This post has been on my to-do list for quite a while, but I’m finally writing it now, because of a conversation I overheard on the train yesterday.
I sat next to a group of girls, all of them 12, perhaps 13 years old. One of them wanted to buy a new pair of jeans and she talked about what kind she might want to get. “I don’t like high-waisted jeans but I have to wear them because I’m a pear shape. They are just so uncomfortable”, she said. “Just make sure you get black or dark blue ones to make your legs look smaller. And wear that with something white on top to balance it out”, said one of the other girls. “I wish I was an apple. That way I couldn’t wear tight tops, but at least I could wear dresses and short shorts. That’s good for the summer.” They all agreed.
That whole situation seems so absurd to me now, even though I remember when I was their age, I also already was very aware of my body type, my ‘flaws’ and ‘assets’. And that’s because for decades that idea of ‘dressing for your body shape’ has been everywhere. A staple in fashion magazines and books, that is so commonly accepted, even tiny 12-year-olds know ‘their type’.
Now, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll probably already know that I’m not a fan of the whole concept, for one simple reason:
The concept of dressing for your body type feeds into the idea that looking slim and attractive according to today’s societal ideals is much more important than wearing clothes you personally like, self-expression and having fun with fashion.
Dressing for your body shape is all about choosing clothes that flatter your body. And let’s be honest: “Flattering” is really just code for “makes you look thinner, taller, more curvy or less curvy”, whichever side your body falls on in comparison to what’s currently considered ‘ideal’.
The girls on the train did not for one second talk about which types of jeans they liked or wanted to wear, they talked about which types of jeans would make their legs seem smaller and which jeans they are ‘allowed’ to wear.
And that’s exactly what articles and how-to guides on various body shape typologies convey to women. That the first and foremost objective of clothes is to manipulate, hide or minimise their body.
Plus, they promote what most women already do way too much of: obsessing over and rating every little part of their bodies. For example, a typical recommendation for the ‘Pear shape’ could go something like this:
“find clothes that enhance your waist because that is your smallest part (smallest = best), and go for A-line cut skirts and dresses that skim over your wide hips and thighs (wide = must be minimised) to make your body seem more proportionate (as if a pear-shaped body, perhaps the most common female body type, is somehow dis-proportionate and must be altered to look ok)“.
It’s a strange kind of nitpicking of women’s bodies that I think is so absurd, totally outdated and a dangerous message to send.
Of course you should feel confident in whatever you are wearing! Definitely! But I believe that confidence should stem from the fact that you love your outfit because it expresses your personal style and is uniquely you, not because it makes you look 2lbs lighter or half an inch taller.
I also think that because of the concept of dressing for your body shape, we have all become a little brainwashed to believe the basic premise that has to be true for body shape typologies to make any sense at all, and that is the idea that only a small range of cuts and silhouettes doesn’t make us look terrible.
It’s lead us to overestimate the effect clothes have on the way our body looks.
Now, I’m not denying that perhaps a few more extreme cuts and silhouettes can visually alter your overall proportions somewhat, but really, that effect is going to be small at best and definitely not something worth compromising your personal style for. Your body is what it is, and clothes can’t magically change that.
I write a lot about finding your own personal style and building a great wardrobe here on the blog, and I try to cover as many techniques and concepts as possible, because we all have a different creative process and find different things helpful. But I’ve never written about body shape typologies before and I never will, because of all of the things above, but also for one very practical reason: If you are trying to cultivate a strong sense of style, you have to first go through that experimentation phase and try a ton of different cuts, colours, styles and materials, to figure out what you love and develop your own aesthetic. Trying to dress according to the typical guidelines for your body type at the same time would completely ruin that process, because it would make you dismiss a huge range of pieces and combinations, that could possibly have turned out to be essential to your style, right off the bat.
So, if I could send those girls from the train a message, it would be simple: Wear clothes that you like! Wear clothes that express your style and that feel good. And forget about all of the rest of the stuff, body shapes, what supposedly flatters you, all that. If you find high-waisted jeans uncomfortable, don’t wear them! Even if you are a pear shape and have been told your whole life that low-waisted cuts don’t work with your hips. If somebody tells you what you’re wearing doesn’t flatter you, ignore them. Because it’s not your job to wear something that makes you look as close as possible to whatever’s currently considered ideal.
Wear whatever you like. And let’s all just stop using the word ‘flattering’, ok?
[Image description: On a white background in blue print, the graphic reads, “Fat is not a bad word. It is not synonymous with ugly, lazy, unattractive, disgusting, or unhealthy. It’s just another adjective to describe how you look. Stop putting stigma on fat. Fat means fat. Nothing more. Nothing less.” The sign is pinned, with a yellow push pin at each corner, to a grey textured background.]
Have you ever read something interesting, uplifting, or out of the ordinary on your Facebook feed? Have you then read the comments and been reduced to shaking your head, narrowing your eyes at the screen, completely confused?
I once found a picture the Cosmopolitan Magazine page had posted to their Facebook timeline. It featured supermodel Robyn Lawley, wearing a bikini during a photography shoot. The caption read as follows:
“Plus-size supermodel Robyn Lawley is BEYOND in
this sexy swim shoot for Cosmo Australia.”
To me, the post was completely normal. The picture of the woman was also completely normal, considering that she is a supermodel. So, what was the root of my confusion?
Ah, yes. You HAVE been paying attention. It was the comments.
Liran states:
Dear Cosmo,
Kindly take your ideas of “plus size” and shove them up your ass sideways.
Sincerely,
Every man on the planet who has had to reassure his perfectly healthy and proportioned woman she’s not fat because assholes like you perpetuate this idea in her head that she’s “plus size.”
Megan remarks:
It makes me sad for our young girls that this beautiful, healthy-looking woman is considered “plus” sized. It’s no wonder there are so many school aged girls with eating disorders…
Countless others rushed to the defense of Robyn, the woman who was being so “wrongfully labeled” as “plus sized.”
———
This is where I began generating a list:
1. Assumption that, if a woman is labeled as “plus sized,” it’s derogatory and an extreme insult.
BEING PLUS SIZED IS NOT A BAD THING. However, it’s understandable why we think this way. The media we consume conditions us. I’m not saying media is assigned all blame. The issue lies in the fact that we assume a few things:
a) Women like to be considered thin or healthy. Thin and healthy are often interchangeable. A slim woman is more likely to be considered healthy than a heavier woman.
b) Women look down upon being very thin. Being a very thin model is nasty and “distorts society’s idea of beauty.”
c) Being called fat is HORRIBLE. It is AWFUL. As a woman, you have literally lived your whole life in crippling fear of becoming fat. You love the gym. You strive to eat really healthy meals. You adore fitspo. You
are “curvy”, “big boned”, “big bootied” and “voluptuous”. You are definitely NOT FAT.
2. Fat is a bad word.
It becomes a little clearer. Plus-sized is fat, and ultimately, being fat means you’re unhealthy and/or undesirable. When this line of thought is presented to a person enough times, the words “plus-sized” automatically trigger the ungrounded assumption that the speaker has
just called the individual in question unhealthy and/or undesirable.
Have you ever heard a woman remark “I’m so fat”, only to be met with a chorus of “of course you aren’ts”? It’s almost automatic to console someone for being told, or for thinking, they are fat. On the other hand, it’s common to hear “you’ve gotten so thin!” used as a compliment. It’s only logical, because if fatness is the enemy, thinness is the ally.
We fear a word so much that its utterance can shatter self-esteem. Being called fat is traumatizing, and when used by others, is said to inflict emotional damage. A three-letter word carries so much cultural significance that we spend our entire lives running from it.
The saying “you aren’t fat, you’re curvy” doesn’t help that much because it can still carry the idea that fat is a separate entity. Using “curvy” and “bigger” instead perpetuates the idea that fat is bad. It’s a band-aid solution for a deep-set insecurity (and it certainly doesn’t do me any favours, personally).
3. Beauty doesn’t encompass fatness.
Beauty isn’t a “you’re not ugly, it’s society who’s ugly” situation. It’s a mindset. Sure, I can blame the media for feeding us ideas of beauty, but we are also obsessed with it. The obsession runs so deep that we forget that a person is composed of other things, too.Physical appearances are fixation points.
For a lot of fat women, the only compliment we can hope to receive is on our “pretty faces” or ample breasts and behinds. This reduces us to a few socially acceptable qualities. The rest of the self is almost disregarded.
Often what you hear is “she isn’t skinny, but she’s really smart.” It’s like people truly believe a woman can only be the magazine definition of physically beautiful or intelligent. There is this strange idea where a woman can’t be both (it’s a really stupid idea).
4. You can’t be fat and wear certain clothes.
I live in tight jeans and leggings. Many of my shirts hug every inch of my torso. I wear what I want when I want. It’s my body and I can dress is however I damn well please. If you try and tell me certain clothes weren’t designed for my body shape I WILL disregard your existence
and walk away from you.
NEXT.
5. Fit is the new skinny.
Women should be toned. Boniness is no longer in style—rippling muscles are. You should go on runs and consume three pounds of raw veggies with every meal. You should work out every day. Healthy is good, and everything else is bad.
This is replacing one standard with another. It simply shifts the point on the spectrum that we consider acceptable. It doesn’t fix anything. Looking down on someone who doesn’t follow your idea of a “fit lifestyle” is in no way better.
Lifestyles are choices, and one lifestyle is NOT better than another. People should exercise only if they want to. Additionally, being a regularly active person does not make you superior to anyone else. You have not magically become an authority on all things health related as a result. Do you. Let others handle their own business.
(This point is very general because I could write an entire essay on it alone. Maybe I will. Stay tuned, folks.)
———
We reinforce strange expectations by validating certain bodies but not others. You are expected to have an hourglass figure, complete with an even bust-to-hip ratio. Your legs should be long and thin, your arms the same. You should be tall, but not taller than all of the boys. Your weight should be optimal. It’s as if nature has made a mistake we have to correct.
The biggest lie you have ever been told is that physically larger women are incapable of being comfortable with their bodies. If I know any happy people, they are those who are at peace with all aspects of themselves—not just the physical. Comfort is found within, a blissful state of being; it’s also easier than hating yourself for what you’re not.
I am not ashamed to reclaim the word fat, and boldly state that I fit the definition of a fat woman. I just as boldly state that there is no shame in my plus-sizedness. If you have a problem with how comfortable I am in my own skin, I am indifferent.
We shouldn’t be offended by a word as simple as fat. Words are not defining points. When you take the sting away, all you’re left with is three letters that hold little actual meaning. A positive mindset about bodies is where the radical shift begins.
Good fattitude, good life.
[Headline image: The photograph shows six large women of different races side by side. Each is wearing fabric around their bodies that is striped with blue, orange, pink, and yellow.]
———
Nadia Nadeem is an independent writer. She attends McMaster University, where she studies Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour. She is an advocate for body positivity and self-love.
When asked why she submitted this piece to The Body is Not an Apology, Nadia wrote: “I feel there is a lot of shame associated with body types that differ from the norm. With reference to fatness, the language used to describe larger bodies is typically negative. I wrote this piece to examine the word ‘fat,’ and to come to the realization that it is just a word. It does not have the power to define one’s character.”
Nicole says she wants to lose weight but says her “fitness freak” husband, George, has no compassion or empathy for her struggles, and his intense, drill-sergeant ways aren’t helping. George says Nicole is her own biggest obstacle to losing weight — he says she’s lazy, makes excuses and gives up too easily — and all his efforts to help her have only strained their relationship. How can he motivate his wife?
And, Dominique says she knows she needs to lose weight but says her mom, JoAnn, won’t stop nagging her about it. Could JoAnn be sabotaging her daughter with her constant comments?
Then, Charles says ever since his identical twin brother, Adam, lost 90 pounds, he has become an arrogant jerk who loves to embarrass Charles about his body. Adam says his brother resents him for getting healthier and needs a serious wake-up call about his weight. Can these brothers heal their relationship while getting to a healthier place?
Husband and Wife “When we got married, Nicole was really fit. She was really hot, hot, hot,” George says of his wife of two years. “Helping Nicole try to lose weight is really tough," he says. "Nicole is her own biggest obstacle. Nicole is lazy." George says he tries to help his wife with her workouts, but his motivating tactics aren’t working. “I tell her, 'Quit crying. Let’s just get it done,'” he says.
Nicole says working out with her husband isn’t working for her. “He’s rough, and he’s strict. I always tell him, ‘I’m not one of your workout friends. I can’t bench press 150,’” Nicole says. “He’ll tell me, ‘Quit being a baby. Suck it up and do it.’ I feel like a failure as a wife and a mother. I don’t feel that my body type matches my husband’s body type because he’s so fit and athletic. When I look in the mirror, I don’t really like what I see anymore. I feel like I’ve become somebody who is not even me. I just don’t know what to do.”
Dr. Phil explains how George can properly support his wife.
Mother and Daughter
“I weigh 229 pounds,” says 21-year-old Dominique. She says her weight isn’t her only obstacle in life. “My mother is always mean to me and constantly making comments about my weight. She’s always telling me I’m gaining weight, and I shouldn’t be doing that. She’s always picking at me.”
“I’m always on Dominique’s back to lose weight because I’m afraid she’s going to lose control,” says her mother, JoAnn. “She needs that little push. I feel like I have to keep on her.”
Dominique admits she sneaks food into her bedroom so her mother won’t see her, and she can avoid another confrontation. She says a fight they had a year ago turned ugly when her mother called her a “fatass.” “I never thought my mother would say something like that to me, and she did. I’ll never be able to forgive her,” she says.
Why does Dominique blame her mother for her weight?
In a powerful experiment, Dr. Phil shows JoAnn how her comments affect her daughter.
Twin Brothers
“My twin brother, Adam, and I have always struggled with our weight,” Charles says. “Right now, I’m 605 pounds. In the last year or so, Adam has started to lose weight, and he’s really becoming an arrogant ass----. Since he’s lost the weight, he’s started taking more jabs at me about my weight. He’s become one of those kids who made fun of us growing up.”
“I’m pissed off my brother doesn’t do anything about his weight,” Adam says. “He doesn’t work out. He doesn’t try to eat right. It’s like he’s just given up. He just sits around and constantly overeats.”
Adam says he’s concerned for his brother’s health and is upset that Charles turns down his offers to go to the gym together. Adam says his life has improved a lot since he lost weight, and he wants his brother to experience the same thing. “He’s just lazy. He needs to get up off his ass before he dies,” he says.
You ate what tasted good and what was available. You weren’t a pig, and your diet was still pretty healthy, but you weren't strict about what you ate.
As time went on, you began to become more careful. Maybe you had some health problems and decided to change your diet. Maybe you became an athlete or got into bodybuilding or modeling. Maybe you’ve always been a little obsessive, like me.
You became more and more focused on what you ate. You started cutting out foods one by one. You only ate foods at certain times. As a result, you felt empowered, in control, and healthier.
Then as the months or years went by, your diet got old. You got tired of eating chicken breasts and carrots every day. Now, you can’t imagine going back to how you ate when you were a kid, but your current diet is also driving you nuts.
You’re ready for a change. You’re ready to have the freedom and comfort around food that you did when you were younger, with more structure and control so you can reach your aesthetic and athletic goals.
You want to put your diet on autopilot while staying healthy and lean.
Answer These 3 Questions to Create a Healthy Diet You Can Maintain
Most of the anxiety people face around eating is caused because they don’t know the answers to these three questions:
You aren’t like that. You care about your health and body composition. Your problem is that you always second guess your food choices. You always feel that you’re eating something that's bad for you.
When you get tired of obsessing about food, you either continue with your current behaviors, making yourself even more unhappy, or say “fuck it” and kill a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. I’ve done both, and it’s a frustrating cycle.
Solve that problem by sticking to the principles in this article.
Eat at least 80% of your calories from minimally processed, whole, nutrient dense plants and animals. Most research indicates that’s a healthy and sustainable way to live.
Feel free to add a few guidelines to keep yourself on track.
For instance, Nutella is kryptonite to my self control. I don’t keep it in my apartment because I can easily murder a jar in a day or two.
I also almost never eat fast food. I don’t think most fast food tastes very good, it’s easy to overeat, and it’s more expensive than cooking at home.
I could buy a jar of Nutella, and force myself not to eat too much, but I’d rather put my self control toward other things. Willpower is a limited resource,2 and you should budget it carefully.
If you need to, think of a few guidelines that you can use to keep yourself on track while investing as little willpower as possible. Here are a few that I use:
I prepare around 90-95% of what I eat from scratch.
I don’t drink soda.
Now that you know what you’re going to eat, decide how much you’re going to eat.
2. Decide how much you’re going to eat.
Even if you’re eating a healthy diet, it’s easy to gain fat if you eat too much.
Everyone who hasn’t lost weight on a paleo diet is nodding their head right now.
Since you’re an informed dieter, you probably know which foods have more calories than others. You don’t need to weigh every piece of food to the gram.
Calorie counting and weighing your food can be extremely useful in the short-term, but neither is generally sustainable in the long-term. At least if you want to be a sane person with friends, relationships, hobbies, and a life.
So how do you decide how much to eat without a scale?
Eat until you’re satisfied. Then stop.
Not until you’re full or stuffed, but just until you're no longer hungry. Yes, you’ve heard this a hundred times before. That’s because it works.
Just like creating a budget, most everyone knows this is a good idea, but they don’t do it.
There are a few of you out there who probably still get hungry even if you’re eating till satiety. You probably fall into one of these two categories:
You’re trying to get leaner than most sane people, in which case you probably won’t feel satisfied from normal meals.
You’re eating mostly unfilling and high-calorie foods.
There’s a reason I told you to focus on food quality in step one. Your satiety system only works if you’re eating mostly unprocessed and filling foods.
Even then, however, you can still feel hungrier than you should if you’re stressed,3,4 sleep deprived,5,6eating while distracted,1 and making other silly mistakes.
If you eat a healthy diet, get enough sleep, minimize your stress levels, and generally take care of yourself, you can usually eat until satiety and stay fairly lean.
3. Decide when or how often you’re going to eat.
For a long time, I had so much anxiety thinking about when I should eat that I avoided it till the last part of the day.
I’d have nothing more than an apple until about seven or eight at night. Then I’d let myself eat for an hour before I could go to bed and avoid the “problem” of eating for another 23 hours the next day.
This kind of behavior also nearly killed me. Not recommended.
On the other hand, some research indicates that one of the reasons people are gaining weight is because they are eating more often, not just more at each meal.7 That’s probably not your biggest problem, but if you’ve been doing what many (uninformed) nutrition experts recommend, and making yourself eat five or six meals a day, you know that can be exhausting too.
My “starve yourself all day” approach doesn’t work, and neither does grazing for most people.
Starting with 3-4 meals per day is a good idea for several reasons:
It’s simple and easy to plan.
It’s what most people do, which makes it easy to coordinate your diet with your social life.
It means you can eat meals that are large enough to keep you satisfied, but not so big that you’re stuffed. (I always felt like a beached whale after my 23 hour fasts, despite only eating 800-1,000 calories per day).
If you don’t like eating 3-4 times per day, then you can always try another approach. Meal frequency really doesn't matter, but this is a good starting place.
Eating a healthy, enjoyable diet shouldn’t be so hard.
It should be fun, relatively easy, and socially accommodating.
You probably got excited when you learned how some foods are toxic, why other foods will help you live longer and lose fat, and how nutrient timing is the secret to fat loss and muscle gain.
Then you realize there’s more to life than playing with your digital scale and reading weird sensationalist health blogs. You decide you’d rather spend your time and energy on having fun and improving yourself. You also realize that most of the stuff you used to believe, is pure crap.
You might be thinking “this is beginner stuff, I know what I’m doing.” Do you really?
If you’re taking any fat loss supplements, spending any time reading about why you should be eating one food over another, or counting calories while eating tons of junk food, you haven't mastered the basics in this article. It’s like someone calling themselves an astronaut when they don’t know how to fly a toy plane.
You’re wasting your time on stuff that doesn’t matter, and ignoring the things that do.
Wansink B. From mindless eating to mindlessly eating better. Physiol Behav. 2010;100(5):454–463. doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2010.05.003.
Baumeister RF, Vohs KD, Tice DM. The Strength Model of Self-Control. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 2007;16:351–355.
Weinstein SE, Shide DJ, Rolls BJ. Changes in food intake in response to stress in men and women: psychological factors. Appetite. 1997;28(1):7–18. doi:10.1006/appe.1996.0056.
Rutters F, Nieuwenhuizen AG, Lemmens SGT, Born JM, Westerterp-Plantenga MS. Acute stress-related changes in eating in the absence of hunger. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2009;17(1):72–77. doi:10.1038/oby.2008.493.
Brondel L, Romer MA, Nougues PM, Touyarou P, Davenne D. Acute partial sleep deprivation increases food intake in healthy men. Am J Clin Nutr. 2010;91(6):1550–1559. doi:10.3945/ajcn.2009.28523.
St-Onge M-P. The role of sleep duration in the regulation of energy balance: effects on energy intakes and expenditure. J Clin Sleep Med. 2013;9(1):73–80. doi:10.5664/jcsm.2348.
Duffey KJ, Popkin BM. Energy density, portion size, and eating occasions: contributions to increased energy intake in the United States, 1977-2006. Duffey KJ, Popkin BM, eds. PLoS Med. 2011;8(6):e1001050. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001050.s001.
It’s probably a bit un-PC to admit this, but the way I look is important to me. I need to be a very certain weight/size to look in the mirror and be happy with what I see.
(Feel free to roll your eyes here and talk about how sad it is that I feel the need to conform to societal norms, but honestly, I don’t care. Being happy with what I see in the mirror makes me feel good and quite frankly, I like feeling good.)
Being my ideal weight/size has a natural enemy however, and that would be my love of food. For most of my life a pitched battle has raged between those two things.
Eventually that battle got so bad that, for roughly 20 of my 35 years on this earth, I spent every minute of Every Single Day obsessing about food. I’d go for a ride in the morning and spend the whole time thinking about what muffin I would eat at the coffee shop afterwards. The second I sat down at my desk at work I’d be wondering what I might have for morning tea. I’d be chowing down on said morning tea and already casting my mind towards lunch. Most days it would be rare for me to go for more than an hour without putting food in my mouth.
Was I even enjoying all this eating I was doing? Nope, because I was also weighing myself every morning (as soon as I woke up, but after a wee of course) and living and dying by what I saw. If the numbers were ‘good’, I’d carry on my merry way. If the numbers were bad I’d get depressed and angrily tell myself to exert some self-control dammit! And by morning tea that self-control would have been tested and found to be wanting. And I loathed myself for that lack of self-control.
I thought because I wasn’t anorexic or bulimic that I didn’t have a problem with food.
I was wrong.
If you’re thinking about food all day every day, then you have a problem with it.
It took me an awfully long time to realise this, but once I did, it gave me the kick in the butt I needed to do something about it. And so started the long and slow process of re-training the way my brain looked at food.
Here’s what I did to break the rather unhealthy cycle I was in. The below isn’t intended to be prescriptive, nor it is based on anything but a sample size of one (me). But since it worked for me maybe it will help others struggling with the relationship they have with food too.
STEP 1: I stopped looking at food as a reward for exercise
“I’ve gone for a three hour bike ride today so when I get home I can eat whatever I like.”
“I did a two hour run this morning so that totally justifies eating this entire pizza.”
While I do appreciate the health benefits (mental and physical) of exercise, for most of my life exercise has been a license to eat without fear of gaining weight. I know exactly how many calories I expend for any given exercise activity and for a long time I replaced those calories almost exactly with the food I was eating. If I had a day where I didn’t exercise (rare) I would get hugely anxious about what I put in my mouth and try to restrict my calorie intake. If I was successful in restricting my intake I felt deprived, and if I was unsuccessful I would hate myself for having no self-control. It was exhausting.
In the end it was just easier to make sure I exercised every day as it beat feeling deprived or hating myself.
That made the first step in re-training my brain pretty obvious: I needed to break up the relationship between exercising and eating.
I did this simply by consuming the same amount of calories every day (the baseline amount my body needed), regardless of whether I exercised or not.
Doing the above stopped me looking at food as a reward for doing exercise and killed my obsession with calories in vs calories out. It took a while but finally exercise became all about health and well-being for me and nothing to do with food.
STEP 2: I stopped having crap in the house
Human beings are funny. We don’t just eat to fuel our bodies to get through the day. No, we also eat out of boredom and when we’re emotional.I am no different to other humans in this regard so part of re-training my brain with regard to food meant I had to stop heading for the fridge whenever I got emotional or bored. This became particularly important when I started to work from home because it was a pretty short walk from my desk to the kitchen.
So what did I do?
I stopped having crap in the fridge or pantry. It took about 100 unsuccessful forays into the kitchen looking for a (now non-existent) sweet treat, but eventually my brain realised there was no point going there anymore. Now when I am upset I go for a walk and if I am bored I go on twitter
(I know people with kids will say but it’s a bit hard not to have crap in the pantry when you have kids. With all respect, if you shouldn’t be eating something because it’s crap, maybe your kids shouldn’t be eating that thing either?)
In short, if it’s not in your house, then you can’t eat it. Try it for a month and take note of how often you go foraging in the kitchen out of boredom. Trust me, you will find alternate cures for boredom and emotion when you can’t sate them with food!
STEP 3: I quit sugar
I am not keen to get into an argument here about whether sugar is evil or not (it is). But I will assert with confidence that most of the Western world eats too much sugar because frankly, it’s hard to avoid it. I know that I was certainly eating way too much of the stuff and I was keen to come off it for a while and see what it did for me. So I did Sarah Wilson’s I Quit Sugar program and here’s what I found:
My digestive system, which had always been terrible, started to work much, much better (better poo, less popping off).
The stomach bloating that used to plague me in the afternoons disappeared.
I seemed to be carrying less fluid all over. This meant the muscles in my arms and legs looked more defined and I looked fitter than I actually was.
I was eating more fat yet not gaining weight.
My skin looked better.
I found it much, MUCH easier to keep my weight stable.
I stopped craving a sweet fix after every meal and in the evenings.
When I say ‘I quit sugar’ I mean I did Sarah’s program (which I found quite gentle and easy to do) and then once I was finished I stuck to the basic principles of it without being obsessive. I knew I really had sugar beat when I ate tomato sauce one day and it tasted grossly sweet to me. Up till that point I’d have tomato sauce on everything.
So I have stuck with the whole quitting sugar thing. For me it is a healthier way of eating … and one that doesn’t make me feel deprived.
STEP 4: I stopped eating low fat food
In line with the above, I stopped eating anything that was ‘low fat’ because ‘low fat’ simply translates to ‘we’ve replaced the fat with sugar’.
STEP 5: I changed the way I looked at fat
For years fat has been public enemy #1 and I, like everyone else, have avoided it like the plague. But fat has an awful lot of good points – the major ones being its satiety factor and the fact that our brains need fat to function. These days, instead of snacking on lollies I snack on nuts. I seem to be able to eat a LOT of nuts and avocado without gaining weight. Eating more fat also means I don’t feel hungry all the time.
STEP 6: I started eating before I got hungry
This one is pretty simple – I eat three regular meals at the same time each day. I don’t wait till I am starving before I eat because I make pretty terrible food decisions when I am starving. In between my three regular meals I snack on stuff like nuts, or avocado on toast. (I find it hard to over-eat either of those two things, but it’s super-easy to over-eat lollies.)
STEP 7: I stopped baking
If I bake it is generally something out of a packet and thus full of crap. Going by the photos I see on Instagram though, a LOT of what people bake is full of crap (sugar mainly), even when cooked from scratch. When I bake, two adults and one toddler polishes off whatever I bake in half a day. This isn’t healthy for anyone in my house so I decided to stop baking. Going back to #2 above, it seems that no-one in this house has self-control if there is crappy food at hand. Yet when the crap isn’t in the house, we don’t really miss it. So in the end there is no real hardship not having it there.
If you loooooove baking however and can’t bear the thought of stopping – then make it good stuff. Alexx Stuart has a blog full of real food/lox tox recipes. For instance check out her Anzac biscuit recipe here.
STEP 8: I started focusing on what I could eat rather than what I shouldn’t
Now I know what you’re thinking: Gee, what a deprived life you lead Kelly if you never get to eat yummy things any more. Here are two reasons why I don’t feel deprived:
I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what I can’t eat. I focus instead on what I can. And believe me there is plenty of yummy stuff that I can eat that is healthy. As I mentioned above, I don’t miss the crap food when it’s not in my house. But if it is there and I try not to eat it, then I will feel deprived.
Since I am not eating crap every day, when I am at a restaurant or a party and something yummy presents itself to me, I eat it AND enjoy it. Revolutionary! I can’t tell you how lovely it is to tuck into a piece of pavlova without thinking to myself gawd, I am going to have to run for an hour tomorrow to work this off.
So there you have it. On conservative estimate it took about two years for me to fully work through the above and break my obsession with food but now that I have, maintaining the weight I like to be has never been easier.
And honestly, life is a lot more fun when you’re not thinking about food every minute of the day.
Here’s a fact I’m uncomfortable admitting: I could tell you, in order, every single food item that I have ingested in the last 72 hours. I could also, with a fair amount of accuracy, tell you how many calories each of those meals contained, and how I felt while eating them. (The Cheesy Wotsits I had on the way to a party the day before yesterday? Guilt. One hundred calories but, hey, I needed something to line my stomach. The lentil and Quorn sausage stew last night? Fine, but I made sure I didn’t have too many bits of sausage. The Marmite on toast I had at midnight because my stomach wouldn’t stop rumbling? Awful.)
There are things I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you how many times I looked in the mirror, for instance, or indeed in any reflective surface (the dry cleaner’s window, the door of the bus as it passed me at the traffic lights), in the hope that the body looking back at me would be somehow different from the reality. I couldn’t tell you how many times I pinched the fat on my thighs and thought “crap”. I couldn’t tell you how many times I thought about my weight, or my waist measurement, or just about my body generally, which seems to have ceased to be a vessel that carts me around through life and has become, to borrow a phrase, a battleground. It is too many.
The above, I recognise, sounds strange and obsessive. It is. But I do not believe it is unusual. So many women I know in their 20s – I am 27 –describe similar anxieties, the obsessive dieting, the skipping of meals. But even so, when I blogged about it earlier this year, after I read a celebrity magazine that promised to reveal “What the stars really weigh” (spoiler: much less than I do), I was surprised by the response. I wrote about it in a rage, having been sent into a tailspin of insecurity that led to me, once again, Googling “Lose 10 pounds in seven days”. I set out upon yet another ridiculous diet, this one involving a strange combination of cottage cheese, Ritz crackers, beetroot and frankfurters. The regime is, according to nonsense internet mythology that my rational brain did not believe for a second, one they give to patients who need to lose weight rapidly before surgery.
You may wonder why I allowed a celebrity rag to affect my self-esteem so negatively. But I do not believe it is a question of intelligence. As Millie Benson, a 23-year-old lawyer who “stares at other girls’ thighs constantly”, tells me: “No matter how much feminist literature I read and no matter how much I tell all the other women I know how beautiful they are and how much they shouldn’t worry, the next minute I will stop myself having a slice of cake in case my bum gets any bigger.”
The messages are everywhere, and being told that you’re too clever to fall for this kind of media manipulation does nothing to solve the issue at hand: that many women, of all different walks of life, are going about their lives hungry or hating themselves, or both.
Naturally, after a few days on the diet, I nearly passed out at the doctor’s surgery during a routine checkup. I was embarrassed, and furious, that I couldn’t seem to escape the cycle of self-loathing that I have railed against so often as a writer and editor. I feel embarrassed about writing this now, as a feminist who has co-authored a book about the pressures the media, and women’s magazines specifically, place on young women today. I feel guilty that I hate my body to the extent that, in my mind, it detracts from anything else I might achieve, meaning that I have turned down television appearances for fear of looking fat, and that it has preoccupied me far more than my own career in terms of energy. I am aware of how it limits me, but I hate my body nonetheless.
“You have an eating disorder,” some readers of my blog informed me, and I felt affronted. An unhealthy relationship with food, maybe; perhaps even disordered eating. But an eating disorder? I don’t think so. I am a healthy weight, as are many of the women who contacted me to describe their own struggles, their food obsessions, flaws and feelings of being just “too much”. This is despite these women having made significant real-world achievements: a PhD in astrophysics, two beautiful children, a successful career, a loving partner. This is despite, for many of them, being slim. Slimmer than me.
There are undoubtedly those who will say that, in the midst of an obesity crisis, “skinny bitches” feeling fat is the least of society’s problems. I can sympathise with that viewpoint. It is how I feel when I speak to those who are thinner than me. “What’s your problem?” I think. “I would love to be that thin.”
I know I have been socialised to compete with other women – to size them up, to envy those who are slimmer – but I believe their suffering is as valid as mine, and that body image problems can manifest themselves even when, from the outside, you’re seen to embody the media-approved feminine ideal.
Take Liz, a 27-year-old researcher who at one point became “obsessed with the scales” and still fixates on “bad foods” to the point where occasionally she makes herself sick. “I often catch a glimpse of myself in a window or a mirror and my heart sinks. I try to avoid walking past rows of shops for this reason,” she says. “I find myself making excuses if I know there are going to be cakes at work, because I don’t trust myself. I feel worse when people have made them themselves. The rational part of my brain knows I’m being stupid, too: I’m a size eight, for Christ’s sake.”
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‘The young women I speak to do not desire the label of an eating disorder. They hide their food issues like a dirty secret. They’ll even preach to others about the dangers of restriction.’ Photograph: Desmond Muckian/Guardian
From the girls in the office chatting 5:2 to the teenagers on the bus mimicking Towie’s “no carbs before Marbs” – it’s everywhere. So often eating disorders – most frequently anorexia nervosa – are claimed to be a middle-class, white woman’s problem, a disease born of privilege and perfection. But a study conducted by King’s College London this year, which surveyed 1,698 multi-ethnic individuals (a general population sample) in south-east London, found that the majority of participants who believed themselves to have disordered eating patterns were of an ethnic minority. Low-level food issues (as one woman I spoke to described them) are not simply the preserve of the white middle classes. The culture of slimming and dieting, of bingeing and purging, of “fat chat” with your friends (“I’m so chubby”, “No, babes, I’m the one who’s chubby”), does not discriminate.
But many of the women I spoke to who admit to a preoccupation with food verging on the obsessive balked at the notion that they might have an eating disorder. “There’s a real fear of trivialising eating disorders,” says Sabine, who is 24 and works for a startup. She charts her eating patterns as having developed when a teenage boyfriend told her she had gained too much weight. She regularly skips meals and once, along with her flatmate at university, devised a diet that consisted solely of prawns, cocktail sauce and apples. “Every time you do eat, you think, ‘Oh, if I eat this now, then I don’t have to have dinner.’ It’s a constant balancing, constant worrying about calories and trying to tally them up in your head all the time,” she says.
“It’s a female issue that doesn’t get enough coverage and it ruins people’s lives, it makes everything so much harder,” she adds. “You can’t get away from food… it’s everywhere, and if you love food, which I do, it really impinges on your life because you’re constantly worrying about it.”
She also engages in regular fat chat with her friends. “I have one friend, and about 50% of what we talk about is what we’ve eaten. ‘Oh, I’ve had a baguette for lunch – is that really bad?’ ‘No, it’s not that bad, just have a salad for dinner.’”
How would you begin to describe these kinds of obsessive thought patterns and behaviours? Where does the division between anorexia and what some call “almost anorexia” lie? An infographic created by private American healthcare group CRC that was circulating online described “almost anorexia” as affecting one in 20 women, and as involving frequent restriction, mild binge eating, infrequent purging and negative body image. Some women were uncomfortable with the label, thinking it pathologises a problem that is hugely widespread (and, let’s be honest, it may be in the interests of some groups to do exactly that); others felt it was a new, nuanced approach to a common problem and that the threshold for an anorexia nervosa diagnosis is too high. “This could describe 85% of my friends,” one girl told me.
Others pointed out that there was already a diagnostic term for these kinds of food issues: EDNOS (eating disorder not otherwise specified), for those who do not meet the diagnostic criteria of other eating disorders. In 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is published by the American Psychiatric Association and aims to offer standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders, removed EDNOS, because it was so widely applicable, in favour of OSFED (other specified feeding or eating disorder). This is a clinical diagnosis, and far from being a description of a less serious eating disorder than anorexia or bulimia, it is a recognition of the fact that disordered eating can incorporate symptoms of both disorders, and others.
So, while OSFED incorporates, for instance, a diagnosis of atypical anorexia nervosa as applying to an individual who meets all the criteria for anorexia, with the exception that that person’s weight remains within the normal range, it is still a diagnosis of a serious condition. Earlier this year, Cosmopolitan magazine and the eating disorder charity Beat co-authored a report entitled The Secret Illness, which highlighted how EDNOS sufferers are being denied treatment because their symptoms aren’t serious enough. The campaign urged GPs to be less fixated on diagnostic criteria, because EDNOS sufferers can, on the outside, appear to be a healthy weight. On the inside, however, their lives can be a daily struggle.
The latest edition of the DSM has also changed several of the criteria for anorexia nervosa, including the stipulation that the patient must have stopped menstruating in order to be considered anorexic. Then there are the non-clinical labels, which seem to be cropping up more and more often. In June of this year, food blogger Jordan Younger came under fire from vegans when she wrote of how she was abandoning veganism due to an eating disorder called orthorexia nervosa, a severe obsession with eating healthily. She had become addicted to juice cleanses. “I was living in a bubble of restriction,” she wrote.
Rachel is a recovered anorexic whose eating disorder manifested itself in an obsession with healthy eating. “[I was] over-thinking food choices,” she says, “and trying to get more protein, more energy density, the correct macro-nutrient ratios… after which I got so exhausted I just chose nothing because it was easier than feeling guilty about the ‘wrong’ choice.” She continues: “The current obsession with health, image and fitness is way out of kilter [with] self-care.” It raises the question: in our seemingly flaxseed and clean eating-obsessed Instagram culture, just how many women are hiding an eating disorder behind a healthy lifestyle obsession?
Reading Kelsey Osgood’s memoir How To Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia, I came across yet another label, wannarexia, often used by eating disorder sufferers to disparagingly describe someone who actively and flippantly seeks out an eating disorder. An exhibitionist, or fake anorexic, in other words. (It is worth pointing out that many anorexics fail to believe in the authenticity of their own illness, lamenting that there will always be a “better” anorexic out there.) Wannarexics may have been diagnosed with OSFED, or they may not. Perhaps we’re living in a society in which there exists a spectrum of disordered eating, ranging from my low-level food issues to full-blown eating disorders, with orthorexia and wannarexia and God knows how many other potential labels in between. As Osgood points out, regardless of motivation, wannarexics are still trying to starve themselves. She describes wannarexia as “a gateway drug for teenagers”, but points out that its symptoms are not to be taken lightly. Self-starvation is self-starvation.
The young women I speak to – friends, acquaintances, teenage girls, strangers – do not desire the label of an eating disorder. They are the opposite of the so-called wannarexic. They hide their food issues like a dirty secret, are ashamed of them, or simply regard them as a part of the workaday diet chat so common in offices up and down the country. They’ll even preach to others about the dangers of restriction.
Cat, a student who describes herself as an “uber-feminist”, tells me: “I’ll often be found loudly denouncing skipping breakfast or eating nothing, shouting at my friends about how ‘your brain just doesn’t work if you diet! It doesn’t work! Have a goddamn biscuit!’ And yet none of my friends knows that I’ve been bulimic for six years and borderline anorexic for six years, too. Nobody would be able to tell, because while I’m certainly not fat, I’m quite curvy with a big bottom and I really don’t look as if I have an eating disorder. I’ve managed to keep it secret from even my closest friends for years and years because I function extremely well. But I obsess about my weight constantly, and I really hate myself for it, especially for being such a hypocrite. I preach self-love all the time to my friends and can’t seem to find any for myself.”
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‘There are those who say that, in the midst of an obesity crisis, ‘skinny bitches’ feeling fat is the least of society’s problems. I can sympathise. It is how I feel when I speak to those who are thinner than me.’ Photograph: Desmond Muckian for the Guardian/Desmond Muckian
Another young woman, Alexandra, tells me that she began having what she describes as negative thought patterns when a teenage boyfriend told her that she had cellulite. “I wouldn’t actually say I had a problem with food or diet at all, although I don’t think I have ever sat down to a ‘sinful’ dessert without a little voice saying, ‘You’re being naughty!’ which says something in itself,” she says. “I don’t drastically cut calories or go on crash diets, or anything like that. What I do is fitness related. I don’t believe I’m obsessive, but I do exercise every single day, and I scrutinise myself for minuscule changes brought about by my latest challenge (this month it’s the ab challenge).”
What interests me about Alexandra’s case is how she hides her hang-ups from her friends. “Because I am so thin and muscular, I actually don’t talk about these issues much with my friends. [I] am acutely aware that I look how some of them desperately want to look.”
She believes that the rise in fitness culture is linked to this tendency towards extreme dieting and calorie cutting. “The disordered eating and obsessive dieting goes hand in hand with the meteoric rise in fitness programmes. Some women do faddy diets, some women do ridiculous fitness regimes, some do both, and all are risky.” Fitspiration – slogans and images of fit, attractive women that are common online and that aim to inspire you to achieve the perfect body through fitness – “is not that far from the pro-ana thinspiration that is so dangerous and damaging,” she says, referring to websites that post “inspiring” pictures of thin people.
Am I part of a generation of young women hung up on their body image but unsure where to turn? “One thing I have noticed is that it’s not cool, sexy or attractive for a girl to worry about her weight or watch what she eats,” Millie says. In this society saturated with diet tips and fitness blogs, with “bony boasters” showcasing their ribs on Instagram and bikini selfies on newsfeeds, our food neurosis seems explicit, on the table for all to see.
Such neurosis is familiar to me in a way that it isn’t to my mother, though I know an unhealthy obsession with food can be passed down. (Sabine, for instance, mentions a friend’s mother who used to survive on a can of tuna a day.) But Millie says her mother doesn’t recognise the sheer level of self-loathing her daughter suffers.
“As a feminist in the 1970s and 1980s, she fought and campaigned for equal pay and women in the workplace, and for sexual freedom for women, and they saw some big advances and big wins. She then got married and had children, feeling like the world was heading in the right direction and that, to some extent, the world had been righted. But she then said that suddenly, she had two teenage daughters who were worrying about their armpit hair and their teeth not being white enough and their figures not being nice enough, and wondered what the hell had happened.”
I asked Susie Orbach, clinical psychologist and author of Fat Is A Feminist Issue, what had changed. I’m nervous because I haven’t ever really articulated the depths of my food obsession verbally before. “I’m curious as to where one would draw the line between unhealthy eating patterns and an eating disorder,” I tell her, and when I listen back to the tape of me recounting my food anxieties, I sound small and pathetic, like a child.
“Of course it’s an eating disorder,” she says of my eating patterns. “To me it’s more that we have a culture that’s so disordered towards eating and bodies that how could it be otherwise? How could it be when you’ve got plastic surgery games for nine-year-olds? [The apps in question caused uproar in January and were swiftly removed by iTunes.] When you’ve got mums obsessing about their bodies, in front of their kids?”
“But what if…” I say, weakly, “these girls don’t tick all the boxes?”
“I think if you read the DSM they’d tick a hell of a lot of them. But that doesn’t really matter, does it? It doesn’t matter whether it’s diagnosable or not, what matters is that we’ve gone mad in our relationship with our food, and it’s a new form of violence against girls and women.”
We have gone mad, I agree. At times, I feel that I have gone mad. And “absolutely it’s getting worse”, Orbach says. “Everything’s a trigger. There are huge, huge industries riding on this. It’s one of the most successful assaults there is, and because we all want to feel comfortable, we don’t even know that we’re doing bad things to ourselves. We think we’re being good to ourselves when we decide not to eat.”
But what can we do about it?
“I guess the question I’d ask you is: how long are you going to put up with it?”
This question stuns me. I wasn’t aware that not putting up with it was even an option. “Become a refusenik!” she says, and I want to: I really want to. Orbach’s work is an attempt to create a social movement to challenge the body fascism that surrounds us. “The fashion industry is hugely powerful, the beauty industry. They make a lot of money out of making every little surface of our bodies feel uncomfortable,” she says.
Orbach wants to work at every level – from the government report she published in June on how to help new mothers with not passing on their body difficulties to their kids, to advising schools on how to teach young girls body confidence. But what about those of us who are already grown?
One of the things I find most dispiriting, I tell her, is how resigned all the young women I speak to feel about this, how resigned I feel. “It’s so heartbreaking,” she says. “We don’t want women to have a full-time job managing their appetites.”
And that’s the crux of it, really. My full-time, unpaid, job is managing my appetite, and in between that I write for the Guardian. I so want to become a refusenik, as Orbach suggests, and by going into schools and talking about these issues with teenagers, I am attempting to fight back. But I know that when this article is published, I won’t focus on the career high of having a feature published in a national magazine. I’ll focus on the photographs, and how much I hate them. And I’ll think of all the other girls out there hating theirs – on Facebook, on Instagram, everywhere – and ask myself: how long are we going to put up with it?
•Costumes by Kirsty McKenzie. Hair and makeup: Laurence Close at Carol Hayes Management and Sophie Higginson at Frank. All footwear: Carlo Pazolini
This post has been on my to-do list for quite a while, but I’m finally writing it now, because of a conversation I overheard on the train yesterday.
