Title (as given to the record by the creator): Compulsive Eating in Sicks Easy Steps
Date(s) of creation: 1974
Creator / author / publisher: Aldebaran, Fat Underground
Location: USA
Physical description: 1 page article photocopy
Reference #: FU-Aldebaran-CompulsiveEating-1974
Source: Largesse Fat Liberation Archive
Links: [ PDF ]
COMPULSIVE EATING–IN SICKS EASY STEPS
by Aldebaran
Compulsive eating was the greatest problem in my life for six years–from the time I began college (and lived away from home and parental supervision for the first time) to the year in which I joined the women’s movement, raised my feminist consciousness, raised my fat consciousness, and stopped dieting. Having studied the problem at close range, I feel qualified to define these six easy steps for raising a compulsive eater:
1. Undermine her trust in her own sense of reality and self-worth by telling her that she eats more than anyone else, even though she can see she’s eating the same or less. Tell her she’s just imagining that she’s hungry.
2. Make food the most powerful influence in her life by telling her that if she could only control food she would be loved by everyone,
3. Keep telling her that she “shouldn’t eat sweets.”
(Preferably while you’ve got a chocolate in your mouth.) She’ll end up sneaking sweets and eating them in the toilet. Then make her feel ashamed of this “sick” act.
4. Keep her on reducing diets. She’ll be so hungry that she’ll always be thinking about food.
5. Teach her to eat what the diet book says she should eat, rather than what her body says she needs. (She already doesn’t trust her body, if you followed step #1.) Then switch diet books on her and tell her they all work better than her own senses.
6. When she’s starving, urge her to kill the hunger pangs by eating non-nutritive foods like celery and diet soda-pop. This will prevent her from recognizing real fullness.
Follow these steps faithfully from the time the victim is four or five years old, and you will create a person who fits the fat stereotype perfectly–preoccupied with food, easily influenced by the opinions of others, full of guilt and self-hatred. Psychiatrists will enjoy publishing papers about her. They’ll also enjoy collecting money from her, and there’s no risk that the money-source will ever run dry since their “cure” is one and the same as these sicks easy steps.
Copyright 1974 by the Fat Underground
