You’ll feel like you’re listening in on a Couric-Monahan family dinner!
If you’ve read Katie’s memoir, Going There, you know she’s not one to pull any punches when it comes to sharing her personal story. And now, she’s going even deeper, thanks to a revealing conversation with a very special guest interviewer.
In the winter 2022 issue of Tracy Anderson Magazine (which you can pick up right here), Katie opens up to her daughter Carrie about the history of the way women speak about their own bodies — and how those societal tides affected their family in a personal way.
During Katie’s childhood, “there was a lot of emphasis on bodies,” she tells Carrie. “I know that when I started to develop as an adolescent, it was very hard for me to be comfortable in my body because I was always such a scrawny kid. And then suddenly I had adipose tissue where I hadn’t before.”
Being surrounded by the culture of fad diets and zealous celebration of weight loss, Katie eventually developed unhealthy habits for regulating her own body. She shares personal stories in Going There about her battle with bulimia.
“I would not eat to the point where I was famished. Then I would make terrible decisions and be filled with more self-loathing for the decisions I made. And then I would start eating everything as a way to both punish myself and say, ‘Well, I wasn’t “good” today, so I might as well.’ Then I would purge,” Katie says.
Katie and her girls are quite close, so they’ve had lots of conversations about these issues over the years. And in their Tracy Anderson interview, Carrie raises the idea of “intergenerational body shaming” — the way we tend to pick up on our parents’ fixations and unintentionally pass them down to our own children.
“Sometimes still, like when we go out to dinner and you ‘don’t want us to spoil our appetites,’ there’s a level of anxiety I can see on your face when the bread basket comes,” Carrie says. “Or there’s this look if I serve myself one too many helpings.”
Katie agrees that most people do “absorb the parenting style of your parent,” but she adds she’s always been carefully attuned to how her daughters are feeling about themselves — and aims to parent accordingly.
“I think if I pressured you at all or if I tried to have you eat healthy, it was because I felt like it bothered you,” Katie says.
There’s a whole lot more thoughtful discourse about these and other body topics in Tracy Anderson Magazine — and, of course, in Going There.
“I talked about these things in a pretty natural way,” Katie says of her writing process. “And even though I wasn’t conscious of it, I wanted to develop a certain intimacy with the reader and share things as if I was saying them to good friends over a glass of wine. I wanted to have a conversation that was extremely unguarded. So, I think discussing my body was part and parcel of that.”
The winter 2022 issue of Tracy Anderson Magazine is available now.
