Reflection #10: is anyone actually eating?!?

A personal essay about thinness.

TW: body image, diet culture, mentions of ED.

---

Lately, I have been growing obsessed with the eating habits of the Gilmore Girls. 

Have you ever noticed how the mom and daughter duo contribute to circa 45% of the food waste produced in North America?

As a recent fan of the show, I have spent the past four seasons pointing out the bites never taken, the takeaway bags prepared with food untouched. Lorelai and Rory are known in stars hollow for their shocking food intake, which secures them a premium spot in the “not like the other girls” category of Y2K television. 

Let me be clear: I love the writing on the show, I think the girls and their contradictions, their flaws, keep me coming back for more; the story isn’t good just because they adore each other, it’s good because they sometimes fuck up in ways that make total sense for their personalities.

But their behaviour towards food is different. It is always treated as one of the reasons to love them: it makes them more relatable to their female audience, more appealing to the men in their lives, it sets them apart from the stuffy and Waspy background Lorelei has been endlessly trying to escape. To me, however, their uniqueness is not born out of how much they eat, but their ability to nevertheless maintain a great body, to remain conventionally attractive without even trying (which isn’t strange considering how seldom they actually do eat). 

Perhaps it is just a sign of the times; it was somewhat subversive to have two beloved female characters not dieting, especially in an era when “heroin chic” was an actual term used to describe women’s bodies. So, I should probably forgive this particular quirk.
Still, I don’t think that’s the full story. Though the manner in which Gilmore Girls portrays the idea of “being thin in a cool way“ would be too on the nose for a 2024 show, the ethics displayed are still present in our culture.

In my essay about neo-liberal feminism, I noted how recovering Instagram influencers still somehow end up monitoring their food intake, and still focus on how to maintain a good looking body type under the guise of self-love.

“This is the great paradox of my generation’s nuanced relationship to beauty and thinness. We are aware of feminism, we want to feel empowered because we have been taught that is the way towards gender equality (a whole other essay is due on the term “empowered” and how condescending it is), yet we do spend the majority of our lives on virtual communities tailored to our own neurosis and most hidden needs. If you were in recovery for an ED, you would probably be shown videos of women in recovery, hitting the gym and “doing nutrition right!”, missing the irony of trying to recover from an ED by obsessing on what to hit and what exercises to do, according to an Instagram influencer (here, I am talking from experience).”

But it’s not just those who used to struggle and are now getting back on their feet who adhere to a more controlled version of body positivity.

We tend to reward those who like food the proper way.

20 years in advance, Girlmore Girls portrays a thinking system that has now grown even more insidious due to developments in the body positivity movement.

We have been raised with the understanding that the only ethical way to show appreciation for a delicious meal is by remaining skinny, and we have now learned that the only ethical way to remain skinny is making sure everyone knows how much we enjoy an delicious meal. This has resulted in a twisted reality where fat people no longer have the right to be fat, to exist. 

Big girls - a group I have been a part of since primary school - have been forced to participate in this game of hiding too; our food choices run the risk of always being under scrutiny. If I order a salad, I am paranoid “I am not fooling anyone”, but being the only one ordering dessert at the restaurant is just asking to be judged.

Going back to Gilmore Girls, my friend rightly pointed out that, while Lorelai and Rory get to fake eat their way to our hearts, Sookie - a fat girl by 2003 standards - reveres food, but never actually enjoys it. She smells, tries, cooks, creates, but rarely does she sit down and have a full meal. 

Since this is a personal essay, I am free to say that, personally, I find this dynamic pretty grating: beautiful girls are allowed to eat for fun, but only if they’re skinny. 

It is implicit in these narratives that, either due to internalised misogyny, or due to a misguided sense of superiority, women who obviously try too hard are the worst kind of women. Because - within this world view -  being skinny should be effortless, it should come natural to everyone who cares about their role in society, and how you do it must be a secret. 

Maybe this is why, in 2024, being accused of taking Ozempic to lose weight always inspires a multitude of Facebook commenters to tell whichever celebrity that it is just not fair to become thin this way. To these users, the issue lies not in the desire to be smaller no matter what the health implications are, rather that Oprah, or Melissa McCarthy, or whoever else, chose the easy way out, the fast way out, when they could’ve just done what is right: be skinny without admitting that is hard.

I think the worst part about watching the Gilmore Girls maintain an enviable weight, and still being written as food lovers, is that my entire life I wanted to be like them. As I am sitting on the couch, trying not to think about the chocolate in the fridge, being “simply” skinny feels like the most important thing in the world to me; to someone like me, who gained weight from intuitively eating because I intuitively wanted to eat, obsessing over Lorelai and Rory’s eating habits has the same effect as “thinspo” posts that circulated on Tumblr.

Unlike other shows from that time, such as Friends - where the three women characters are skinny and behave as such - Gilmore Girls reminds me that I could be different, better, if only I wasn’t myself.

---