Caroline Knapp Quotes

My son, before he went to school, he'd eat pretty much everything. Then as soon as he went to school, he got some peer pressure, and other kids would say, 'Oh, you're gonna eat that. That's horrible. That's disgusting.'

If you watch a group of schoolchildren eating lunch together, you cannot help but notice how it is a comically Lilliputian version of the adult thing - the cocked eyebrows of conversation, the reaching for condiments, the shovelling of food into tiny mouths.

I made a lot of friends over the years and I would always look at what they were eating. All of them were skinny. I would think that I would like to eat like that.

We were too young to know better, and none of us were very aggressive people. It would have helped a lot if just one of us had been aggressive enough to say no.

When ordering lunch, the big executives are just as indecisive as the rest of us.

I tell people I'm on a diet. If somebody sees me with a muffin, they'll think I'm off my diet. It's like secret little police that I've made for myself.

Girls in my school were always prettier.

I like Kit-Kat, unless I'm with four or more people.

Some people who meet me might think I starve myself, because there's such an assumption that being thin involves putting yourself through torture and punishing your body, but I'm just naturally skinny - you should watch me demolish a ploughman's lunch.

Like every girl, I felt amazing pressure to look like the popular girls, but no one told me the popular girls were all air brushed in magazines.

Everyone would talk about their diets and working out and what it made me do was go to craft services where all the food for the cast and crew was and I would eat.

I really never thought about the way I looked until boys came into the picture. Then it starts to be like, 'Am I wearing the right outfit? I have to do my makeup for school!'

I kept getting told, 'You need to bulk up. Burgers and shakes. Burgers and shakes.' That's never been my thing.

I feel the pressure to be toned, yeah, and everyone's going on about the thigh gap, but I like food more than exercise, so I'll just carry on that way.

When we were growing up, all of us kids were vegetarians. No one had asked me to stop eating meat - I just noticed everyone else around me had stopped, so I followed the crew.

Teenage girls these days are more and more getting lured into thinking they should dumb themselves down, and that's going to attract the wrong kind of guy, and it's serious. It's serious business.

I think there's a misconception that I eat everything. The one or two bites that you see me take, that's it.

When I was doing my research for 'Branded,' I'd meet groups of teenagers and preteenagers or tweens, and they would laugh at a magazine spread in a women's magazine or teen girl magazine and say, 'I'd never buy this outfit. I know these girls are starving themselves.' But they probably would go out and buy the thing eventually.

I wouldn't get asked to dances because I wasn't as petite and cute as the other girls.

I eat carefully because people don't want to see a large person judging cakes. They'll think to themselves, 'That's what happens when you eat cake.'

I've never been on a diet and never will.

No one comments if they think a man has lost weight or if they think he needs to eat more.

One of the best ways to deal with the peer pressure of the 'Fear of Missing Out' is to opt-out whenever possible.

I went to a school where the girls that were found attractive were the complete opposite to me. I judged my worth on how many boyfriends everyone had, and I wanted to jump out of my skin every second of every day.

When someone asks me about my diet I feel terrible saying that I don't really have one.