Women and social eating

11th July 2007

posted in Body Image, Diets, Eating Disorders, Health, Nutrition & Fitness, Pop Culture |

There’s one in every office: the woman constantly peddling homemade brownies or the one who always offers doughnuts in the morning. Vending machines, morning bagels, cookies, cakes, candy – offices can become a breeding ground for competitive dieting and binge-eating, reports the Telegraph.

Social pressure to eat is one of many reasons some workplaces seem to promote weight gain, experts say. And nowhere is this more evident than in offices that are crammed full of weight-obsessed women.

While researching his book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink, the director of Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab, discovered that, because they are more likely to be restrained eaters, women tend to be more influenced than men by groups.

“When we put two women together, regardless of whether they’re friends or not, they end up mimicking the eating habits of the other person.”

Women might think that they eat when they’re hungry, but few of us actually do, says psychotherapist and writer Susie Orbach.

“Eating habits are contagious. There’s so much guilt, confusion and anxiety around eating that women don’t listen to their appetites. They’re only stimulated by food when somebody else starts eating.”

Part of the problem, writer Anna Chapman reports, is that four out of ten British women (and one out of three women in America) are on a diet and dieting breeds bad eating habits. This is despite experts’ repeated warnings that diets don’t work and that most people on a diet eventually gain the weight back, many by binging.

When you have deprived your body of food it naturally wants to overeat, explains nutritionist and therapist Judy Price. “When you go on a diet you learn to override your natural hunger cues,” she explained. “It’s like stopping yourself from going to the loo.”

And if your office is anything like mine, it’s nothing short of a Betty Crocker Bake-a-thon. The sheer pervasiveness of sweets, along with the accompanying social pressure to eat them, makes staying healthy a battle in itself.

“Eating is a very social thing. There’s a lot of pressure from the group to have a piece of cake,” explains Orbach. “That’s why it seems churlish to turn down a home-made chunk of brownie when your colleague is thrusting a Tupperware box in your face.”

Orbach calls it the pack mentality: “There’s so much policing of women’s food, by ourselves and by others. If one person says, ‘Let’s have dessert,’ then we feel we can have dessert.”

How did we get into this situation, where we’re obsessing over who eats what and how much? And more importantly, could we be passing on disturbed eating cues to our daughters.

The International Journal of Eating Disorders recently reported that daughters of mothers who like to diet have a tendency to binge and overeat. In fact, three of the most powerful risk factors for the development of an eating disorder, reports ANRED, are a mother who diets, a sister who diets and/or friends who diet.

“A lot of kids are growing up with mums whose own eating is troubled,” says Orbach. ‘”Mothers can have the best intentions, but they’re often dieting or talking about how fat they are or how they shouldn’t be eating this. It becomes embedded in a girl’s mind that she should be worried about food. She doesn’t even know there’s anything wrong with that idea.”

According to Orbach, eating problems are rife in children as young as six – 15-years of age:

“…none of the girls feels comfortable with her body or what she’s eating. It’s starting earlier than puberty and gets accelerated about the age of 11. By the time they’re 15 or 16 they have such chaotic eating habits they don’t know when they’re hungry, and they’re only eating from external cues.”

Chapman sums up the article pointedly: “[I]f we continue to take our dietary cues from other women, rather than our own bodies, we’re fighting a losing battle.”

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 6:29 am and is filed under Body Image, Diets, Eating Disorders, Health, Nutrition & Fitness, Pop Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 On July 11th, 2007, Elastic Waist said:

“In fact, three of the most powerful risk factors for the development of an eating disorder, reports ANRED, are a mother who diets, a sister who diets and/or friends who diet.”

Okay, so this is everyone in America…

posted on July 11th, 2007 at 2:32 pm

2 On July 11th, 2007, Rachel said:

There are other factors at play, of course, including a genetic predisposition to ED’s. But for someone who does have that tendency, if the environment is ripe, an ED could naturally follow.

While not every woman will develop an eating disorder, a great majority do have disordered thinking about food. Unfortunately, this is all too often cyclical, as children are influenced by close family and friends in crucial and impressionable development stages.

posted on July 11th, 2007 at 3:59 pm

3 On July 11th, 2007, DivaJean said:

EEK.

This hits me right after I spent my entire lunchtime hearing about who in my dept would eat what on their respective diets; how tracking with WW is easier than calories, etc. Then a huge dissertation on favorite restaurants, desserts, where to get the best gelato, etc. FREAKS. With their frozen plastic calorie conscious lunches.

I loved having my bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich (heaviest on tomatoes this time of year!) and watching their judgements of me. Not.

posted on July 11th, 2007 at 1:56 pm

4 On July 11th, 2007, Rachel said:

DivaJean – I posted a related news story a while back, on how women “bond” over fat talk. Link: http://the-f-word.org/blog/?p=24

Sometimes I wonder what women would talk about, if they didn’t talk about food, dieting and weight.

posted on July 11th, 2007 at 2:41 pm

5 On July 11th, 2007, Meowser said:

Here’s another reason there’s a lot of snacking going on in female-intensive occupations: They tend to be stressful and not particularly high-paying, and demand that those that practice them be constantly sweety-sweet, nicey-nice, and perky-perky. And you have to take lunch on THEIR schedule, not when your body clock decides it needs food. How do you deal with constant high stress and low blood sugar? Bingo.

I used to work for a company like this, which had rows of employees — mostly female — sitting and proofreading all day. I’ll call this company Fatcorp in honor of their ginormous financial success. The workers there constantly referrred to the weight gain a new employee could expect as “the Fatcorp 40.” Binge, diet, binge, diet, binge, diet, blah blah. Of course Fatcorp also expected lots of mandatory overtime, and with mandatory OT came mandatory (well, almost) doughnut consumption. I never ate doughnuts otherwise, but there was the sense of, “well, it looks like I’ll need one today.”

posted on July 11th, 2007 at 3:08 pm

6 On July 11th, 2007, Sarah said:

Oh, this is SO true. My office is horrible about this. People are constantly bringing in baked goods and dumping them in our common area. Then all day long we hear “Oh, this is sooo good” or “oh, this is soooo fattening” or “who is trying to make us fat” etc etc. My boss especially is always loudly commenting on what everyone else is eating as opposed to what she is eating. It’s incredibly stressful.

posted on July 11th, 2007 at 4:02 pm

7 On July 11th, 2007, littlem said:

“There’s one in every office: the woman constantly peddling homemade brownies or the one who always offers doughnuts in the morning.”

“People are constantly bringing in baked goods and dumping them in our common area. Then all day long we hear “Oh, this is sooo good” or “oh, this is soooo fattening” or “who is trying to make us fat” etc etc. My boss especially is always loudly commenting on what everyone else is eating as opposed to what she is eating. It’s incredibly stressful.”

I think the phrase FOOD PUSHERS adequately describes people like this.

Worse yet, if you refuse whatever it is they might be offering — irrespective of how horrendous it might be for your hypoglycemia or ignoring the fact that you brought in a homemade casserole for everyone else to eat at the last potluck and it was devoured, so it’s not that you’re necessarily a lousy cook, you are harassed, derided, and shamed (or at least repeated attempts are made) for being “NOT PART OF THE TEAM” or “NOT A TEAM PLAYER”.

What the *expletive emphatically deleted* is that really about, anyway?

posted on July 11th, 2007 at 7:13 pm

8 On July 12th, 2007, Rachel said:

I think its because people, especially women, may want to indulge, but don’t want to indulge alone, necessarily. If you decline a brownie for instance, it might make another who wants a brownie feel guilty for wanting one, as if she doesn’t have enough willpower that you do. It’s bandwagon guilt.

posted on July 12th, 2007 at 12:16 am

9 On July 12th, 2007, PastaQueen said:

I don’t go out to eat much, but I recently went out to dinner with a group of women. I didn’t finish my plate because I’ve gotten much better about stopping when I’m full at restaurants. Sometimes it makes me self-conscious, though I doubt anyone but me cares. Still, I felt *so* much better about it when I noticed everyone else at the table had left some food on their plates too. I felt much less freakish for not stuffing my face. However, I still wouldn’t have eaten the food even if they’d all cleaned their plates. I would have felt pressure to, sure, but I think with practice you can learn to resist those forces, though you may still falter a little.

posted on July 12th, 2007 at 11:10 am

10 On July 12th, 2007, DivaJean said:

I shamefully recall when one of the more obnoxious diet talkers was making a big deal about what she would and wouldn’t eat a few years back- and also recommended I follow her pursuits. I made sure to have more goodies around than usual to bring her to a breaking point. When she finally said something to me to the effect of “Don’t let me have any of your food anymore”, I then advised her I was no ones food police. I then had some discussion about food, dieting, and size acceptance- but she didn’t get it.

posted on July 12th, 2007 at 11:19 am