Content warning: references to diets, negative body image & calorie counting
One thing you will know about me if you have known me for longer than a week is that I love to eat - I love cooking, baking and going out for food. My weakness is my sweet tooth; I love a big slice of cake with a cup of tea, apple or strawberry crumble with vanilla ice cream, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and butterscotch sauce most of all. But my relationship with food hasn't always been fantastic. Because of this love of sweet things I was a self-consciously chubby child; I remember my mum coaxing me to eat slices of apple with the promise of a chocolate digestive at the end. I'm also the youngest of three siblings, and so remember looking up at my teenage siblings and being green with jealousy that they were so effortlessly slim and lithe, while I was stuck in year 7 with my massive blazer and my puppy fat.
But let's take a step back for a second and ask ourselves - why did I even care so much at that age what my body looked like? I was still a child, right? That brings us on to the issue of just how much children, and especially girls, are sexualised from an increasingly and worryingly young age, in my opinion and based on experiences I've had. I was 11 and hated my body because it didn't look like the pop stars and actresses I was seeing on TV and in magazines. Popular sex symbols at the time were people like Megan Fox and Mila Kunis (so you can guess what chance I stood of coming out favourably when compared to them lol). I was 11 and hating myself and my body because it wasn't a slim yet voluptuous adult woman's body like they had. TV shows and films and music videos taught me that the most important thing a woman could be (and let's face it - a teenage girl too) was sexy, and most crucially, appealing to men. Being appealing to men equals currency and power. Even in TV shows aimed at children and teenagers, the female protagonists were always slim and weirdly coquettish - I'm looking at you Disney Channel. There seemed to be no place in the media where children could just be children; where teenage girls could just be girls. It never occurred to me at the time to think "Hey, I'm literally a child, why not give myself a break, enjoy the place I'm at, and let my body develop at its own pace? I'm not supposed to be sexually attractive yet". I didn't possess the requisite self-esteem to formulate these thoughts. I felt ugly and undesirable, and hated the way I looked.
Things are thankfully getting better now, but there seems to be a long-standing tradition in the media and in the world at large, which consists of men feeling entitled to freely pass judgement and critique women's bodies, in a public forum, with impunity. For the not-all-men club, I know and readily acknowledge that men get body-shamed too, and are under pressure to look a certain way and to perform masculinity in a certain way; but no-one can ever convince me that it happens on the same scale. Whether consciously or not, we learn very young that a woman's body is not her own, but rather existing in public forum, a democratic project that other people weigh in on, even a political battleground. Everyone, it seems, gets a say, whether it's parents, teachers, classmates, even strangers on the street. And so it seemed that, in school, boys could get away with saying absolutely anything they wanted about girls and their bodies. On many occasions this would even extend to unwanted touching and harassment too. It is only now that I am an adult that I can look back and be amazed at how normalised it was. One such instance happened to me in a biology lesson in year 8. We were working on whiteboards and the boy sitting next to me showed me his. On it he had written: "Greta you're boobless, grow some boobs". You know when someone says something to you that shocks you so much that you remember their exact words even years later? I mean, it was true, I was boobless, but I was 12, give me a chance! I was so upset and humiliated and enraged that someone would actually have the gall to say something like that to me. To be fair to my biology teacher, she did take it seriously and got him to apologise. Thinking about it now, it's probably one of my earliest experiences of what I call 'sexist rubbish' and likely started me on my path to an awareness of sexism and patriarchy, so maybe it was meant to happen.
If you're the same age as me then you may recall a couple of fashion trends that were popular in the early 2010s and proved a nightmare for the awkward pre-teen girl. I could and honestly might dedicate a whole post of its own to this era in fashion (shiny Lyrca disco pants? God, why?) but one item that stands out to me is denim shorts. It must have been the summers of years 7-9 when everyone was rocking them, and even in the winter you could just wear tights underneath and achieve a stylish look. I begged my mum for some - acid wash denim, of course - but soon began to dread wearing them. Naturally I've always had bigger thighs, with a good deal of muscle and fat on them; nowadays I love them and hardly give them a second thought, as they are in proportion with the rest of my body. But you have to remember that this was in the age of the thigh gap and tiny legs poking out of tiny denim shorts was the sought-after look. It's also unsettling when you consider how the sought-after and desirable body type was not one you'd often find on most adult women but instead waif-like prepubescent girls; a lot to unpack there. Adult women supposed to look like teenage girls, and teenage girls supposed to look like adult women. (I'm speaking generally of course. Cis women tend to gain weight around hips and thighs during adolescence but I know it's not the same for everyone; you may have that thigh-gap body shape naturally). Is there ever an age where women and girls are allowed to just, be? Bringing up these infamous shorts also makes me wonder just why I bought and continued to wear an item of clothing that plainly did not fit me, flatter me or suit me. That brings us on to the topic of clothes, which is a whole other kettle of fish I am hoping to tackle in another post.
By the time year 9 rolled around I had had enough, and soon began on a 'get fit' crusade. Contrary to what you might expect, it was successful; with the help of Blogilates and her tough but fun pilates videos (which I still follow today), I was able to shed some fat and even get abs for the first and last time in my life (so far!). Today I do regard it as a positive experience for me; it was the first time I properly got into exercise and working out, and it made me feel proud of my body and what it could do for the first time. I'm sure that the late arrival of puberty, finally eating some fruit and vegetables and the mad notion of buying clothes that actually suited my body type helped as well. I wholeheartedly believe that exercise is a great thing and that everyone should be doing some form of it. It's hard, and it may feel like torture at first, but I always feel better after I've done it - something, anything.
Having said that, now at 21 I still do struggle with diet and exercise; I find it hard to find balance, or a happy medium with them both. I'm either really good with my diet, having a cheat day once a week and working out consistently every other day. Or, when I'm stressed, going through a tough time or just exhausted from a term at uni, I sack off exercise completely, and eat to excess. Sometimes after one of these periods, when I'm keen to get 'back on track', I download the infamous app MyFitnessPal - a name sure to strike dread into the hearts of many. If you've no idea what I'm on about, firstly I'm jealous. It's a free mobile app which lets you log all the food you eat and adds up the total calories you've consumed. From this it subtracts the calories you've burned (you can enter your workouts, and it also uses your phone's pedometer) and advises you on how much or how little you should be eating in order to reach a certain goal weight. You can log and track your weight on the app, too.
TW: Difficulties with eating
Now, maybe this sounds great to you; maybe you're reaching for your phone to open up the app store and download it. I am very lucky to never have had an eating disorder and my heart goes out to anyone who is battling them. But I can unequivocally say that the points where my relationship with food was at its worst was when I was 'dieting' and counting calories. The last time I used MyFitnessPal was in January and February of this year. It was typical: just after Christmas, put weight on, bombarded with messages from social media and advertising about 'new year, new you', the perfect time to start a new regime. I'll just use it for a bit, I told myself, to get a bit of control back over what I'm eating, to be able to hold myself accountable, to see the facts and numbers there in black and white. And it worked, for a bit. Recording what I eat did help me to get some perspective on my diet, and it helped me to make better, more thoughtful decisions when snacking, for example. Wolfing down that Aero bar to distract yourself from your feelings of boredom/sadness/general malaise seems less appealing when you've got to tell the app about it later! But I am still a proponent of keeping a food diary on the humble Notes app when I need to calm down on the snacking.
But suddenly it was February, and I found myself weighing out everything I ate, so I could enter it into the app and know the exact number of calories I was consuming. Making my breakfast porridge: weighing out the exact amount of oats, milk, peanut butter, honey. Cooking dinner in the evening: measuring out exactly how much olive oil I put into the pan instead of just eyeballing it because olive oil is calorie dense and I might go over my daily total if I pour out too much. I knew I'd gone too far when I, a food lover through and through, practically Henry VIII when it comes to pudding, began to feel anxious about eating. I knew I'd have to remember everything I ate, every ingredient I put in, so I could log it on the app and rest assured that my calorie count was accurate. Thankfully, it never went much further than that. I knew I was heading down a bad road, a slippery slope, and after valuable conversations with friends, and myself, I deleted the app and vowed to never count my calories again.
Now it's nearly September, back-to-school time, and I want to get back on the exercise horse after a bit of a lazy August. But I've decided that, while I'll eat sensibly and exercise restraint around Mr Kipling Battenberg, I'm not going to count calories, or track what I eat, or calculate my daily Macros. If any fitness experts are reading this then no doubt they'll be raising an eyebrow; it's said that our diet plays an even bigger role in how we look than exercise does and I'm sure that's right. But I just can't do it. Food to me is just as much about how it makes me feel than how it makes me look; it's community, family, a celebration of being alive and being human. I just can't base an important and nigh on sacred part of my life on numbers, calculations and restrictions. I guess that's what's called 'intuitive eating' or taking a more holistic approach.
I started this post intending to talk diets and the importance of our relationship with food. I didn't expect to half start telling my life story and tackling patriarchy and sexist nonsense along the way. I don't really have an inspiring conclusion to dazzle you with; I love my body and am proud of it but my relationship with food remains something that I struggle with. Even now in the 21st century, an age where women are beginning to reject the idea that they have to appeal to the male gaze, I find it a struggle to find a self-image and articulate a self-love that isn't based on what straight men find conventionally attractive. Am I only happy with myself and my body because my body shape is one that is conventionally attractive; would I or could I still love myself if it wasn't? These are all questions that I am grappling with. I want to acknowledge the fact that I have had a much easier time of it when it comes to body image and beauty standards, being that I am a slim, white, cis, able-bodied woman living in Britain and coming from privilege. I know that your ability to meet and align yourself with standards of beauty has a lot to do with your economic circumstances. And I can't imagine how much harder it must be for black and brown people wanting to feel beautiful and be represented in the media, when we're living in a racist society where whiteness is the default and the standard of beauty. So I guess I wanted to end my first post by acknowledging that. And also by reminding anyone reading this that the things about ourselves which we feel bad about are the result of a combination of capitalism and sexism, we are being exploited by companies and corporations who want to make money off of us feeling like we're not good enough. More on that in another post maybe?
If anyone has read this and would like to share their thoughts or experiences then please leave a comment if you like. Thankyou for reading :)
Greta x
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