A Weighty Matter - Manufactured Beauty - Part 2

When I think about the last 30 years of my life and how much of it I spent worrying about my weight or how I looked, I realize that it was almost all time wasted.  My battle with my body was a war that occurred on the front lines of my daily life and also as an ever-present undercurrent of my inner life.  We are told in a thousand different ways through the bombardment of media and entertainment that in order to be beautiful we must strive to be anorexically thin.  I am somewhat grateful that the Super Models of my youth - Christie Brinkley, Rachel Hunter, Kim Alexis, Carol Alt and Cheryl Tiegs - they each projected an image of beauty, strength and health and had what seemed to be, at the time, reasonably attainable figures.  Those days are long gone - the image projected by today's models is excruciatingly thin and impossible for most women to even attain - and we won't even talk about the airbrushing that is standard in the industry today.

I lived in Los Angeles for 20 years where the obsession with beauty and weight is legendary.  I remember talking to a friend once who had lunch with a famous socialite/actress.  The woman was incredibly thin - my friend said that when she ordered her lunch she asked for a grilled piece of fish, no butter or sauce, no more than 4 ounces to be brought out with a cup of steamed, fresh veggies.  That was her lunch.  She had ordered the same thing at lunch to be polite and couldn't believe how little food it was.  She wanted a piece of bread but her lunch guest had banished the customary bread basket from the table.  My friend left the lunch starving and grabbed something else to eat when she got home. I recently read an interview with the beautiful and hugely talented actress Julianne Moore where she said she was always hungry - morning, noon and night but that the Hollywood obsession that actresses represent a certain size and thinness didn't allow her to eat very much...I can't imagine always being hungry by choice.

Once I was in line behind Renee Zellweger at Williams Sonoma in Beverly Hills.  She was the tiniest thing I ever saw - she probably came up to right underneath my breasts and her thigh looked to be as big around as my upper arm.  I am dead serious.  I felt like a behemoth.  Most actors are notoriously small but look much bigger and taller on film. Tom Cruise is 5'7" tall and towered over Zellweger in Jerry Maguire - I don't know why I was so surprised at what a small woman she is. The same with Eva Longoria of Desperate Housewives fame.  She was on a soap I used to watch before becoming famous, and I saw her at Disneyland.  She is so petite and thin it's shocking in person. Neither woman represent any version of beauty that I could ever attain given our genetic differences.

I saw Cheryl Tiegs in Ralph's grocery store in LA a few years ago. She looked terrible, she was losing her battle against the aging process.  Too much work and injectables can actually give you the opposite effect of what you are going for. She was 60 trying to look 30 and looked exactly what you think 60 trying to look 30 looks like.  She had much too much work done and it wasn't sitting well on her face.  Also, she had become so thin, she looked horribly ill.  Her wonderful, curvy figure was totally gone and all that was left was a brittle, thin shell.

The other problem with this bullshit image of beauty that we are fed is that these women have spent thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars on attaining this unattainable image of beauty.  They starve themselves and then because they are too thin and have lost all their body fat, they have no boobs...so they get implants.  They botox, inject, liposuction, nip and tuck themselves into Barbie doll perfection.

I had a friend in sobriety who had a nosejob, eye lift, breast implants - then bigger breast implants - and then had those taken out and had smaller implants put in (she was tired of not being able to button her blouses or having to buy them in a larger size and have them taken in at the torso and waist); lip implants, lipo on belly, arms, knees, back, butt; tummy tuck, facelift, a second eye job, veneers, hair extensions and also managed to get her 5'9" frame down over 50 lbs to somewhere around 112-115 pounds via lots of juicing and protein shakes and veggie soups with negative calorie count.  She was horribly thin but when I mentioned my concerns, she told me she was in perfect health, worked out everyday and knew what she was doing - but I thought she looked anorexic - from behind I could see the outline of her pelvic girdle, not a pretty sight.  But she was thin, by God and in LA, that's gold.  People coo over you when you are that thin.  All the women want to know how you did it.  What's your secret? Once we were out to breakfast in Brentwood and the waiter inquired as to whether my 45 year old friend was a "starlet" - she looked so familiar.  She giggled and batted her eyelashes at him - that compliment made her day.  I didn't even know there were such things as "starlets" anymore.  She died of pneumonia 3 years ago.  I think she got so thin and had so many surgeries that when she got so sick, she had nothing to fight it with.  Her maid found her dead on her kitchen floor one morning shortly before her 50th birthday.  She was a hugely successful, self-made businesswoman, funny, smart, irreverent and gorgeous - even before all her "work".  She became obsessed with perfection, literally rebuilt herself from the ground up in some false image of beauty and I think it killed her.

You see all these (aging) actresses who claim to get lots of sleep, eat well, exercise and take supplements and that's why and how they look so good/young. It's all bullshit, people!  They've all had work.  They all have botox and filler....you can't get into your 40's without a wrinkle and certainly cannot be striding towards fifty with a smooth face, full lips, firm breasts and wide eyes without a lot of help.  To be clear, I don't care what they've done - it's their business, their body - but to try to make the rest of us think that they are circumventing the aging process through common sense alone should be offensive to all women who are fighting their own battle against Father Time.  (Notice how Time is represented as a man?  What's that about?)

How do I know this? Through my *own* common sense and my (some of them costly) attempts in my quest for a semblance of external beauty and also to slow the aging process....

Part three of this series will bring the focus back to me and my struggle to discover what truly makes me beautiful.  Full disclosure ahead - the good, the bad and the ugly!  ;)

Pax