I can barely remember when getting on a scale meant a “good” thing. It was about the time of age three or four. I was “growing,” so my height got measured every once in a while, too. Putting on weight was “healthy” growth.

The next time I heard the word “healthy” used in that manner was when my husband’s grandmother of blessed memory, who was quite nearly blind, put her hand on my thigh, and slapped and felt it in the way older women are justified to do, and said “I am glad you are a healthy girl.

Some time not long after that first time that putting on weight was good, it changed suddenly and completely. My mother did not see the contradiction that I told her about. I had to clean my plate. That was told me unequivocally everytime I sat down to eat. But when I was weighed, I was getting fat and it was bad. She acted as if she were totally blind to what to me was, even then, a stupid and obvious contradiction. I have since decided that the customs mothers live and pass on come from some mystical realm of logic, and have less to do with anything akin to reason than they do with some sort of mindless revelation validated by repetition and mimicking, probably of her mother, and so on back through an infinity of Jewish mothers. Not that I think this experience is particularly Jewish, or particularly ethnic in any way. If the patients I have seen (as well as the friends I have had) over the years are any indication,such messages about weight in general and the relationship of weight to food are as ubiquitous as air. Read more on Women+Weight+Scales=PANIC!…