Anorexia: still a problem under a long skirt and thick tightsYou might not guess it, but Orthodox women are hiding something under those long skirts and thick tights: Eating disorders. Anorexia and bulimia are generally associated with mainstream media and the pop culture that promotes super-thin figures, but eating disorders are problematic even in the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish worlds. Girls (and increasingly boys, too) in these communities aren’t necessarily modeling themselves on celebrities, but they are trying to live up to to societal expectations for beauty and thinness. In a community where couples get engaged after only a handful of dates, it’s no wonder that undue emphasis is often put on the physical.

A Forward article about the phenomenon of eating disorders in the frum community contains a disturbing revelation about matchmaking:

Very often, young men looking for brides in the Orthodox community call a girl’s parents and ask for her dress size. “If it is anything over an eight, forget it,” Abraham Twerski said. Twerski, founder of a drug-and-alcohol treatment center in Pennsylvania, wrote a book about eating disorders called “The Thin You Within You.” “Girls have become probably even more body-image conscious in the Orthodox community than in the general population,” he said.

Wanting to predict what a young woman’s figure will be when she turns 40 or 50, some men go as far as asking what the size of the potential bride’s mother is. This obsession with physical appearance has led to an increase in eating disorders among middle-aged women.

In a response to this apparent epidemic, the Orthodox Union is producing a documentary titled Dying To Be Thin, about anorexia and bulimia within the Orthodox community. Many of the already available resources in this area focus more on media influences, which is less relevant for girls raised in homes without televisions, so the O.U. has committed to developing its own film for distribution to schools and synagogues affiliated with the O.U. in the United States, Canada and maybe Israel.

The Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance has a wonderful page of links to articles, books, and programs dedicated to eating disorders in the Orthodox world, but as was recently pointed out in a post on Dov Baer Forever, much of what’s being discussed has to do with very young, single women, but married and middle-aged women are also susceptible to anorexia and bulimia, and are likely to pass their eating disorders on to their daughters.

Speaking of zaftig: Beyonce looks good in greenAs someone whose occasional bouts of self-loathing have nothing to do with my relatively normal-shaped body, I didn’t think I’d be susceptible to the pull of the weight-loss-obsessed website Elastic Waist, but watching their video on the derivation of the word “zaftig” really did make me a little bit bulimic.

Zaftig, the host explains, is Yiddish for “juicy,” a phenomenon about which we feel profoundly ambivalent these days—just ask poor Jennifer Love Hewitt, who was roundly trashed in the tabloids this week when shocking photos revealed that her bottom half is as jiggly as her top. Helpfully, the Elastic Waist video goes on to offer a handy guide for how to react when someone calls you zaftig. Apparently it’s a “fat euphemism” (so it’s an insult) which describes the kind of body you’d see on a Greek statue (so it’s attractive); it translates roughly to “pleasantly plump” (so it’s bad) and can be used in sentences such as “Pamela Anderson is quite zaftig after being injected with all that silicone” (so it’s good, or at least it’s considered attractive enough that people pay money to emulate it and also to look at it naked in old issues of Playboy.)

All of this could, I suppose, leave a girl unsure whether she needs to go buy some Snackwells or a push-up bra—or, duh, both—but the video derails these consumer urges with a sharp right turn into total insanity. Meet Frau Zaftigheimer, “the world’s zaftig expert.” She’s a Teutonic dominatrix, she’s built like a brick house, and for her, being zaftig is “a global movement” aimed at combating “the bony-ass models, anorexic celebrities and the media.” Frau Zaftigheimer explains all this while whipping her “2 o’clock” (because fat activism alone doesn’t pay the bills). Then she turns to the camera, and, as the Wagner swells on the soundtrack, says the following: “We shall create a master race of zaftig!”

Targeted by eyepatch–wearing German dominatrixes: Keira KnightlyGot that? If, like Frau Zaftigheimer, you’re a little worried about the way the media—like, oh god I don’t know, random example here, maybe websites about weight-loss?—perpetuates unhealthy body images among women, then maybe, like Frau Zaftigheimer, you are a Nazi. It’s rare for women-aimed publications to prove out Godwin’s Law (the rule that as discussions get longer and crazier, someone will invoke Hitler) but then again, they’re only just starting to take hold on the Internet. I’m sure that as publishers figure out how to make money off of women online, we’ll get used to hearing all sorts of fashion- and body-related stances being conflated with Nazism all the time.

What makes this really mind-blowing, though, is that ostensibly the whole thing is a Hanukkah-themed video, Yiddish being the language of all those Hanukkah-celebrants who were systematically murdered by the same kind of Wagner-loving fat activists who tried to take over the world in order to rid it of Keira Knightly and her ilk. (Typing that sentence made my head throb.) Um, and a chag sameach to you too, guys!

Listen closely: You can hear the stomachs rumblingI decided that I wanted a bat mitzvah when I was 20. I had been living in South Africa and spending a lot of time with Jews whose lives seemed enriched by their faith. Though I had not been raised religious and wasn’t looking for a holy-roller conversion, I wanted to do something to mark my Jewishness. The plan dissipated upon my return to the States, but my desire to participate in some of Judaism’s more meaningful rituals—an excuse to celebrate with people I love—did not. I have not lived up to my plan.

When a friend invited me to her break-fast this year, I made up my mind not to fast unless I had a good reason. Taking a random sampling of Jewish friends, I found that most observed because of their parents, because that’s what you do on Yom Kippur. But we’d never done the High Holidays in my home, so the tradition was really mine to take or leave.

Consulting Rabbi Leonard Gordon about the fast’s biblical roots was informative, but predictable. I knew I’d need to find a more tangible reason than souls and spirits. I liked the drama inherent in Rabbi Alan Flam’s description of the fast as a “structured encounter with death,” and I was drawn to the possible peace of mind that I imagined confronting mortality might bring, but I worried that I’d be too self-conscious trying to achieve this state. I did not want the pressure of trying to feel something as massive as death. I wanted a reason that wasn’t shrouded in religion.

Dr. Myron Yaster insisted both to my relief and disappointment that so long as you have a functional metabolism, your body will be fine. Where I had thought that the fast was something to struggle through, Dr. Yaster made it sound like half of America is fasting. (Which of course they are.)

Help yourself: Is Yom Kippur really about body issues?Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair suggested that rather than being an excuse not to eat, Yom Kippur can be used as a way to forgo body issues for a little while. This self-help-y language, while perfect for a self-help column, was not entirely convincing.

It was Wendy Shanker, a regular (and insightful) Jewish girl, who finally convinced me I should fast. For Shanker, a day shouldn’t require deprivation to be holy, but it does require doing things outside the norm: not checking email, not putting on makeup, not having sex, and yes, not eating. It means going to synagogue and being reminded of family and thinking about what is important in the coming year.

I have decided to fast on Yom Kippur because I want to be with a community of people who are also trying to feel something. I know I won’t be the only person in the congregation who is perplexed by why it’s important to spend the day starving. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to “check in” or “turn inward,” or even keep quiet during shul, but I will make an attempt, and if I fail, I’m not a bad Jew.

Having trouble finding time for a meal?: You are not alone.For my final day of decision-making, I didn’t want to talk to an expert. I didn’t want to hear what the Torah had to say, or how my cells would dry up and die, or how fasting contributes to body dysmorphia. I just wanted to talk to a Jewish girl like me, someone who had a flexible relationship with the faith, and who practiced on her own terms. I wanted to know what her reasons were for fasting, if she did it just because, or if there was intention in the ritual.

I met Wendy Shanker at New York’s City Bakery. She daintily picked at black rice, snow peas, and chickpea-encrusted chicken, and sipped an ice coffee. I ate three vanilla bean cookies. Shanker is 34 years old, the author of the memoir The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life, and the kind of person you want as your friend. She’s warm, she’s proud, and she laughs easily.

Shanker, who doesn’t belong to a shul but keeps Shabbat and fasts each year, grew up believing that Yom Kippur was about suffering for sins, since for Jews, not eating is a major concession to God. As she got older, she found that a 24-hour fast doesn’t really work as punishment. It’s not long enough to cause much discomfort or to achieve elevated peace of mind, let alone a transformation. And fasting, as she noted, is not so different from what has become normal eating behavior. These days, it’s not only obsessive Jewish girls saying, “I had a huge dinner last night so I’m going to skip breakfast and lunch today,” but a good portion of everyday working stiffs who try to wedge their first bite of the day in at 4 p.m. If abstention is the status quo, does the Yom Kippur fast work as atonement?

Sweating off the pounds: Why Yom Kippur brings back unpleasant memories for some womenTalking to Shanker helped me understand on a personal level what Rabbi Gordon meant when he assured me that guilt and suffering weren’t the ultimate goals of the holiday. But I was still concerned about the way fasting echoes unhealthy eating behavior. I had perversely thought of the fast as having added weight-loss bonus, but for Shanker—who’d spent years trying to lose weight with various dieticians and trainers—not eating comes with an entirely different kind of guilt. Rather than giving her the secret pleasure of being allowed to skip meals, Yom Kippur instead roused unpleasant memories of being told not to eat. She’d had enough trouble dieting for her own well-being; why was it so much easier to do for God?

To make the fast meaningful beyond punishment-lite or indulging Jewish-girl body neuroses, I did not want to do it for an abstraction like God, or transformation, or even forgiveness. Shirking dogma and religious obedience, Shanker finds the fast significant partly because it reminds her of childhood and family, and partly because it makes the day different. There is no expectation of transformation, no half-hearted nod to forgiveness; she draws meaning from the day by designating it meaningful.

This is usually the kind of thing I hate—deciding something is meaningful just because. Unlike most mass holidays, there’s nothing particularly fun about Yom Kippur. There are no gifts, you can’t observe it until you’re old enough to at least fake solemnity, there’s even a special prayer just for the dead. And so unless you have a deep-seated faith or are just going through the motions, finding meaning in the ritual can be a struggle. This is what finally appeals to me, what makes me almost want to start fasting this instant—being in a room full of other people who are also trying to find meaning in what we have been told is a holy day.

Next page: Hunger Pangs

The guilt shouldn't be in the pudding: Is it healthy to fast in a country obsessed with food and weight?“I could eat all the time” is a favorite expression among the women in my family. It’s an exaggeration, yes, but not by much. We’re second- and third-helping kinds of eaters, the types who always eat dessert and apologize for bad moods by mumbling, “I was hungry.” But despite a seemingly unabashed pride in our appetites, none of us are particularly thrilled with our bodies.

Though I’ve never dieted or been diagnosed with an eating disorder, I have made—and inevitably broken—absurd promises to myself about food. I’ve sworn I wouldn’t eat dessert for a whole week, or that I’d go easy on bread, or even abstain from eating until 1:00 p.m. I feel guilty when I have Doritos, ice cream, and fries—all foods I’d like to eat every day. If this sounds strange to you, chances are you’ve never had an honest conversation with a woman about her relationship to her body and food. How could I separate a holiday that sanctions not eating in order to feel holy from the everyday pressures of not eating in order to be thin?

I took this question to Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair, the director of Eating Disorders Education and Prevention at McLain Hospital in Boston. She disagreed with the idea that Yom Kippur contributes to dominant body neuroses. Judaism, she suggested, can actually counter unhealthy choices. Paraphrasing the Torah, Steiner-Adair offered the old body-is-the-temple-of-your-soul adage, insisting that Judaism actually promotes a healthy psychological and physical connection to your body.

It’s nice to think that the Torah discourages unhealthy behavior, but the ethics of Judaism can easily slip into obsessive behaviors. Indeed, Lori Hope Lefkovitz, a women’s studies professor at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (and the wife of Rabbi Gordon), pointed out that some kosher cookbooks, with their strict hygienic guidelines and separation of foods, read like a prescription for an eating disorder. Whether you’re doing it for obsolete sanitary purposes or for ritual purity, keeping kosher requires you to be vigilantly aware of everything that goes in your mouth. This can easily contribute to being freaked out about food in general.

Cracking under pressure: A disproportionate number of Jewish women suffer from anorexia.Though Steiner-Adair does not believe that keeping kosher contributes to eating disorders—she thinks eating disorders are a contemporary neurosis—she agreed that Jewish women are especially susceptible to the cultural pressure to be thin. Anorexia clinics, she told me, actually house a disproportionate number of Jewish girls. From her time spent working with women who suffer from eating disorders, Steiner-Adair thinks Jewish women grow up with the impression that to assimilate into American standards of beauty, you must be thin.

While Steiner-Adair’s optimism in the Torah as a way to help women get over body issues struck me as naïve, I did like her suggestion that the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur should be a time to remove yourself from the strange dialogue women have about food. In fact, Steiner-Adair sometimes tells her anorexic Jewish patients to eat a little more on Yom Kippur as an alternative way of observing the holiday. Flipping the rules this way helps undermine the idea that eating is bad. Similarly, those who decide to fast need to stop thinking about food as sin. “Don’t worry if you can’t hold the fast,” Dr. Steiner-Adair told me. “You’re not a bad Jew and you’re not a bad person and you’re just not bad.”

Instead of using Yom Kippur as an excuse to not eat, Dr. Steiner-Adair says, you should use it as a time to think about who you want to be in the world. This is a simple enough suggestion, but I’ve never connected the holiday with personal reflection. I certainly spend enough time during the rest of the year thinking about what matters, but typically in a list-making, goal-oriented kind of way. Whatever my ambiguous relationship toward spirituality in general and Judaism in particular, I liked the idea of using the fast as a designated way of taking stock.

Having spent the last three days hearing the various opinions of officialdom, for my last interview I wanted to get a personal take on the fast. Tomorrow I’m going to forget doctors and rabbis and instead talk to a regular Jewish girl, the author of a memoir about body image who has plenty of reservations about both religion and dieting but fasts nevertheless.

Next page: Lunching about fasting.

Hold off on the Manischewitz: Water is better after a fastDr. Myron Yaster is the reason I started fasting, though he doesn’t know it. Yaster has been observing the fast since his bar mitzvah 41 years ago. He attends a Conservative synagogue in Baltimore, the same one where his three children were all bar mitzvah’ed. Since the eldest of those three children happens to be my boyfriend, the guy I followed to synagogue three years ago, it seemed especially appropriate to get medical advice from him.

I wanted to speak with an M.D. because when you separate fasting from a religious or political context, it comes down to a simple question of metabolic health. As a mostly non-observant Jew, I have a hard time accepting religious practices that compel you to inflict pain or even stress on your body. What I wanted to learn from Yaster was exactly how much stress our bodies undergo during this religious rite. Additionally, I wanted to know if there was any kind of documented physical transformation I could expect as a result of not eating.

Yaster assured me that a 24-hour fast is fine for anyone with a normal metabolism. The physical effect of fasting on the body is sort of like being on a high-protein or low-carb diet where your body is tricked into using fat as a primary fuel. Although you might feel a little lightheaded or cranky by the 22nd hour, a one-day fast has almost no effect at all on your health or ability to function.

Don't let the Torah get you down: Bodies can handle a lot of deprivation.At sundown on Yom Kippur I generally head straight for the lox plate and bagel basket to stuff myself with as much fish and bread as I can grab. Yaster explained that while this is a common urge, liquid is really the first thing you should have after the fast (wine doesn’t count). I’ve never seen someone bring Gatorade to Yom Kippur dinner, but it’s an ideal way to break the fast, since it contains a severe infusion of salt, water, sugar, and glucose—the things you need to maintain a well-functioning metabolism.

Though he put all fears of masochistic worship to rest, I came away from our conversation feeling somewhat let down. It is true that I don’t want to harm my body just because the Torah says so, but part of me was expecting—hoping—for the fast to be more of a physiological undertaking. If your body hardly registers 24 hours without food, any real physical change is unlikely. It seems that achieving an inward-focused death-like state, as Rabbi Greenberg suggested, requires a lot more than the hungry, sleepy stupor I tend to fall into by the holiday’s end. In spite of my own misgivings with religion, I didn’t want my fast to be the equivalent of a crash protein diet.

In a culture that rewards abstinence, where Atkins is a household name, it is impossible not to associate fasting, no matter how holy, with the desire to be thin. As someone with a fairly normal attitude towards her body for an American woman—not pleased but not moved to change—I know I will have to confront the fast-as-diet before deciding if I want to observe. Tomorrow I will talk to a clinical psychologist who specializes in eating disorders, particularly among Jewish women.

Next page: Yom Kippur as a time to eat more, not less

Like Queen Esther: This girl is obviously rilly religiousToday is the Fast of Esther (or Ta-anit Esther, for the transliteration-happy among you).

“Go and gather all the Jews who are found in Shushan and fast over me, and do not eat and do not drink three days, night and day; and I and my maidens will also fast thus,” Esther is said to have told Mordechai. And, since the story ended well, the fast remains.

So, blackberry/raspberry bran morning muffin aside, I’m feeling nice and hungry and contemplative. (Can’t I meditate on my hunger between meals? I mean, technically I’m fasting at this very moment! And boy, am I thinking some redemptive thoughts.)

Unhappy correlation between modern American Jewish women and starvation aside, there are many, many purported benefits of fasting (redemption of your people is just icing on the cake you can't eat). If it’s good enough for Esther et al, Robin Quivers, and Beyonce, there’s got to be something to it.

Come on! We'll do it together! It'll be, like, a bonding thing!

I feel like I've been covering the Thin Beat lately with my three recent shvitz posts on the topic of overly thin models (Banning Skinny Minnies, News Flash:  Models Too Thin, and The Thin Beat:  Israel Makes More Strides). But it's a topic I have a personal connection to:  I've known too many girls with eating disorders and have experienced the problem myself.  To any model agent or designer that insists 5'10" models who weigh 115 pounds are not contributing to a rising number of eating disorders among young girls, I say, go to hell.  They do, and I guarantee I can easily find 100 suffering anorexic or bulimic girls to agree with me.

This is the last time I'll shvitz on overly thin models. But it's worth emphasizing once again that the world should follow Israel's example in this arena. Reuters reported yesterday that Israeli fashion photographer Adi Barkan secured commitments from advertising firms in Israel to not employ models with a BMI lower than 18.

Furthermore:

"Legislation that would enforce the BMI threshold throughout Israel's fashion industry has passed a first reading in parliament and could be ratified by year's end, Barkan said."

Way to go Israel. And way to go Barkan.

I cannot help but weigh in (excuse the pun) on "Thin and Thinner" from the Times' Thursday Styles. I could go on and on about the topic of overly thin models (for that see my personal blog). But I'll make a few points here:

1. Have Eric Wilson, everybody at the Times, and everyone in the fashion industry been asleep the past 12 years? Because too-thin models have been around since the early '90s and it hasn't taken the vast majority of the world until now to identify how sick this trend is. This topic is old. Not new(s).

2. Linda Wells, editor of Allure:

“What’s happening right now is an extreme... Some of the models really are too thin, but that is such a tricky thing to say.”

Rosa Cha

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, Wells. I, too, find it tricky to say the model above really is too thin.

3. A few who casted the shows complained about the thinness of models who auditioned. Talk is cheap:

"Amanda Brooks, who assists Bryan Bradley of Tuleh with model castings, said a top runway model was turned down because she looked too thin. 'You could see her hip bones,' Ms. Brooks said. 'We couldn’t imagine putting her in a dress.' "

They could, however, imagine putting this model in a skort(?):

Tuleh

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

" 'I think we’re all to blame,” said Michael Vollbracht, the designer of Bill Blass. 'I’m very aware of these girls who look too thin or unhealthy, and at one point during the casting I had to walk out of the room. We called a model’s agency and said, ‘Do you even watch these girls?’ ”

These two must've wallked in when he made that phone call:

Bill Blass

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Katie Ford, the chief executive of Ford Models:

“We’re talking about this because Madrid chose to do something now.”

Ford referrs to Madrid's ban of overly thin models at its upcoming Fashion Week. I already Shvitzed on this topic: Israel had the same idea years ago.

If any of you have been as disgusted as me watching this Fashion Week's regime of toothpicks struggle to lift the weight of the very "in" platform stiletto (I recall some of Marc Jacobs' models were especially appalling... like his gross striped dresses), you'll find it refreshing that Madrid Fashion Week has banned underweight models. The ban came after protests that the skeletons we call supermodels were inspiring way too many young'ns to develop eating disorders.

But not so fast there, Spain. You're not the first country to show such concern for your eating disordered population. Israel beat you to it!

Adi Barkan, an Israeli photographer, "successfully submitted legislation to the Knesset in December, 2004" requiring modeling agencies to review models' BMIs to ensure they're not underweight. Read more in this old Guardian article.

How long has eating been out of style for? Since the stirrup pant? I say let's bring 'em back together.