The Lonely Hunter, page 5
How tragic I was, old and worn out, falling apart at the seams. Too many crunches would send my stuffing flying everywhere; couldn’t he see?
“I’m thirty,” he said, with a contemptuous glance.
Oh my god, I thought. I was thirty-two, and I looked about 102 years older than this man. He had the buoyant energy of a teen running into the house after track-and-field practice and my joints ached from the pressures of simply being alive.
The moment was a turning point in my sense of personal vanity. That week, I started to finally go to the gym in between sessions with Daniel in the hopes of mortifying myself slightly less when I saw him. More importantly, I went to slow down my aging.
Vanity and my health (and delineating between the two) became my new obsessions.
I tried not to focus on an outcome of all this exercise, like potentially being hot. I tried to think of it as an experiment, like a scientist testing the hypothesis that “exercise feels good.”
Interesting, I thought, watching myself do squats. Very interesting.
Week by week, my strength grew. The half hours I spent with Daniel were hard, but not crying hard. I started to see muscle in certain places. At first, this actually was a relatively private enterprise, the changes so subtle that only I could really tell—tracing the sore spots along my obliques, feeling the heat of a shower soothe the aches. I was afraid to advertise the effort I was putting into myself in case it turned out I couldn’t actually change anything through that effort, so I didn’t post gym selfies or buy cute spandex outfits, though Instagram’s data mine somehow caught wind of my new hobby and started targeting me with ads for them.
Daniel usually directed me to focus on my lower body, saying that the larger muscles of the legs burn more calories. As my thighs and butt and nothing else began to gain definition, I thought about how personal trainers have a lot of say in the body shapes of their clients, especially new ones who don’t necessarily have a grander end in mind besides “getting fit.” Fit for what was not explicitly stated; based on how big my quads gradually got over the next few months, I was training for a footrace against an emu.
Then, during a week when Daniel was on vacation, I scheduled with a substitute trainer named Mason, who had me work on my undeveloped shoulders. “Muscular shoulders look nice in a sundress,” he said encouragingly, revealing his own biases. This was an annoying comment, but Mason could get away with it. Whatever his interest in sundresses, he was obviously deeply committed to helping people build muscle. He told me he’d only been a certified trainer for about eight months. Before that he’d worked as a line cook in a restaurant. He was fifty-six years old and he, too, looked way younger than me. His six-pack was so deep and cut, time would never erase it. Moreover, he had changed his entire life in his fifties. He was body goals and life goals.
“I wish I’d been your trainer from the beginning,” he said, as I screamed doing bicep curls. “You would have been my masterpiece.”
This was said without any detectable salaciousness. Mason really did view my body as something with potential, clay that could be formed into something worth triumphantly advertising. There was still no answer to the question of what such a transformation would be for or whom it was meant to please. Me? I wondered, flexing my arm and fingering the slight bulge beginning to grow.
Before the new year, as another resolution, I had been thinking of spending a month not eating dairy. In this susceptible state of mind, I wandered into a conversation in the greenroom of the comedy theater where my sketch show was set to go up. Everyone, including myself, was in costume. The show was set in the regency era. The other women in the room were in high-waisted cotton gowns printed with flowers and tied around the waist with bows. I was dressed in black, playing the maid, my hair tucked under a frilled cap. I’d written and cast the part myself, but when I would see everyone else in their graceful finery, I resented being the frump.
One of my castmates was reciting a list that didn’t make much sense to me.
“No alcohol, no grains, certain oils, no soy, no dairy, no sugar of any kind,” she said counting on her fingers. “Oh, and no legumes!” she added.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, intrigued.
“It’s the Whole30,” she said, explaining these were all things you couldn’t eat on the thirty-day elimination diet. “And a bunch of us are doing it for January.”
“I was gonna do no dairy….”
“That’s good, too!” she said enthusiastically. I looked in the long mirror in the corner, covered in scraped-off stickers and lipstick kisses. My eyes appeared sunken, my skin patchy, my neck bloated. It wasn’t just the outfit. I turned back to her.
“Okay, I’ll do it, too.” Even though she hadn’t asked, she fist pumped the air like she’d made a sale and promised to add me to the Facebook group of friends embarking on the Whole30 starting January 1.
The Whole30 is rebranded dieting. Established in 2009, the elimination diet plan is marketed as a way to get “in control” of your eating habits, by identifying what you consume that makes you feel unwell and then cutting through your food “addictions” to things like sugar and dairy. On their website, the Whole30 corporation paints a picture of freedom through restriction: “We cannot possibly put enough emphasis on this simple fact—the next 30 days will change your life. It will change the way you think about food, it will change your tastes, it will change your habits and your cravings. It could, quite possibly, change the emotional relationship you have with food, and with your body. It has the potential to change the way you eat for the rest of your life.”
What a promise.
Those grand ideals, or the support of my friends in our online forum, or just a determination to change something, pushed me, and for the first time in a long time I stuck with a diet. I roasted vegetables and bought a crockpot and meal prepped. I read the posts and comments of my friends on our Facebook page, and we texted one another and joked about the Whole30’s guarantee of “tiger blood” euphoria around day fifteen of our one-month commitment. I felt included and supported, even though I suspected we might be supporting one another in a kind of mania when someone posted about rejecting a slice of cake on their birthday.
It was hard. It was not as hard as I thought it would be. Every time I wanted to eat cheese, I told myself, It’s just thirty days. You can do things differently for just thirty days. Having a time limit on changing my daily behaviors made those changes more manageable. If they didn’t take, if nothing happened, I could just go back to the way things were and forget I even tried. That was soothing.
Toward the end of that month on the Whole30, I was in the greenroom, once again in costume, when another castmate remarked on my appearance.
“I don’t know what you’re doing, but you look amazing,” she said, waving her hand in front of my face like she was wiping a windshield. The answer was mostly that I had lost ten pounds, but I said, “Thank you so much!”
She nodded, adding, “There’s just something radiating out of you.”
The praise warmed me, even as I recognized that a physical change was being labeled as something coming from my very spirit. It does feel good to stick to a routine and get your blood flowing and eat lots of vegetables, but it doesn’t transform your soul. Fundamentally, nothing much had changed, and yet people had begun to treat me differently. It was very seductive to imagine more was happening than muscle gain. It was also easy, because “wellness” trends have been conditioning all of us to attribute much deeper meaning to losing a few pounds.
The weight-loss industry has gone through some revisions in recent years, absorbing the language of the body positivity movement to make a confusing hybrid. Reading the Whole30’s cultish propaganda and following their Instagram handle certainly made me confused. I wasn’t allergic to legumes, my stomach processed dairy just fine, and eating a piece of fruit had never done anything harmful to me. Following all those restrictions did stop me from snacking. I ate less and I ate it less often. It was definitely a diet, just the first diet I’d ever done where I could claim it was about “changing my relationship to food” rather than helping with weight loss. I did lose weight. And all diets are about disordered eating habits, no matter how they’re packaged.
In her 2017 essay on the transformation of corporations like Weight Watchers and Lean Cuisine for The New York Times Magazine, Taffy Brodesser-Akner expounds on how people’s general perception of weight loss has changed so dramatically that traditional weight-loss companies don’t even want to be associated with their own purpose. Instead, they use the language of body positivity and the new emphasis on the less easily defined umbrella of “wellness” to sell the same products: “Women’s magazines started shifting the verbal displays on their covers, from the aggressive hard-body stance of old to one with gentler language, acknowledging that perhaps a women’s magazine doesn’t know for sure what size your body should be, or what size it can be: Get fit! Be your healthiest! GET STRONG! replaced diet language like Get lean! Control your eating! Lose 10 pounds this month! In late 2015, Women’s Health, a holdout, announced in its own pages that it was doing away with the cover phrases ‘drop two sizes’ and ‘bikini body.’ The word ‘wellness’ came to prominence. People were now fasting and eating clean and cleansing and making lifestyle changes, which, by all available evidence, is exactly like dieting.”
This change had certainly made pursuing weight loss more palatable to me. When I was a teenager, it was still both appropriate and expected that any girl would want to be thin, then thinner, then so emaciated she practically faded away. My mother would sometimes force me to run laps up and down our very crowded street in exchange for an allowance. She frequently berated me for overeating. She told me I’d lose weight in my stomach if I stopped eating bread and corn and rice; if I stopped eating anything, essentially, since I had the unrefined palate of a carb-loving kid.
Over time, my mother’s perspective changed. She became less inclined to criticize my behavior or looks as they related to weight, though she still hates it when I cut my hair short. Perhaps she recognized the way beauty standards had shifted, or perhaps she learned to shut her mouth to save our relationship. She made a living in her twenties as a model and grew up in a household where her mother guarded her daughters’ figures like they were security deposits. I could forgive my mom for her former critical habits. The cycle of self-loathing over having a gut was harder to break. Thinking of working out or changing my diet as a form of self-love rather than of self-abnegation opened a small, new neural window that allowed for a different reaction. The hours at the gym, the fiercely monitored meals were all possible if I considered them a gesture of love and care toward myself. Even if that messaging was still corporate diet-culture bullshit.
As Brodesser-Akner observed, capitalism has an uncanny ability to soak up meaningful cultural trends and turn them into marketing ploys. In early 2017, “self-care,” wellness’s distant cousin, exploded into the mainstream as a response to political upheaval. Everyone was urged to develop daily habits of caring for themselves to escape their awareness of the direction the globe was heading. The way self-care was being used in the media then felt like a replica to me of the “work on yourself” mantra so frequently pushed upon lonely people. It was a hyperindividualistic solution to a major structural problem (i.e., having a fascist for a president).
In a 2007 article on fitness and feminism, author Carol-Ann Farkas quotes the work of Shari Dworkin and Michael A. Messner, after explaining that fitness magazines tend to work as a salve on individualistic concerns: “The kinds of individual empowerment that can be purchased through consumerism seriously reduce women’s abilities even to identify their collective interests, [leading to] a radical turning inward of agency toward the goal of transformation of one’s own body, in contrast to a turning outward to mobilize for collective action.”
There were many collective actions to participate in at that time, and I did, but I was in no way impervious to that individualistic salve. For me, the self-care trend post–Trump’s election gradually translated into more exercising and more focus on food, because losing weight was the first thing I’d done in a long time that felt transformative. These habits were also being marketed to me as something healing, something that would give me back control, something that would help center and strengthen me. But “self-care” developed from the idea that entire communities were not receiving the external care they deserved.
In a piece for Slate in April of 2017, writer Aisha Harris noted the rising popularity of the term, mentioning that in the week after November 8, 2016, Americans googled the phrase “self-care” at twice the usual rate. Harris traced the original concept to doctors of the sixties and seventies who primarily “prescribed” self-care to the elderly or people who required long-term medical attention that kept them home- or bedbound. It then found its way into academic circles as a theoretical tool to combat stress in difficult jobs, like social work. Self-care meant acknowledging that one had to slow down and be sure to take enjoyment in life, because without health within oneself, how could you promote health in others?
Self-care became an important tenet of activist groups during the civil rights movement, eventually becoming a part of the Black Panther Party’s work to bring health programs into their communities. As Harris writes, the programs instituted by the Black Panthers were about much more than taking a break and being kind to yourself:
“These nationwide clinics recruited nurses, doctors, and students to test for illness and disease rampant within the Black community (including lead poisoning and sickle-cell anemia), as well as to provide basic preventive care. For Black people and especially Black women, this kind of self-care was brought to fill a desperate need. The ‘survival programs’ of the Panthers were about just that: survival.”
The politically meaningful use of “self-care” coincided with a rise of “wellness” culture in the seventies. There is a long history of wellness ideologies that can be traced back to European “cure towns,” as writer Sarah Treleaven explained in a piece for Elemental in 2019. There, people would drink mineral waters said to have healing properties and engage in rest and relaxation practices that often involved an ascetic diet. These destinations evolved into the sorts of spas someone might now attend as a luxury, like Canyon Ranch. The term “wellness” was actually coined in the fifties by Dr. Halbert L. Dunn, and it became a mainstream phenomenon over the next few decades.
In the late seventies, as writer Daniela Blei recounts in a piece for JSTOR, Dan Rather interviewed Dr. John W. Travis, founder of the Wellness Resource Center in Marin County, on 60 Minutes, releasing the concept on a much wider audience. He introduced the segment by saying, “Wellness. There’s a word you don’t hear every day. It means exactly what you might think it means: the opposite of illness…. It’s a movement that is catching on all over the country.”
“Just because you aren’t sick,” Travis explained in the interview, “[and] you don’t have any symptoms, and you could go get a checkup and get a clean bill of health, that doesn’t mean that you’re well.”
That sounds like a threat to me. It’s even reminiscent of the idea in the Whole30 that there is some secret flaw in you that can be rooted out through a specific diet. Wellness has an element of vagueness that allows for it to absorb whatever it wants as part of its program. In the seventies, white hippies were appropriating Eastern medicinal practices like acupuncture and yoga as a part of wellness, and trying all the non-FDA-approved treatments available—everything from craniosacral therapy to sound baths to crystal healing—basically, all the alternative therapies that are often mocked as Goop nonsense, even though they are based in ancient spiritualities.
On a more positive note, wellness promised a different form of medicine that connected the spiritual to the physical; it was a more holistic approach to health that contrasted with the alienating aspects of Western medicine and offered people a sense of control over their own bodies and health.
Regrettably, as it’s become more mainstream, wellness seems to have absorbed the deeper meaning of self-care into itself, diluting the radical, community-driven aspects by overuse of the term and its application. I first understood the idea from the book A Burst of Light by poet, novelist, and civil rights activist Audre Lorde, who wrote that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Lorde wrote those essays as she battled liver cancer; the gravity of her condition combined with the esteem in which I held her work made self-care seem like a rather serious undertaking meant for people on the front lines of saving the world. But three decades after A Burst of Light was published, after Donald Trump’s election, it seemed like everyone who did a mud mask was posting a selfie on Instagram tagged with #selfcare, and they were only half joking.
It struck me as ludicrous and self-indulgent. It also looked really nice. I am human, and I was worn out. I needed care of some kind, and turning inward seemed safer than anything that was happening on the outside. Wouldn’t being a better person be good for everyone? Wouldn’t I be a better person if I felt better? Wouldn’t I feel better if I looked better? It seemed not only possible but life-affirming and responsible to continue to focus on my packaging and to call it necessary for my health. My skepticism about the entire undertaking had been eroded until I barely remembered my hesitation about “working on myself” as a philosophy.
After a few months of meeting with Daniel, he started to pay more attention to what I was doing when we were together. One afternoon, he caught me looking at myself in the mirror as I pulled on the rowing machine.
