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Home » Diets that Work » A Memoir of Dieting in the Age of Total Body Vigilance – New York Times

Photo Credit Lydia Ortiz

BEAUTIFUL BODIES A Memoir By Kimberly Rae Miller 222 pp. Little A. $24.95.

On the very first page of her memoir Beautiful Bodies, Kimberly Rae Miller stacks the book with a lot of questions that dont have easy answers: What is the ideal human body? Why dont we all have it? Why do we come in different shapes and sizes, and when and why did we start hating ourselves for it?

Shes taking aim not just at the countless Americans who are attempting weight loss at any given moment, but at our culture that takes the body as an all-consuming improvement project with no end in sight.

For Miller, whose previous memoir, Coming Clean, was about growing up with hoarders, dieting started in childhood and has stuck around into her 30s as her only real hobby. She was a suburban Long Island kid who wanted to be exceptional, to be visible, but for her body to be nothing of note. She attempts to be a child model, loves the brief notoriety she gets as the first girl in her fifth grade class to get her period, spends two weeks skipping breakfast and aerobicizing at fat camp and ends up gaining an eighth of a pound.

And then there are the failed diets she reels off: eating nothing but meat, nothing but raw vegetables, nothing but fruit, nothing but juice. I loved the rigidity and lack of choice, she writes in her chatty way. Deprivation was awful but amazing.

By adulthood, Miller teaches indoor cycling classes, occasionally goes on acting auditions and maintains a blog about health and fitness. She still sees her body and her weight as her primary asset. I could maintain a size 8, but it took herculean effort, near starvation and a religious gym routine.

Which she tries when she starts dating Roy, an Israeli personal trainer she meets online. Then she finds an email he had written to a friend that called her lovely but chunky: She does have a big butt and a belly, which do bother me. To her face he says shes in possession of one of the most obstinate bodies Ive ever dealt with in my career. Instead of reacting with anger, she thinks its what she deserves. He advises her she could eat as little as 800 calories per day and helps her train. She shows up to a friends wedding in a size-6 dress thats too big and weighing the same as she did when she was 11. We are to believe their true test of love comes when she gains the weight back but he proposes anyway.

Despite the fact that Millers weight yo-yos frequently by dozens of pounds, her body size is always, by societal standards, neither very thin nor very fat. She keeps a photograph in her wallet of her at her fattest, 188 pounds, around the time she graduated from high school. She means it to be proof of my failure, my rock bottom. Describing the photo is where her writing is most vivid, her shame most palpable: My wet tank top clung to my body, accentuating my bloated breasts and stomach. My stomach formed a perfect 8, round everywhere except where my too-tight pants pulled my stomach in; my face, a perfect circle. She recounts publishing it online only to be mocked for her appearance: some echoing her own criticisms but others complaining shes not big enough to really be considered fat.

It is just another way to fail at measuring up. In this era of total body vigilance, there is no middle ground where one is neither too fat nor shockingly thin. Thats the story she should have pursued connecting her own lifetime of ambivalence and restriction around food and her body to a larger narrative. She does add in brief historical interludes about dieting the Rev. Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kelloggs bland vegetarian plans, Inuits eating a lot of animal fat, and William the Conquerors alcohol-heavy regimen but they are about as long and detailed as the average Wikipedia entry. Over all, what we get is a book that reads at times like a mildly funny therapy session or a familiar memoir about the redemptive power of love.

Miller never comes close to answering any of the questions about ideal bodies she poses in the beginning of the book, but here are a few more: How does a person know when to stop? Or at least stop trying?

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A Memoir of Dieting in the Age of Total Body Vigilance - New York Times

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Home » Diets that Work » A Memoir of Dieting in the Age of Total Body Vigilance – New York Times