J. Law, girl. You used to be my favorite.
She recently opened up about her nude photo scandal, and made some great comments that made me really look up to her and admire her as a role model. I was thinking, “Wow, finally. This woman who seems to be a pretty normal human being is famous and isn’t pretending she’s some perfect superhuman like most other celebrities do,” it was great. Combine her personality with her acting ability, and I was about ready to dedicate a blog to her greatness.
And because I love her and her awkwardness so much, I’ve always looked past her skinny-shaming comments. I tried to tell myself that she was just so worried about perpetuating “thin is in” that she forgot that all bodies are beautiful, even skinny ones. And while I still like her a lot and will continue to watch her movies, after her recent interview with Vanity Fair, I have to say that my love and admiration has been kicked down a notch or ten.
Sam Kashner wrote for Vanity Fair, “Jennifer is the anti-vegan, anti-gluten-free consumer, having just eaten a breakfast of spaghetti and meatballs before the interview.” Jennifer Lawrence then went on to describe a gluten-free diet as “the new cool eating disorder, the ‘basically I just don’t eat carbs.'”
J. Law, that was not cool.
Now I’m not gluten-free, and I know that there’s a lot of controversy over the pros and cons of a gluten-free diet. But that’s actually not what I’m referring to. Lawrence could live exclusively on Cool Ranch Doritos and go on for days about how much she hates gluten-free diets. What makes me so upset is her description of it as “the new cool eating disorder,” because that’s just so wrong in so many ways.
Firstly, there is nothing — _nothing_ — cool about an eating disorder. There are no “cool” eating disorders. Eating disorders are mental illnesses. That’s it. Eating disorders are not trendy. Eating disorders are not a fad diet. Eating disorders are mental illnesses and nothing more than that, and it’s ignorance like Lawrence’s that makes it so hard for everyone actually suffering from this mental illness to get help and to be taken seriously.
Combine this with her famous quote from Mirror, “I’d rather look chubby on screen and like a person in real life,” as well as her other “body positivity” comments and I’m forced to rethink my affection for the actress. She’s great, but she seriously needs to be educated on body positivity and eating disorders.
All people look like a person in real life. Do you have a body? Are you a human and not an armadillo? Congrats. You look like a person. I know that overweight people get a lot of hate, and that there is an overwhelming emphasis in today’s society of the importance of being slim. I’m not discounting that at all.
But I think that it’s just as bad to tell someone like my sister — who at 5 foot 5 inches weighs a solid 100 pounds but has never dieted in her life — that she needs to eat a burger as it is to tell someone who is overweight that they need to run to lose weight. All bodies are beautiful bodies. Whether they’re tall, short, skinny, fat, have tattoos, whatever.
Parading an obsession with junk food and laziness around as a better form of self-care than eating gluten-free and trying a new yoga class isn’t right. Are you happy with your life? Is your current diet working for you? Then you’re fine. Don’t stress about the people who want to lose weight. And don’t put other people down because you think society isn’t nice enough to you. That’s just adding to the issue. And never, ever, ever, refer to any crash/fad diet as “the new cool eating disorder” because there’s no such thing as a “cool eating disorder.”