
A Sister Must Sacrifice
Special | 11m 20sVideo has Closed Captions
Miranda couldn’t wait to serve a mission for the LDS Church, then dieting consumed her.
Miranda couldn’t wait to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She was eager to convert new members and spend time thinking about her faith. But when she made it to the mission field, she discovered a strange culture of dieting, obsession with weight, and a troubling association between thinness and Godliness.
RadioWest Films on PBS Utah is a local public television program presented by PBS Utah

A Sister Must Sacrifice
Special | 11m 20sVideo has Closed Captions
Miranda couldn’t wait to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She was eager to convert new members and spend time thinking about her faith. But when she made it to the mission field, she discovered a strange culture of dieting, obsession with weight, and a troubling association between thinness and Godliness.
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- [Videographer] So if you could just start by telling me about like, deciding to go on a mission.
And what that was like.
- Okay, yeah.
It was so hot.
And if you like brushed it on anything when you had been out tracting, the words would just slough off.
And I had three that all sloughed off.
I had one blank one where it just like came off, and I had to get a new tag.
I ran into my parents' room and was like, "I'm going on a mission."
And I like, wasn't even 18 yet.
So I was like so excited and then I had to wait for a really long time.
My gigantic collection.
I need to downsize this.
This is so heavy for no reason.
Like, I have all of my journals.
I was raised in Idaho, but the youngest of a really big family.
We were generational LDS.
So we love, I loved going to church.
I was raised going to church, reading the scriptures before school every morning.
Like, just kind of the classic LDS, like, life experience.
Like this one says, "Can't move mountains sitting on your backside."
I had a companion talk about what it meant to be a missionary.
She made this comment on, "I would bleed out for this mission.
That's how important this is to me."
There was definitely this idea of like, being exhausted at the end of the day was the goal.
Not just like, know that you did everything that you could but actually physically push yourself to limits.
Food and eating and health, and health, and losing weight was a major part of that for me.
(light music) (light music) - Your girl gained about 60 pounds on her mission.
- There's this joke that the sisters are always fighting this losing battle against weight.
- I was literally cutting the insides of my shirts because I couldn't fit my arms through them.
- God made you ugly as a sister missionary.
And that you know, oh, you gain this much weight so that you weren't as attractive.
Then when you came back it would all come off.
- I lost about 25 pounds before I came home doing wickedly unhealthy things.
- It's implied like, be healthy, AKA be skinny, and be fit and be beautiful.
- And then we just have to realize that like missionaries, especially now, are still girls in a lot of ways.
Like they, yes, they're legal adults, they're 19 years old at least.
But that's still so young.
- There is that ingrained idea in them, just in that higher pressure situation as well of, okay, my body has to look a certain way.
I have to sacrifice everything.
I have to make sure that I give 110% all the time.
And so then comes in, maybe an eating disorder to help cope.
- You want to work as hard as possible.
You don't wanna have any weaknesses and so you, if having food or wanting sugar, or any of those things are perceived as weaknesses, you want to cut them out.
I wasn't thinking about like what I was eating as much as like how much.
This says, "I had a tortilla for lunch."
And I put a heart and said, "Healing is good."
I remember getting this journal specifically to tell myself that it was healthy.
"I am worthy of healthy choices.
I'm grateful for my Savior.
Today's health and beauty goals is recovery and detoxing."
And it was not healthy.
And I was, sorry, one sec.
I talk about this all the time.
- [Videographer] It's hard?
- Yeah.
- When you're going on a mission, there is this additional pressure to achieve because you want to get people baptized, you wanna teach them about Jesus.
- You know, they would encourage you to fast if you wanted success in asking about a baptism.
They would tell you to, you know, skip meals if it meant that you could work more.
- My mission president created a challenge program for us missionaries that he called lose 500, gain 500.
- I'm not eating and people are getting baptized and I'm not eating.
I look really skinny.
And that was great.
- You're supposed to deny your own body for a higher spiritual cause.
- The pressure you feel to be perfect in every way is such an immense pressure because it's the pressure of, if I am not perfectly obedient, then someone else's salvation will be on the line.
- The challenge encouraged us to focus on losing weight and eating healthy while also working to find people to teach.
- If that's how you're receiving praise is based on how you look, then how you look becomes of paramount importance.
- I wrote a note that said I ate too much, and then below that was a reference to study obedience and sacrifice.
- It's just so harmful to say to women, if you're skinny, you will baptize X amount of people, if you lose X amount of weight.
- And then what does that mean when she doesn't lose weight in the way that something like this has promised them?
Does that mean that she hasn't been faithful enough?
- [Videographer] I'm curious, did you write in your journal about meeting with the mission president's wife?
- I don't think I did.
I went to her and told her that I was struggling with eating a lot and worried about it.
"Well, let's not make this, like, I wanna support you, but let's not like, overturn any stones.
We don't want you to go home or get sent home for having an eating disorder."
Or we don't want, I don't know if she said, we don't want you to get sent home for an eating disorder or don't want people to think that you have an eating disorder, so that you get sent home.
So that was November.
That was like five, probably five and a half months out.
I was like, "I don't wanna go home."
You know, like.
So I was, I was more careful after that.
But you know, I was already using an appetite suppressant.
I was skipping meals, I was fasting to make up for times when I ate out.
- [Videographer] What do you mean you were more careful after that?
- So I just never talked.
I never brought it up again.
By the end of that year, by the time it got up to 18 months, I was not well.
And was not, I pretty much stopped eating.
I think I only ate saltines and tuna packets.
- It's this idea of if I can just please God in the right way through my body, then I will be perfect.
- I would restrict these items and then of course, because no one can live in that restriction for a prolonged amount of time, I would binge.
- And so now to make it right, I need to suffer.
I need to hurt and I need to reverse this, make it right, purge.
- And I relied on food, both as a comfort, and I also relied on restriction as a comfort.
- You know, damaging your body becomes what God asks of you.
- In a healthier environment, suffering might be seen more as a red flag and a warning sign that something may be off.
Whereas within the church, and specifically within a mission, suffering can be worn as a badge of honor.
- And not only were we expected to track our weight, we also were expected to report that.
- His advice to me was to start counting my calories.
- We had to wait until we had not had a period for at least six months before they'd do anything about it.
- Whatever you're doing to say, to lose weight or to change your body is always going to be harmful.
- I still struggle to listen to my body cues because I was told not to trust them.
- I still have physical struggles that I deal with every single day.
- When I came home from my mission, I felt like my body just didn't belong to me.
- That's your body telling you that something's off and something isn't right and it was something that you're just supposed to ignore.
- I am still recovering.
- Why are resources, tools, suggestions, support.
Why is there nothing?
- We can't be doing this to people.
That is so crazy.
- In general I just say don't talk about people's weight.
Don't talk about people's bodies.
Just leave their body alone.
If we talk about it as the body, we're missing so much of the underlying stuff.
- I always wonder if it was easier for me to get away with it because I didn't look like somebody who people would worry about dieting.
I don't know if I've ever been as excited for anything as I was to go on my mission, and sometimes I have to mourn the mission that I was hoping for versus the mission that I had.
There's like a, there's a righteousness in being thin.
Like there's a level of, I don't even know, like.
(light music) There's a godliness to it, I think.
(light music)
RadioWest Films on PBS Utah is a local public television program presented by PBS Utah