It was the thought of having to wear togs on a camping holiday and realising how bad that made her feel about her body that triggered the idea for Lotta Dann’s latest book.
The Wellington author was inspired to write about diets and body image, and how her usual enthusiasm for her summer holiday with family and camping buddies had been dampened since gaining weight.
The last time Lotta – whose acclaimed 2014 memoir Mrs D is Going Without detailed her journey to overcoming alcohol addiction – had seen her friends, she’d been thin, thanks to a strict diet. But the weight had crept on when the regime became unsustainable and she went back to eating what she wanted.
Feeling so ashamed prompted Lotta to start thinking about the stigma around having a body considered to be overweight and the pressure women in particular are put under to be as small as possible, along with the time, money and effort they spend on trying to shrink themselves.
The more she looked into the subject, the angrier she became that society subscribes to a “thin is best” mentality. So she sent an email to her publisher suggesting diet culture could be the topic of her next book.
“I felt really fired up,” recalls Lotta, 53, who works full-time running addiction workshops and part-time overseeing the website livingsober.org.nz.
“I’d started waking up to diet culture, and how we become sucked into thinking we have to be skinny to be happy and healthy. Which is not true.
She explains, “I’d had my eyes opened to how dysfunctional your thinking becomes and how this idea that you can’t be fat becomes embedded in your life. It leads to so many of us hating our bodies and being miserable. I wanted to get other people thinking about it.
“Plus, I thought if I wrote about this, I could try to take control back over the horrible feelings that I was having.”
Her publisher said yes to Lotta’s idea and the result is Mrs D is (Not) on a Diet. The book covers Lotta’s journey from being “pin-thin” thanks to the restrictive diet, through to a rebellious “free-eating” phase, which led to her gaining weight, and to now no longer obsessing about food, body image and shedding kilos.
It includes interviews with experts, who share their views on how damaging diet culture is and highlights research that shows that 95 percent of diets don’t work.
“The body fights diets because it prioritises survival. Dieting makes it think it’s in famine,” tells Lotta. “The research shows that restricting foods doesn’t lead to long-term weight loss. You start craving things and bingeing, and you end up being bigger than you were when you started.
“It’s so demoralising. You tell yourself you are weak and stupid, but you’re not, it’s because diets set you up to fail.”
Lotta looks at how people fat-shame others, including health professionals. What horrified her most while writing the book was talking to a colleague about how people treat her because of how much she weighs.
She shares, “The extent to which diet culture and bias, including within the medical world, diminish the lives of bigger people shocked me.”
“You can be fat and healthy, but people judge you so harshly. I’ve had friends who’ve lost significant amounts of weight who say people treat them very differently than when they were fat. For some people, their whole experience of life is receiving judgement for this and that should outrage us.”
Lotta says she was bursting to write Mrs D is (Not) on a Diet to try to make sense of a massive issue that affects so many women, but being brutally honest about her own experiences – as she was in Mrs D is Going Without – does make her feel rather vulnerable. She credits her sobriety and her family – she’s married to journalist Corin Dann, 50, and mother to sons Axel, 20, Kaspar, 18, and Jakob, 15 – with giving her the stability to “put myself out there”.
She enthuses, “They’re the rocks I stand on and they make me brave about doing these things.”
Lotta still occasionally has “spirals of shame” about her body, but for the most part, she’s happy with the way things are.
“I can have a wobbly tummy – who cares? It’s better than when I was smaller and obsessing about everything. And I get to eat what I want!”
Mrs D is (Not) on a Diet (Allen & Unwin, rrp $37.99).
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