I Only Knew She Had a Problem When I Remembered Her Recipes From the 80s
A tour of diets and damage.
I was born in 1976 which means that my entire life has been lived in the cradle of Diet Culture. All of the women around me were dieting. This is not hyperbole, but a fact. It was a universal part of life in the 80s when we were too collectively naive to find anything wrong with all trying to look like the exact same photograph of Jane Fonda on the cover of her 1981 workout book with her legs stretched straight up in a V-shape (For victory, obviously). The diet message of those times was that you, too, could look like this–a concept that was able to simultaneously defy both physiology and reason, but somehow remain sexy and aspirational.
My mother and grandmother were the two women that I personally got to watch wrestle with their bodies every day of my childhood. One of them was successful, one was not, but it was only later that I figured out why.
My mom was an eager student, but never quite excelled at mastering the art of 80s weight loss. There was a lot of Tab, cottage cheese, halves of grapefruits, and fat-free blue cheese dressing, but she never made it to Jordache Jean nirvana. Thankfully, I do not remember when she took diet pills the year after I was born, which my dad said were actually “uppers”. However, I do…
