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Disordered Eating in the Time of Quarantine
Beware the Quarantine 15.
Beware the fat clinging to your body. Beware change. Beware relaxing. Beware satisfaction with, or even mild acceptance of, your appearance.
“Remain vigilant!” says a wave of advertisements on my timeline for weight loss programs and exercise leggings. “Complacency adds 10 pounds.”
“Here’s me after quarantine lol,” says a former colleague who always seemed nice enough. Her words hover above a picture of an unfamiliar woman. It’s unflattering. She’s fat and unaware she’s become the butt of someone’s joke.
I wonder if the photographer had permission to take the picture, and know they most likely didn’t. A woman’s body is treated as public property, regardless of whether it’s showered with praise or scorn.
“Wonder Woman after the Quarantine 15 hits,” says a cosplayer I follow. The picture they post isn’t of them. It’s of yet another fat body, dressed as Wonder Woman, as if this is the greatest of jests.
Beware the Quarantine 15, chants a chorus of voices online, their greatest fear not becoming ill, losing their livelihood, or having to bury a loved one, but of growing larger. I listen, because the alternative is being alone in my house, disconnected from the world.
