…And all the diet clubs are advising their clients how to eat sensibly over the festive period, publishers have their launches of new diet books ready for boxing day, and diet challenges, news years resolutions and gym memberships are waiting around the corner in January…
Why on earth we choose the darkest most miserable month to become a ‘new person’ is beyond me. Perhaps, we believe that like a caterpillar we can emerge from our winter cocoon a beautiful butterfly in summer, wafting down our local high-street in pants 3 sizes smaller than the previous year.
Thing is, if you’re anything like me, you have probably been there, done that, bought the XXL t-shirt too many times to count.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a new diet regime, cookbook, exercise plan. Well, I must, because otherwise why have I tried so many?
There’s a lot of noise at the moment about the ways female bodies were portrayed ‘in the past’, and here people are talking about a decade ago, which frankly feels almost like yesterday to me (yes, the years really do fly by as you get older).
And its certainly true that the female body has an ‘ideal’ which many of us strive to replicate with our diets and exercises every year. And for the most part fail. I do think there is also a darker side to body positivity though, neither too thin nor too fat is healthy, nor is a disordered view of food, good or bad.
And the worst part is the self criticism and the critique of other women’s bodies constantly. Those who are not holding up to the mythical standard set this week by a clothing company or a diet shake brand or the latest celebrity TV programme. I think even supermodels struggle with this, as Cindy Crawford said, even Cindy Crawford doesn’t wake up looking like ‘Cindy Crawford’, there is a lot of work and effort that goes into making anyone in the public eye look as shiny and glossy as they are (also, that was a lot of times to write one persons name in a paragraph).
So what’s my point? Well, a confession really, I’ve struggled my entire life with weight, from being weighed by the school nurse from the age of 6 (that will immediately make you self conscious, believe me), to hearing adults talk about their bodies negatively, to taking on the latest fad diets – which work, for a time, and there is nothing like a 16year old girl to be focused and committed to losing weight via SlimFast to make you feel a failure when you can’t replicate that success again later in life. To disordered eating and really stupid elimination diets, to throwing up your hands and relinquishing any control over your eating and drinking.
I’ve spent so many years of my life trying to lose the same weight, I’ve been a similar size for the last 20years now, but I still want to be smaller. I think I had this ideal so long its difficult to let go. Will my life change? Not massively, but perhaps it will make me healthier in the longer term. And that’s the WHY now (its all about ‘finding your why’ these days). Less about fitting into clothes I would probably not want to wear anyway, and more about overcoming this vision of myself for my daughters sake.
I don’t want to pass on this skewed vision of how things ‘should’ be to her. To make her fear the camera, avoid the mirror, and have a deeply troubled relationship with the scales. I want her to realise what her body can DO, and appreciate it for that and not whether it can fit into a piece of clothing with a particular number on the label.
If anything is teaching me that labels are bullsh*t, its seeing the huge disparities in toddler sized clothes, and toddlers themselves! Intellectually of course we all know people come in all shapes and sizes, Usain Bolt would make a crappy jockey for example, but watching a small person grow into their own body really makes you want them to love it and themselves for who they are and what they can do, rather than how they look.
I hope that the next decade or so, we continue to become kinder to ourselves so that she doesn’t have to live through the same bullsh*t most every other generation of women seems to. Although probably there will just be something else to fixate on!
Anyway, moral of this story, eat the bl**dy chocolates this Christmas, I will. Life has taught me that January is the time to worry about these things!