Food Politics and Me: The Damaging Fetishisation of Weight Loss
By Mollie Traylor
I think that we are all guilty of standing in the mirror and picking ourselves apart – pulling at the jiggly bits, poking at the bumps. We tell other women that their bodies are beautiful while barely being able to look at our own.
To be a woman is to be predisposed to worry about weight and weight loss, to worry about the size and the curvature of your body and to question hunger and suppress its cues. Whether you’ve been influenced by the idolised actresses of your childhood or have subliminally acquired the habits of other women in your life, it’s not unusual for women to face both confrontational and innate pressure to look a certain way. If you’re not tormented by these recurring thoughts, then you’re one of the lucky ones: approximately 1.25 million people in the UK suffer with an eating disorder, with 75% of that figure attributed to the female population.
But statistics are rigid, cursory things and fail to consider a number of factors – the primary one being the deep-rooted expectation for women to put up with this life of limitation. We normalise unhealthy behaviours so imperceptibly that it’s become impossible to differentiate the disordered from the ordinary.
As a general rule, to have a normal relationship with food is to be able to eat enough to intuitively fuel your body, sans feelings of guilt and shame. But there are very few women that I’ve come across in my life that aren’t conscious of their consumption or who don’t promise to skip breakfast to make up for the pizza they ate the night before. Picking in public and gorging in private have become a counteracting arrangement to appear restrained alongside the private acceptance that your body needs to eat. Do we really believe that Jennifer Aniston drinks juiced celery as a treat? That Elizabeth Taylor ate nothing but a boiled egg and a cup of coffee for breakfast? It’s become taboo to openly and honestly air what you eat; while this might not be what Taylor or Aniston openly claim as their diet, it’s what the magazines are publishing, and it’s normalising a culture of starvation under the guise of normal eating habits. After all, you can’t drop Aniston a text and ask her yourself.
The pressure comes from all angles, whether intentional or not, and it’s this suffocating culture of adherence that ultimately highlights and humiliates the anomaly – in this case, the fat woman. The woman who unashamedly eats and disregards the stereotypes set for us in this regulated society. Venture to any social media post from the women at the forefront of the body positivity movement and you’ll see a slew of comments perpetuating discrimination under the guise of a concern for health, confirming the overwhelming consensus that thin equals beautiful in the confines of this society, no matter what we might like to think.
This observation takes an even more interesting turn when these women lose weight. Take Adele, a woman whose talent was constantly thought to be compromised by her weight. Then she conformed and the narrative flipped, with adoring comments of her “sensational” weight loss. This worshipping of thinness breeds an incredibly toxic perspective of weight loss, especially for anyone that has been obese.
My personal journey began rather healthily, with a natural realisation that I enjoyed eating wholesome foods that energised my body and made me feel good. I was walking to work, eating my greens, and initially ignorant of the physical changes – until people started to comment on my weight. A sucker for validation, I became obsessed with the attention I was getting and, like an addict craving the high of their first hit, I would soon descent to drastic measures to achieve what I believed, at the time, was success.
People finally saw me, wanted to talk to me, were interested in spending time with me. No one flagged that I’d dropped 100lbs in seven months; frankly, I don’t think anyone cared. The NHS recommended calorie intake for a young girl of seven years old is 1,530kcal – this is just a guide, but to put things into perspective, at my worst restriction I was walking over 20k steps a day and consuming ~800 calories, leaving me in a deficit of over 1000. I really don’t know how my body was surviving, let alone functioning. I think back now, and the abuse I inflicted on myself was so flagrant that I am completely in awe of how supposedly oblivious everyone was to my deliberate starvation. Yet, I heard no declarations of concern, only accolades and admiration: yay, I wasn’t fat anymore!
However, the approach I took doesn’t come without its consequences. I’ve shouldered every form of nutritional deficiency and eating disorder anyone could imagine. I’ve gorged myself to the brink of death, starved myself to the same place. Fixing my relationship with food left me hunched over the toilet, fingers down my throat, more times than I’d like to admit. But I was being awarded for this self-torture, preserving the cycle and irreparably skewing my understanding of what it meant to exist in this world.
The reason that I’m writing this is to emphasise how important it is to tread carefully in referencing weight, whether it’s loss or gain – or better yet, to stop addressing it altogether. Whether it’s the food someone eats, how much, or what of, you can never fully account for the damaging cycle you might unwittingly perpetuate or create.
Of course, there are acceptable and healthy ways to lose weight, and certain well-adjusted people won’t have the addictive, self-destructive personality that I do. But we cannot lose sight of how easy it is to substantiate the impression that losing weight is the only way people can gain respect and acceptance. Sadly, in some ways – and only of myself – I still believe it to be true.
Existentially, weight does not equal worth. Instinctively, we know this – but society will tell you different. It takes great bravery to rebel against this entrenched belief and present yourself exactly as you wish to be. To not let it get to your head and wreak havoc on your coping mechanisms and philosophy of life. I fervently hope that no one else has been through this experience, but if you have, I hope you know that you are worth so much more. Don’t let the toxicity of this society swallow you whole.