A “checklist” of diagnostic criteria that appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders needs to be met before an individual is diagnosed with anorexia (Lafrance & McKenzie-Mohr, 2013). In contrast, obesity has mainly been a concern for public health officials and health care providers, rather than psychiatrists. In conventional wisdom, obesity is understood as a “lifestyle issue” resulting from the imbalance between caloric intake and output (Gard & Wright, 2005). Further, anorexia and obesity both have different relationships to health. While the Health at Every Size movement has been critical to debunking the association between health and thinness (Bacon, 2008), the pro-anorexia community has been far less successful in its promotion of living well with anorexia (Rich, 2006). Thus, with the exception of scholars who have problematized these constructions, anorexia and obesity stand as pathologized and feminized bodies in contemporary culture.

Importantly, the pathologization of the two embodiments should not be conflated in any simple sense. Each is discursively inscribed with a different set of meanings, differences that we unpack in more detail later. Although there is considerable feminist research on anorexia and fatness, relatively few studies seek to examine the embodied experiences of thin and fat bodies (for exceptions, see Longhurst, 2010; Murray, 2012; Owen, 2012; Warin, 2010). Instead, textual and discursive analyses of fat and thin bodies are more common (Burns, 2009; Murray, 2012; Probyn, 2009). Despite the claim that anorexia and obesity are both non-conforming feminine embodiments, with some exceptions (Burns, 2009; Malson, 2009; Probyn, 2009), few scholars have sought to investigate how these bodies are lived by those who experience them every day (Murray, 2012; Warin, 2010). Inspired by the phenomenological research stance, we depart from the binarized approach that has traditionally been used by attempting to describe and interpret how Canadian women who self-identify as anorexic and obese experience their lived bodies. Thinking about anorexia and obesity in a relational manner – and following in the footsteps of other scholars who are also charting this terrain – is important for several reasons. Critical weight scholarship has questioned how feminist analyses of eating disorders and obesity tend to over-emphasize the “inscriptive power of cultural images of thinness” (Burns, 2009, p. 124), and, in so doing, foreclose the experiences of the dynamic, lived, feeling body (see Bray & Colebrook, 1998; Murray, 2012; Probyn, 2009; Rice, 2014; Warin, 2010). Such a singular focus on the determining power of images precludes an analysis of how the body is always becoming through complex negotiations with “pleasures, pains, other bodies, space, visibility and medical practice” with “no single event in this field… act[ing] as a general ground for determining the status of the body” (Bray & Colebrook, 1998, p. 43). In other words, the “fixation on the image” (Probyn, 2009, p. 114) in much critical feminist scholarship “renders understandings of bodies as static” where the body is understood as “image but not feelings, emotions and affects”. Nor, for that matter, is the body understood in terms of “intra-experience (background, personal history, etc.) and inter-experience (in terms of insults, praise, etc.)” (Probyn, 2009, p. 114) when it is reduced to the “inscriptive power of cultural images”. In this article, we build on the critique of the tyranny of images in critical feminist scholarship, suggesting that it is the reliance on images of fat and thin bodies that is – at least in part – responsible for the continued examination of the two embodiments as though they are separate and distinct. Once we move past the notion of images as oppressively determinant of feminine bodily identities and open the critical terrain up to the irreducibly complex and diverse negotiations that constitute feminine bodily becoming, whether fat or thin, only then is it possible to see overlaps between the two embodied experiences. Indeed, when we focus on the pains, pleasures, desires and experiences of bodies, for instance, we can rethink thin and fat, not as two static representations standing still and oppressed by culture, but as complex systems in constant negotiation with sensate experiences. Further, a relational perspective to studying thin and fat might allow us to understand how anorexia and obesity are not isolated pathologies that stand on their own, but rather, are negotiated embodiments that fold into each other.

Review of the literature

A full discussion of social psychological examinations of obesity (see Bell, 1985; Longhurst, 2010; Murray, 2012) and anorexia (see Bordo, 1993; Hepworth, 1999; Selvini-Palazzoli, 1979; Warin, 2010) is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, we focus on the few studies that have examined anorexia and obesity relationally. To our knowledge, there are only a few research teams that have sought to compare the similarities and differences between anorexia and obesity. The few that do tend to employ a textual or representational analytical approach. Using a Foucauldian discourse analysis, Whitehead and Kurz (2008) examined the construction of anorexic and obese women in four contemporary women’s magazines. While both anorexic and obese women are regarded as aberrations to normative feminine embodiment, the authors found that the portrayal of anorexia is far less virulent than that of obesity. Although the “passive anorexic victim” construction has been deeply problematized by more critical feminist scholars (Burns, 2009), according to Whitehead and Kurz (2008), anorexic women are most often constructed as innocent victims caught in the storm of a malevolent illness. Anorexia is also positioned as a medical illness, rather than a personal choice. Such a discursive position appears to elicit reader pity, serving to awaken audience sympathies. Although obesity is also positioned as a medical illness in these magazines, it is far more likely to be seen as a malady that has resulted from poor personal choices. In addition to lacking personal control, obese women are constructed as having failed the attainment of femininity. “Important” feminine achievements – such as getting married – are constructed as being unattainable to obese women as a result of their failed corporeality. Whitehead and Kurz (2008) conclude that while both bodies are deviant in the textual representations in the magazines, Madonna and Whore iconography is played out in the anorexia and obesity dichotomy. Ferris (2003) uses a discursive analysis to contrast and compare the highly public struggles of Carney Wilson and Tracey Gold. While pop singer Carny Wilson struggled to lose weight, child television actress Tracey Gold experiences anorexia. Although both bodies are constructed as excessive, Ferris (2003) shows how Gold is positioned as an innocent victim in a tumultuous battle against anorexia. Alternatively, in becoming fat, Wilson is thought to have “done this to herself.” Since anorexia carries the “language of femininity to its symbolic excess,” it may be more culturally intelligible than obesity. Saguy and Kjerstin (2010) conducted a content analysis to examine the construction of anorexia and obesity in two prominent New York City publications. The researchers’ findings support those of other scholars by showing how anorexia is constructed as a complex condition that requires a medical intervention, while obesity is thought to stem from poor individual choices and requires an individual dietary solution. Thus, the few scholars who have undertaken this work demonstrate that while both are constructed as deviant, given its close alignment with dominant health messaging and ideals of femininity that encourage thinness and vilify fat, anorexia is constructed as the “morally superior” illness that engenders society’s collective empathy (Squire, 2003).

Although they have not explicitly studied anorexia and obesity together in an empirical study, a few critical feminists have began to deeply problematize the binary, polar construction of thinness and fatness. Burns (2009) purports that we should study women’s eating distress on a broad “continuum” of food and body management practices. Further, she suggests that these bodily practices should be examined within the contexts that give them meaning. Burns (2009) goes on to suggest that we should study women’s binge eating, food restriction and purging practices without imposing a presupposed interpretation that these eating practices are made in an effort to attain some kind of illusory image ideal or semiotic sign. By arguing for an approach that seeks to examine what such practices mean for the bodies that live them, Burns (2009) does not engage in the dichotomizing of anorexia and obesity that so often appears in the literature. Probyn (2009) suggests that at this particular historical juncture, “something worrisome” is happening to women, food and their eating practices. Regardless of whether women are fat or thin, eating today is an affair that is replete with feelings of confusion, worry, regret, dread and guilt. Probyn reminds us of Suzie Orbach’s groundbreaking feminist cultural studies scholarship in the 1970s, where both thin and fat women began to engage in consciousness-raising activities about the secretive nature of eating and food related distress. Probyn suggests that we pay attention to the shame and emotional damage that is associated with “feeling too fat,” and, regardless of weight, scholars should be attentive to how these bodies feel. Indeed, when women claim that they feel too fat, they might be making a more profound point about their social and cultural position in contemporary society. Probyn (2009) also asserts that the incessant focus on the body as image through representation does little in the way of changing our ideas about how and what we eat.

Towards a new research contribution

In this article, we attempt to make a novel contribution towards the literature by exploring the similarities and differences between anorexic and obese women’s lived experience of their bodies. Most social-psychological examinations of anorexia and obesity have occurred in relative isolation from one another. The few notable exceptions that have offered a non-binarized, relational way of conceptualizing anorexia and obesity have offered more complex, subtle and nuanced ways of thinking about these two embodied states (Burns, 2009; Malson, 2009; Probyn, 2009). However, with the exception of these notable cases, when these two embodiments are examined together, researchers have tended to rely on textual or discursive analyses of media representations (Ferris, 2003; Saguy & Kjerstin, 2010; Whitehead & Kurz, 2008) or school curricula (Cliff & Wright, 2010). To our knowledge, there are few studies that relationally examine the lived embodiments of fat and thin people themselves in an empirical study. This lacuna in the research mirrors a shortcoming that has been identified both within critical studies on fatness (Murray, 2012; Owen, 2012) and anorexia (Platten, Warin, & Coggrove, 2014; Warin, 2010) more generally, where the “physical, tangibly somatic realities of [fat and thin] bodies moving through space and time” (Owen, 2012, p. 291) are buried beneath discursively laden accounts (Burns, 2009; Malson, 2009; Probyn, 2009). This might amount to a limited understanding of how these expectations – and other life circumstances – play out in the everyday situated lives of women. In what follows, we attempt to follow in the footsteps of those scholars who have offered more nuanced and complex, albeit separate and distinct, ways of thinking about thin and fat (Burns, 2009; Malson, 2009; Probyn, 2009) by asking how do women living with anorexia and obesity experience their bodies in everyday situated contexts? In so doing, we attempt to make a novel contribution to the literature.

Research design and participants

After ethical approval was received from the Research Ethics Board at the University of Manitoba, participants were recruited in two Canadian cities – Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Toronto, Ontario. A recruitment script was developed by the authors and circulated through regional health authority email lists. A recruitment poster was posted at support centres for people living with eating disorders. Interested participants contacted the researchers directly. The study was explained, informed consent forms completed and convenient interview times arranged.

Participants. Nine women who self-identified as anorexic and 10 women who self-identified as obese participated in this study (N = 19). The average age of the anorexic participants was over a decade younger (30.4) than the obese participants (43.9 years). All anorexic participants had been hospitalized on several occasions in inpatient eating disorder programs. At the time of the study, many of the anorexic participants were experiencing deteriorating health and awaiting hospitalization. They suffered with a vast array of negative bodily experiences, such as bone loss and cardiac disturbances (Wheatley, 2005). All of the women who self-identified as “obese” also declared of their own accord that they had a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or greater, meaning that they were defined as “clinically obese.” Interestingly, although we specifically did not ask the women about their BMI, most shared it with us voluntarily. This was usually in the form of a well-articulated critique about the unrealistic standards of the index itself. None of the obese women self-declared any health complications associated with obesity, although one woman attributed her obesity to a pre-existing health condition. Speaking of health from a more holistic perspective, most of the women eloquently shared heart-wrenching stories about how they had experienced fat oppression, which they suggested had diminished their overall quality of life. Two of the women described themselves as fat activists and suggested that they cherished their fat bodies. One was a graduate student and another identified as having a disability that prevented her from working.

“The second road to phenomenology” – Heidegger’s methodology. We adopted the phenomenological research tradition to explore how anorexic and obese women experience their bodies (Aspers, 2010). Since anorexia and obesity are both “embodied” – and we are interested in the sensate experiences of these women – we considered phenomenology to be ideally suited for our study. Phenomenology is considered to be both a philosophy and a research methodology (Connelly, 2010). While the field of phenomenology is diverse, the development of this philosophy is credited to the 19th century German thinker Edmund Husserl.

In taking up Heidegger’s articulation of phenomenology, we are devoted to the understanding of human experiences from the perspective of those who live and feel these embodied encounters (Aspers, 2010). Although we cannot “bracket” and “suspend” our judgements, we are profoundly interested in understanding the essence of anorexic and obese women’s bodily experiences. In so doing, we ask, “what is it like to experience anorexia and obesity?” Further, we are interested in intentionality and its relationship to human consciousness. We are intrigued by the direction in which anorexic and obese women orient their intentions, as well as to the content and substance of their consciousness (Connelly, 2010). While we appreciate understanding the role of consciousness, unlike Husserl we do not assume that there is an isolated ego – or that it is possible to study independent mental states. Thus, rather than assuming that conscious experiences can be separated from everyday events and attitudes in a type of psychological reduction (Aspers, 2010), we recognize that consciousness is heavily influenced by – if not constituted in relation to – contextual information and embodied encounters with other bodies, objects and the world (Ahmed, 2010). Our being in the world – or Dasein – is profoundly social; we are always in the world with others, formed by our histories and touched by our numerous, daily social encounters with fellow beings on this journey (Aspers, 2010). We share a commitment with other phenomenologists to understanding the body, bodily encounters and visceral experiences (see Ahmed, 2004a, 2010). In so doing, we are critical of modern Western philosophy and its dualist tradition that privileges the mind over the body, where the body is constructed as a mere “thing” that is heavy, burdensome and prone to sinful temptations. The carnal vices of the body – like eating too much – are thought to be in need of control by the mind (Bordo, 1993; Grosz, 1994).

Phenomenologists also share a commitment to the study of the body and its role in the production of knowledge. Recently, critical feminist scholars have turned their attention to the embodiment of anorexia and obesity. For instance Burns (2009) suggests that we limit the multiplicity of fruitful ways in which we can understand the body by focusing solely on the representational aspects of thinness. A solely representational focus reifies the exteriority of the body and positions the body as little more than a sign. It also reduces the potential multiplicity of other meanings that might be derived from a study of the body and its experiences, desires, temptations and feelings (Burns, 2009). Further, by failing to study these disorders using an embodied lens, we risk perpetuating disembodied notions of the self that have so long pervaded Western thought (Grosz, 1994). Instead, Burns (2009) argues that we embrace an approach that entails studying the experience of women’s starving, binging and purging practices in the context in which they occur. Probyn (2009) concurs with Burns (2009) by suggesting that a hyper focus on the body as image obscures a richer understanding of bodily feelings and experiences. Further to this, an overly representational focus on the body reproduces women as passive, docile bodies without active, bodily agency (Malson, 2009). An embodied, non-representational approach to studying bodies, in contrast, opens up a multiplicity of ways in which to understand embodied distress. We follow in the footsteps, then, of scholars who invite the study of how thin and fat bodies are experienced, with a focus on feelings and emotions (see also Norman & Rail, in press; Fraser, Maher, & Wright, 2010; Windram-Giddes, 2013).

Method

We conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with the participants. Given that all of the participants were women and the topic of the interview was intensely personal, participants were given the option of being interviewed by Moss, Fiona or a female research assistant. Convenient interview times were arranged for all of the participants, either in person or on the phone. Participants chose the interview location that was the most comfortable for them, such as at home, in the community or in semi-private meeting rooms at the University of Manitoba and the University of Toronto. We devised an interview guide based on the existing literature and previous knowledge on the body, food and weight. We tried to maintain a central focus on the body during the interviews by asking questions such as “how does your body feel when you restrict your diet? What are your thoughts and feelings about your body?” When recounting experiences with the body, food and weight, many of the women became quite emotional. Crying occurred in some of the interviews or other embodied gestures such as looking away or at one’s feet. When difficult topics were raised, we tried to extend empathy and support to the participants. For the two interviews that occurred on the phone, we were not able to observe embodied gestures. However, when participants made reference to embodied sensations (e.g. hunger, fatigue, satiety) and feelings (e.g. pleasure, disgust, guilt) during the interviews, we asked participants to expand on these aspects of their stories. The interviews were approximately one to two hours in length and were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim.

Analysis

We engaged in a rigorous, inductive and in-depth analytical process. We read the transcripts numerous times to familiarize ourselves with the data set. Then, using a charting method and codes, we read and coded each individual transcript for commonly occurring and meaningful concepts in the data. We generated a table for each coded transcript. Next, we collapsed the coded concepts into broader themes, such as “emotions.” This process involved searching for similar patterns of meaning across the entire data set, collapsing codes with similar conceptual meanings into categories, generating broader themes and carefully refining these themes. The final themes were also organized in a chart to visually depict our findings. Using a notebook, we analytically attempted to theorize, connect and interpret the arising codes and themes in relation to phenomenological concepts, such as embodiment, disembodiment and corporeality. For example, when participants discussed concepts such as “mental depression,” we attempted to theorize and connect this code to broader literatures on Cartesian dualism and the “cerebral” nature of the mind.

Findings

The emotional experience of food, the body and weight

When discussing their relationship to food, eating and the body, both anorexic and obese women described a vast spectrum of intense emotions that marked these experiences. Regardless of whether they were “anorexic” or “obese,” the women described deeply emotional and often tortured relationships to food, the body and eating. However, in a few cases, women described pleasurable and desiring affective reactions to food, eating and the body. While we do not focus particularly on the pleasurable or desiring emotional aspects of eating in this article, it is important to note that the women’s emotional experience towards food reflected great nuance and ambivalence.

Julissa is 20 years old and living with anorexia. When she was hospitalized for anorexia as a child, intense, overwhelming feelings of anxiety marked her everyday encounters. She worried about seemingly unrelated circumstances, such as her parents’ financial situation. Julissa describes a general state of anxiety, fear and lack of control which, she suggests, led to her use of food and anorexia to re-exert control into her life.

I was a very anxious child. I guess… I never really hated food or the thought of eating, I was just, it was just like I was afraid. A lot of the girls that I was with ummm at Children’s Hospital they just, they hated food and they never wanted to talk about it or look at it and I didn’t feel that way I just was like really, really anxious about it. Yeah because it, anorexia, it definitely lessened my anxiety because [pause] like obviously the feeling of being anxious is a feeling of being out of control because if you had control you wouldn’t be anxious […].

Katarina, an obese women in her late thirties, battles chronic pain, anxiety and fibromyalgia. Katarina also expressed a sense of anxiety and loss of control and explained how disabled she feels as a result of fatness and chronic pain. The food-emotion nexus was forged when Katarina was still a child. Since her parents were starting a new business, she was often left alone to care for herself. Katarina reflects on the role of emotions – such as isolation and boredom – in her eating experiences.

And your parents are busy trying to start up a company and you are alone! And you just, you don’t have any friends and you are just like an emotional, emotionally weak.

Fiona: So what kind of emotions did eating help to reduce?

Katarina: The feeling of boredom, of loneliness.

Harrieta regards herself as an obese woman. As she grew up and faced new developmental challenges – such as going to university – a new affective meaning was ascribed towards food. Eating became a way to self-sooth during times of duress, such as dealing with family strife. A love-hate, soothing-stressed affective complex now characterizes Harrietta’s experience with food, eating and the body.

At some point, probably in university. I sort of just became an eating machine, I just loved food. I guess it gave me comfort when I was stressed. And I had a lot of stress through those times so uhh I think and you know things at home weren’t that great, not getting along with my parents and stuff like many teens and so I think that food was sort of like a – it made me feel good. I just eat uhh a lot for comfort and just a good feeling.

A diverse range of emotional experiences marked both anorexic and obese women’s relationship to food, eating and the body. While anorexic women described using food restriction to re-assert control in their lives and soothe anxiety, the obese women described using food consumption to achieve the same ends. Below, we discuss one of the more potent affective responses that the women experienced – that of bodily shame.

The experience of bodily shame. Bodily shame and disappointment in oneself was a pressing feeling that many of our participants described. Other participants felt ashamed for not ever realizing the state of selfhood that they had once envisioned for themselves. They also expressed a profound sense of disappointment in their bodies, their attainments and their lives.

Ella is a 40-year-old woman who has recovered from anorexia. Ella’s narrative is particularly illustrative of the fundamental imbrication of thin and fat bodies. While Ella is a “recovering anorexic,” as illustrated throughout the manuscript, her embodied narrative strongly resembles many of the stories by the women who described themselves as “obese.” When anorexic, Ella experienced a tremendous amount of bodily shame. The feeling of shame for Ella was strongly linked to the judgements that her mother often made about her body and weight in comparison to her thinner sisters. Since thinness was exalted to an elevated level of morality in her family, Ella experienced a great deal of bodily shame:

That was not my mom’s perception of my body – so this was something that I had on my radar from a very early age and then I developed unfortunately a habit of eating secretly. And sometimes eating compulsively when things were rough in my emotional life and that was sort of my response to challenges growing up… and I developed a lot of shame toward my body, I was very embarrassed about the way I looked… the body type that I had it caused me to be quite voluptuous and I was very self-conscious about that so. I had a tremendous amount of shame and dislike and hatred toward my own body. Always anxious, tense and shameful.

In her experience of bodily shame, Ella also associates a thin body with an exalted state of morality:

I had an extra layer I guess of shame and umm moral associated with a larger body size. I believed that body fat when it’s visible is a sign of, uh moral laxity, character weakness, lack of discipline, lack of energy. I really believed from a very early age that visible fat on my body said something very bad and very embarrassing about me.

Giovanna identifies as an obese woman. When chronicling her battle with food, weight, and the body, Giovanna reflects on how the cycle of weight loss and gain – and failed diets – often leaves her feeling extremely ashamed and disappointed in herself. Giovanna’s body shame is more acute directly following a late night food binge:

So a binge, so I will come home and I will have my supper, regardless of the calories, and then I’ll stop eating and I’ll drink my water and that type of thing but when I’m binging I’ll come home and I’ll just eat and I won’t stop until I finally say “ok this is enough” and I have had uhh, I don’t know if this is a medical term but food hangovers […] I’ll have a headache or like I’ll get a stiffness in my neck, that kind of thing so I do have physical symptoms from it. Well I just feel disappointed and ashamed in myself.

Whether it was in relation to a failed diet, a callous remark from a parent, or a late night food binge, shame marked the experiences of both thin and fat women.

The family ties that bind

Both anorexic and obese women discussed family relationships when recounting their experiences of food, weight and the body. Some participants recounted an inter-generational pattern of food related distress. In some cases, participants were bullied for their weight by a particular family member or sabotaged in their efforts to attain health. Other participants felt that being ill with anorexia or obesity was a way to draw the attention of often-neglectful family members.

Antonia is in her mid twenties and battling severe anorexia. During the interview, she drew on philosophical metaphors to explain her body, describing it as a “case” that she “does not recognize.” When Antonia weighs more, family members are often neglectful. In contrast, family members extend their care when she is at dangerous and critically low weight.

I remember when I was gaining the weight on my own that time. I felt that people backed off from me a lot more and like my family and stuff. I feel like they put more of a separation between us. Although like I want there to be a certain amount of separation, I feel like there was more than what I like. I know that people, people actually reach out to me more when I’m at a lower weight like even like my therapist or my family.

Antonia is also terrified that fatness “lurks” mysteriously in her family’s genetic code, suggesting that she is preordained to become fat without a self-imposed intervention. Although the “seeds” of fatness are thought to lie dormant in her, they are ready to awaken at any moment. Anorexia is a way for Antonia to simultaneously deny her genetic code and not succumb to the fatness that lies in her family’s gene pool.

It’s scary. Like my family, they’re more overweight on both sides of my family and I think to myself “I don’t wanna be like that.” I mean I don’t see like I look at my mom and I don’t think that she should lose weight, but I say to myself “I don’t want to be that size”. I guess, it, it scares me because I don’t want to be like that but I know that there are – that my genetics, that it’s in my genes to be heavier.

Rivka identifies herself as a fat activist. Rivka describes her mother as “extremely controlling over food”. When Rivka was young, her mother’s controlling ways only served to intensify her battle with food and the body. Since she was no longer controlled by her mother’s food related impositions, she was able to consume food whenever and wherever she wanted.

I think that my mother’s really health oriented, unusually health oriented also. You know so my father will eat anything and my mother has all this fat hatred and you know so she would basically not eat all day and then gorge. And you know, my mother is like super controlling and so she would control the food […] And so you know I, I would uhh spend my allowance on junk food. So at 18, I moved away, no one was controlling my food, I over-ate a lot because no one was controlling it.

Ella explains how family relationships impacted her struggle with anorexia. Raised by a single mother, Ella describes herself as the “black sheep” of the family. Her mother preferred her younger, thinner sisters and forbade Ella from eating with reckless abandon, as her sisters did.

So when my mother decided my belly was too big she stopped feeding me the same way as she fed my sisters so she would feed me a small piece of chicken and a large heap of vegetables and she would feed them a larger piece of chicken, a big potato with butter, vegetables and then when she came back in to offer dessert she would look over my head as if I wasn’t there, or she would look into the eyes of each of my sisters offering them dessert but she would look over my head and if dared to say ‘I’d like some’ she would glower at me you know gaze her eyes at me.

Familial relationships were critical to both anorexic women’s relationship to food, the body, and the self.

“Eating by the light of the moon”: On the meaning of food and eating

Our participants often described complex and tortured relationships with food. Words such as “struggle” and “battle” were often employed to describe their experiences eating food. Anorexic participants in particular were more likely to employ a “food as medicine” or “food as fuel” metaphor, implying that it is an external object to be controlled and manipulated by the willful subject. In contrast, obese women were more likely to describe food as having “control” over them.

There is the part of it that I see it as fuel. I guess because that analogy has been engraved in my head so many times, my father […] Just about how you know a car needs to have fuel in order for it to propel so I mean you need to have food in order for yourself to propel you know cuz if your car if the car runs on empty, it’s gonna stall, it’s not gonna work (Antonia).

Lilia describes herself as an obese woman and explains a complex, convoluted and often pained relationship to food and eating. To describe food and eating practices, Lilia unwittingly draws on the same metaphor that is presented in the infamous book Eating by the Light of the Moon (Johnston, 1996). Cloaked in darkness with nothing but the moon to light the way, eating for many women in Western cultures is a secretive and shameful nighttime activity. For Lilia, eating is marked by pain, pleasure and guilt and also often happens during nights when she is deprived of sleep.

I think it’s, oh I think it’s very complicated… I eat if I’m happy, I eat if I’m sad. I eat to celebrate I mean I think eating is such a complicated [thing]. I think it can be a self-esteem thing, it can be a social coping kind of thing, it can fill a void if you’re anxious, if you have no friends I mean, I just think it’s from anything and I think for people who cope by eating, that maybe they use it for many, many different things. […]. When I’m feeling like I can’t sleep, that’s the worst thing and then I get up and eat. That’s the awful part it’s the same. It’s still miserable. It still controls me […] after all these years – I mean my weight is better like I’m more, more in control of my weight, but the pattern is still there. It’s still, it still feels like it’s a fight every day.

Lilia explains how eating is often an “all or nothing” affair and the impossibility of ever eating in a balanced fashion… “I’ve never figured out a way in my life to have moderation with food and have one piece of cake and then that’s enough I just, can’t stop.”

Antonia’s relationship to food and eating practices is similarly complex and has changed over the course of time as she has lived with anorexia. As a child, she was an extremely picky eater, displaying a troubling relationship with food at the age of three.

I was always an extremely picky eater – like I had to eat the same thing at the same time every day, every day, every day. Very structured, very strict with what I would eat. I remember even like my mother put me into daycare before she put me into umm… kindergarten because she wanted me to socialize with other kids… So I went to, to the like daycare part time and I remember like they sometimes had umm – like spaghetti days or this or that or whatever and [pause] being picky that I was my mom I remember she used to have to go there and tell them how I liked to eat the food or else I wouldn’t eat it.

However, when Antonia developed anorexia, her eating rituals intensified into a militaristic regime. Currently, when Antonia purges food after consuming it, she feels a great sense of emotional release. She explains that “when I… [pause] purge… food [pause] there’s some kind of release [pause]”.

Brigid, who characterizes herself as obese, similarly has a complex relationship to food and its meaning. Specifically, Brigid regards eating as an addiction that is impossible to stop. Thus, much like a substance addiction, Brigid views eating as a mechanism to inflict harm on one’s body. She states that:

I think it’s an addiction that is not treated like an addiction […] It’s, it’s, I believe it’s a disease that can be categorized in the same as alcoholism, drug abuse because quite honestly, you can’t just go on a diet, lose your weight and the obesity is gone. Cuz as soon as you get off the diet, it’s back. […]. I don’t know if it’s an addiction to abusing your own body maybe.

The participants’ relationship to food and eating was layered with complex and often contradictory experiences. Participants rarely talked about food and eating as joyous or pleasurable exclusively, but always inflected these experiences with more complexity by connecting them to other descriptors, such as relationships of love–hate, pleasure–fear and desire–anxiety.

Discussion and future recommendations

Related to the experience of emotional eating, both anorexic and obese women described a deeply affective response to the body, food and eating practices. Their bodily relationships were often laden with intense and deeply emotional experiences. Guilt, isolation, confusion, pleasure, comfort and intense anxiety are just some of the affective responses that women had toward the body and food.

Other scholars have talked about the affective and emotional dimensions of obesity and anorexia. Evans, Rich, and Holroyd (2004) found that anorexic girls in middle class grammar schools often “hunger” to be noticed. They feel an intense desire for praise in a schooling context that promotes high academic ideals and a slender body orthodoxy. In demonstrating how the middle class also “bleeds,” Evans et al. (2004) explain how schooling practices often worsen the emotional experience of anorexia. Pioneering scholar Dr Hilde Bruch explains how anorexic girls and women feel a deep sense of personal ineffectiveness in a “chaotic” world where events often seem outside of their realm of influence (Bruch, 2001). Longhurst (2010) describes how fat women experience the contempt others have for their bodies in particular spaces, such as restaurants, cafes, and women’s clothing stores. Our work adds to the growing scholarship on the affective dimensions of thinness and fatness (Evans, 2010; Rich, 2006). Our findings are novel because they show that despite the radically different portrayal of these bodies in image-based popular culture, which constructs them as polar opposites on a weight continuum, both thin and fat people experience the emotional weight of eating through remarkably similar, albeit complex, affective experiences. The affective response of our participants to the body and food is also important because it demonstrates that the overly cognitive conceptualization of anorexia – as well as the mechanistic metaphor conventionally employed to understand obesity – are not sufficient to capture the complexity of diverse embodiments. Rather, paying attention to how emotions mark and change the body over the long journey of both anorexia and obesity might be important to better theorizing and describing these bodies phenomenologically.

Ahmed’s (2004, 2010) cultural phenomenology on the cultural politics of emotion is particularly instructive in thinking about how emotions mark and change the experience of thin and fat bodies (Norman & Rail, 2016). For Ahmed, emotions are not individual psychological dispositions. Rather, emotions circulate within affective economies, moving between bodies and objects, forming the effect of boundary and surface as they move. The subject is not the “origin and destination” of emotions. Rather, the subject is “just one nodal point” in the affective economy (Ahmed, 2004, p. 121). Here, boundaries and surfaces of the subject do not pre-exist the feel of, and feelings about, other bodies and objects, but are produced through encounters with other bodies and the world. In this sense, emotions do something; they are productive, forming the very surfaces that they ‘touch’. Ahmed’s notion of the “‘press’ in impression” is helpful in this regard, as it “allows us to associate the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another,” in that encounters with other surfaces leave their mark or trace (Ahmed, 2010, p. 6). When we retch and recoil at the disgusting or turn away from the frightening, we are re-orienting bodies in space. In so doing, we produce as an effect the boundary between self and other, at the same time that that boundary is instilled with the “weightness of feelings,” in this case, disgust and fear (Ahmed, 2004, p. 85). Intense emotional responses to food, eating and fatness, therefore – as observed in our study – should not be approached as individuated psychological dispositions, but as complex relational encounters that are making and re-making the very surfaces and boundaries of the bodies of the participants who felt these emotions. Using Ahmed’s conceptualization of emotions, it is possible to see that a mother’s disapproving glare at a meal or a stranger’s gaze at a body, leaves an impression. These moments have a felt force and press upon the surface of the body.

Judgement day: On the experience of bodily shame

One of the most potent affective bodily experiences for anorexic and obese women was a pressing sense of bodily shame. Shame and a flawed sense of morality forever tainted not only how they saw their own bodies, but how they imagined others to gaze at them. It is evident that while anorexic and obese embodiments are read very differently in culture and society, both share some overlapping lived bodily experiences – such as shame – that are not always considered in dominant public health discourses. In dominant health discourse, anorexia is typically understood as a psychiatric illness with bodily consequences. In contrast, obesity is most often regarded as a “lifestyle” problem resulting from an imbalance between caloric consumption and expenditure. Given the population prevalence of obesity and alarming reactions by public health officials, obesity is also regarded as a “public health threat.” Despite these vastly different readings, thin and fat bodies both often experience a pressing sense of bodily shame, and this common experience of shame is often not considered within the dominant readings of these bodies. This observation is not to draw a relation of equivalence between the oppression of fat and thin bodies, but to shed light on how dominant understandings are less attentive to bodily shame, instead focussing on purported health risks. Although there is some important research within dominant obesity science that has begun to examine the social, emotional and economic effects of weight stigma (for reviews, see Phelan et al., 2015; Puhl & Heur, 2009), it remains a comparatively under-investigated area of study within dominant approaches to anorexia. The oversight – if not outright reluctance, in the case of anorexia – to consider shared experiences of shame might be attributable to, on the one hand, the general somatophobia that results in the hesitation to study the body (Malson, 2009), and, on the other, the continued hesitation to examine the disorders relationally.

Our finding of bodily shame is deserving of attention for other reasons as well. Although anorexic women are much closer to the normative cultural slender ideal and appear to face less discrimination in comparison to obese bodies, they too feel ashamed about their bodies and lives. “Purging” anorexics in particular regard their own behaviours as abhorrent. Binging and vomiting appear to be lower on the hierarchy of disordered eating practices and pale in comparison to food restriction, which is understood to be the “real deal.” The experience of shame in anorexia – and the negative moral connotations that it is associated with – deserves further research attention and is an important conceptual and theoretical contribution that has not been theorized fully by others.

Furthermore, our finding on bodily shame is novel and instructive because it demonstrates how shame is embodied and made corporeal. Typically, shame in relation to anorexia and obesity has been discussed at a cognitive, intellectual level. In contrast, our findings demonstrate how shame circulates through affective economies in relation to other bodies and objects (such as food), and, in so doing, forms body surfaces and orients bodies in space. By illustrating the embodiment of shame, we have carried forward the work of other scholars (Rice, 2009) who might consider exploring shame not at a cognitive level but, rather, as a deeply affective and emotional experience that changes the way both thin and fat bodies live, feel and experience their bodies (Bacon, 2008). By incorporating the phenomenology of shame and guilt into the current theoretical and conceptual lenses that we use to study anorexia and obesity, we might be able to further enrich the scope of theoretical perspectives that are currently used to study these bodies.

Family relations

Both anorexic and obese women discussed the complex ways in which family relations were embroiled in their embodied distress. Many of the participants discussed intergenerational patterns of food-related pain. In other cases, a particular family member was singled out as having contributed directly to the women’s bodily distress, while other participants pointed to how food served as a synonym for love and loss. Some participants feared that obesity “lurked” deeply in the genetic code of the family tree, and they described controlling their eating to avoid “becoming like them.” This range of different familial experiences suggests that the role of the family in anorexia or obesity is very complex and nuanced.

Most psychological theories of family relations in anorexia problematically describe the family as a discrete “unit” or “system” that contributes to the development of eating disorders. For example, Selvini-Palazzoli (1979) is credited with the development of family systems theory which is heavily employed in the study of anorexia. He viewed the family as an evolving system in which each member influences the actions of all others. Bruch (1981) believed that a controlling relationship with the mother was at the heart of the anorexic condition, and, in so doing, reproduced a mother-blaming discourse. Kim Chernin (Hepworth, 1999) also produced a mother blaming discourse by suggesting that anorexia develops when a girl child feels guilt for having surpassed her mother’s life chances and opportunities. Problematically, mothers are often constructed in culture as being responsible for their child’s health behaviours and diets (Kokkonen, 2009). This is part of a broader discourse of gender that positions mothers as responsible – and to blame – when children suffer with various dietary, bodily or behavioural ailments.

Interestingly, some of the participants in our study adopted dominant constructions of the family in the literature which tend to hold particular family members responsible for the development of anorexia and obesity. The participants’ use of this dominant construction of the family is problematic because it demonstrates how pervasive notions of “proper parenting” are in participants’ reflections. Further, these conceptualizations of the family are problematic because when researchers conceptualize families as discrete entities – rather than an evolving and ever changing set of relations that mould and shape bodies in time and space – blame is easily ascribed to families.

We propose that it might be important for researchers to think phenomenologically about families. Rather than a discrete unit that contributes to the development of anorexia and obesity, families might better be considered as a constantly evolving and complex set of social relations that shape bodies and lives. Further, a phenomenological understanding of the family would conceptualize family relations as just one part of a much more complex machinery of everyday bodily encounters that shape the experience of anorexia and obesity. It is also important to work towards problematizing why and how mothers are constructed as being responsible for their child’s health, eating and wellbeing.

Conclusion – Listening to thin and fat bodies

Informed by the phenomenological research tradition, we described how women living with anorexia and obesity in two Canadian provinces experience the body, food and eating. Through the embodied analytical lens used here, we show how anorexia and obesity might be better conceptualized as complex systems of bodily practices, sensate experiences and bodily interactions with others. Our work might also have practical contributions. Indeed, current treatment practices for anorexia and obesity are highly Cartesian. We tend to “treat” anorexia by using a mind-based psychoanalytic or cognitive psychological tradition. Here, the body is talked about at a conceptual level but rarely ever engaged somatically (Moola, Amara, & Gairdner, 2013). The “treatment” of obesity involves body-based nutritional and physical activity “interventions” (Young & Burrows, 2013), with little emphasis on the psyche. By considering the body and its sensate knowledge in the care of these two bodies, our work might enhance therapeutic efforts. We hope that our study opens new phenomenological terrain to dialogue with and for anorexic and obese bodies in a relational way, recognizing that both of these bodies hurt in a remarkably similar manner.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the University of Manitoba Research Grants Program.

Note

Author Biographies

Fiona J Moolais a Research Scientist at the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the role of the arts in enhancing psychosocial wellbeing among children with chronic illnesses and disabilities.

Moss E Norman is an Assistant Professor with the School of Kinesiology in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. Moss uses a socio-cultural lens to examine health and physical activity. He has done extensive research using a feminist-informed, critical obesity lens to examine how differently located individuals take up and experience health messaging related to body weight, shape and size within the context of the “obesity epidemic”. Recently, his research has shifted into the area of Indigenous masculinities and physical cultures. He is currently the principal investigator on a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded project that uses a community-based research design to explore Indigenous masculinities and physical cultures in Fisher River Cree Nation (Manitoba).

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