Dieting

weight tables and other measures “worked to enforce adherence to what Lasch identifies as fundamental tenets of the consumerist world: submission to experts, loss of the ability to decide on one’s own satisfaction, chronic anxiety. . . . the diet became a key to social order: even as it criticized middle-class lassitude, it painted a very particular portrait of postwar society and disciplined the dieter to fit into that picture. Equally importantly, it opened a way to the truth of the self through the avenues of consumerism” (Berrett, 810). . . . Diet, then, helped to reconcile traditional masculine individualism with the restrained corporate world. Providing a putatively healthful means of regimentation that ensured a middle-class man’s economic success, it connoted adulthood, expertise, possession of the store of knowledge by which such men have commonly reckoned their authority. But diet also mandated the imposition of discipline, submission to experts, and rigid self-control. Workplace lore would be supplanted by the science of nutritional values and exercise; having mastered this language, the male dieter had achieved mastery of himself” (816). . . . Feminists, in contrast, have detailed the numerous social pressures that converge on women’s bodies. Where these men relied on arbitrary personal goals for bodily transformation, women suffer (and cannot escape) constant ‘cultural manipulation,’ as Susan Bordo puts it, toward an unattainable ideal. . . . Their fat is presumed to ‘compensate’ for something, to be ‘about’ something internal – an expression of inner fear, anger, self-doubt – whereas men’s fat, according to these dieters, signified a narrow range of problems that were both external and remediable. (Most often, merely that they had eaten too much) (819). “The linkage between appetite restraint and work was an important feature of the postwar men’s dieting culture and, again, often translated into corporate reality” (Stearns, 115).