Skinny Women Who Eat Cheeseburgers in Magazines - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/opinion/women-weight-food-body-shaming.html
Consider People Magazine’s “What I Eat in a Day” feature, which requires a star to submit his or her daily intake to the public eye and a nutritionist’s assessment.
Whether the subject’s a dancer, an actress or a TV personality, the diet is guaranteed to be frighteningly abstemious, long on whole grains, short on joy. Greek yogurt or a protein shake for breakfast, a salad or some lentils for lunch. Grilled salmon and blueberries (superfoods!) almost always show up somewhere, along with some kind of name-brand soup or shake (is the star compensated for its mention? We’ll never know!). Dessert — if it happens — is a single cookie. Or, perhaps, a square of artisanal chocolate. Never both.
The message: acquiring a body that isn’t a joke or a punch line, one that won’t earn your partner high fives for his broad-mindedness, requires endless sacrifice, perpetual denial.
Except everything changes when you switch to glossy magazines like Elle and W, GQ and Esquire. Over there, you can’t swing a weighted jump rope without hitting a star — sometimes the same one who’d claimed to subsist on poached eggs and wild salmon in People — proudly scarfing a cheeseburger or a plate of nachos.