A Feminist Walks Into A Diet Clinic
Samantha Schoech has struggled with weight for most of her life.
"I am sort of a lifelong yo-yo dieter and like many women, weight is a frustrating topic for me," she tells NPR's Arun Rath.
As a feminist, she faces another struggle — the tricky prospect of balancing society's expectations of body image, without giving into them, and also wanting to be healthy.
She wrote about this tension in a piece for Ozy.com.
"I live, as many women do, in sort of this frustrating dichotomy between wanting to be filled with self-expectance and a sense of power and efficacy and value, and being constantly told, 'All that's great, but if you're overweight, you're sort of a loser.' "
Recently, she crossed the line into clinical obesity. She'd successfully lost weight before, but felt that she couldn't do it alone this time. She sought out a diet clinic in the San Francisco Bay area, and on her first visit, she was prescribed a diet pill called phentermine.
Phentermine is one half of the infamous diet pill fen-phen, which was hugely popular in the '90s. Fen-phen was taken off of the market after multiple lawsuits and mulitibillion-dollar settlements. But phentermine remains a widely popular drug in the United States.
"I chose to take it, because I felt like anything that might help was welcome," Schoech explains.
"The truth of the matter is, you know, I have a certain amount of vanity and I care about how I look to a certain extent. I am not trying to be a supermodel, by any stretch of the imagination. I am trying to be a healthy 43-year-old mother of two."