“Next time I go out with my friends, I’m bringing this book. I know it will spark some great conversation. And maybe we’ll be brave enough to tell each other the number that has too much control over our lives. The stigma lifts one person at a time.” –GeekMom.com
The concept behind “How Much Do You Weigh?” is simple: 24 professionally photographed women, depicted alongside the number that their scales read that morning.
No big deal, right? Maybe even overly simplistic. Women, and a number.
But in this culture, it actually is a very big deal.
For so many of us, this number represents a private shame. Almost as if we step on the scale in the morning and let that number tell us how to feel about ourselves, and how to treat our bodies. That number never seems right. Or perhaps even if it does seem right, it never stays the same. One day we wake up and we’re 2 pounds heavier and we feel as if we have to punish ourselves for it.
But why? How on earth does this little number gain the power necessary to dictate and inform our self-esteem?
By the fact of it being a private matter, for one. You know your weight. Perhaps your doctor knows your weight. But in our culture, talking specifically about our weight is forbidden. So we don’t know what anyone else weighs, either. We have no perspective.
This makes us vulnerable to the pitches of beauty industry and the diet industry and the impossible cultural standards that they elevate, and we internalize the message that flawlessness + lowest possible weight = healthiness. And desirability. And happiness.
And we let that number that is our weight hold us back from these things.
This book is here to show you, definitively and in no uncertain terms, that 173 pounds and 114 pounds are equally gorgeous. 271 is stunning. 171 is confident and caring. 153 and 250 are just about the most awesome gals on the planet.
Each of these 24 women are here to show you their numbers. And they are here to show you their happiness, their desirability, their healthiness. And to show you that in fact, these things are not related at all to their number. Nor is yours.
Looking at these women side by side, the meaning and power of our own numbers is dissipated. Finally, we can have some perspective. Surprise and serendipity await.
“The effect of ‘How Much Do You Weigh?’ in addition to confronting the taboo against publicly announcing/broadcasting the particulars of one’s weight, is that it recalibrates our ideas of what certain numbers on the scale are supposed to look like. If 180 pounds sounds “fat” in theory, it doesn’t necessarily look it in reality, which makes the whole enterprise of weight measurement — and, by extension, BMI — rather meaningless. –Anna Holmes, The Washington Post
“Nieto has created a vital project tackling a thorny issue.” –The Opinioness of the World.com
“Erin Nieto’s project, ‘How Much Do You Weigh?’… puts the body front-and-center, challenging us re-think what numbers mean. She counterposes photographs of volunteers with the number on the scale. These women model a refusal to be embarrassed by their weight and show us the imprecision of the number itself.” –Lisa Wade, Sociological Images