Will I ever, truly love my body?

Can we ever break free from diet culture conditioning? Or will it always be there, waiting to pounce, when we least expect it?

Hello! First of all, sorry I’ve not been here as much. I’m in the middle of a ghost writing project, as well my part-time role at Cosmopolitan. (here’s something I wrote recently, about the controversy surrounding at home rape kits.)

At the end of each day, often the last thing I want to do is look at words. But, I promise you, I’ve been reaching out to interesting people to interview and have lots planned for this Substack. I just always want whatever I write to be properly considered, so hopefully, even though, at the moment it’s few and far between I hope you keep reading (and sharing, if you like it!) Thank you.

This post continues on similar themes to this last one. It also CONTENT WARNING contains descriptions of disordered eating.

“Are you sure?” It’s a Thursday night, around 7pm and I’ve just ordered a glass of Vinho Verde. When I did, I smiled happily at the waitress, told her it was my favourite wine. She’s a towering woman, slim, high cheekbones, aloof. Already I feel round in her presence; rosy cheeked, flustered, silly.

I assure her, yes, I am sure, I do want the wine. She tells me that, at this restaurant, they like to practice “restraint.”

When she leaves, I feel unsettled. I look around the table, give a small shake of my head to my companions. I don’t know them, so I don’t want to make a fuss.

Her attitude continues. When we are served bread, with this ball of rich, expensive-tasting butter she comments, clearing the dishes, “oooh someone ate a lot of butter.” When we order our courses, I choose the vegetarian option which is basically just two bowls of vegetables, served in different ways, and she congratulates me for “actually, finally, caring about my health.”

When it comes to pudding, I know what to expect. I order chocolate mousse, I’m questioned, asked if I’d prefer the fruit instead. I’m laughing now, but it’s not a real one. I’m an uncomfortable people-pleasing rebel, insisting that “yes, I want the mousse. I am allowed the mousse. Give me the mousse.”

I laugh because I’ve figured the whole thing out. I can play along with her game. I don’t like doing it, but I will, because the other option – to storm out, make a scene, feels too big, too fussy and, besides, maybe they’re right, maybe I don’t care about my health. Maybe I deserve to be told.

The waitress is an actress. This whole restaurant is a sham, a clearly-not-thought-through PR stunt to launch a campaign. I won’t tell you what for, as I am writing this not to complain about what happened* but instead to analyse how I felt afterwards, what this experience did to me. But I appreciate it may be confusing, so what I will say is this: as a journalist I am invited to events, to promote products or companies, and often I don’t know what I am getting myself in for. I say yes to things, and sometimes that works out. In this case, it really, really didn’t.

Having figured out what was going on, early in the evening, I managed to develop a coping strategy. As thoughts of inadequacy, of self-hatred, began to flood me, I would chant, over and over in my head, you are happy, you are healthy, you are loved, you have a good body image… I told myself, you don’t obsess over food, you like yourself, you enjoy your life… These things are more important than being thin. They are, please believe me, they are, please…

I know I’m right. That message is right. I am also happy, healthy and loved. But, do I have a strong body image? Do I view myself - the skin that I inhabit - as good? No. I can’t say that with confidence. Not right now, not after that night. Not after hearing every voice I’ve heard, in my own head, voices I’d dismissed as ridiculous, and paranoid, reflected back at me. Confirming the cruelty I have inflicted on myself, cruelty I have been trying to leave behind.

My body was the biggest at the table. That became something I obsessed over. The waitress made jibes at everyone, but I felt that she was only really making them, intentionally, to me. That she was thinking: oh I’m made to do this, as part of my job but her, that one, her jeans are slightly too tight, is that a belly roll I see? She needs this. She should listen.

The first course was cleared. And, from that moment, I was that ball of butter. I was lardy, coated in grease. I was something that people should not consume; I was not to be witnessed.

I can’t imagine what that evening could have done to someone with an eating disorder, or a history of disordered eating. As, in general, I do consider myself to have a healthy body image. But, in the days that followed, I began to unpick that. I only have a healthy body image, in comparison, to those who do not. I eat three meals a day, I don’t weigh myself, I don’t curse myself, tug or pull on my stomach, pinching myself hard in disgust, each morning, no, I don’t do that. Not like I used to. My camera roll has actual nudes in it now, sexy ones, instead of front, side, back, underwear shots stored in a special folder, to ‘track my progress.’

I view my body as a vessel to exist in, to carry me around, rather than something to be changed, altered. A project that could never be completed.

But… it took two barbed comments for all of this to unravel. For me to leave my rational brain and into an all-consuming space, to get trapped in a loop of stinging thoughts, where everything I was, and everything I ever would be, would be defined by how much flesh I carried on my bones.

That was in the moment. Then, in the days that followed, I began to scold myself, question my intelligence, my supposed ‘strength’ for letting the comments impact me so much. Isn’t this the curse of today? We’re still absolutely told that we should look a certain way, but we are also absolutely told that we’re meant to be ‘smart’ enough, mentally robust enough, to not care about beauty standards, to see through them. If we don’t manage: well then, we are vain, bad feminists who need to get ourselves into therapy. Because it’s that simple. And therapy is, of course, accessible and works for everyone.**

There’s something I need to add here. That I’m too ashamed to admit, but I will, because I need to write this out of me. Only once I’ve done so, perhaps, I can move into a different realm. One where I address the cobweb of my mind, and clear out the false literature that’s been placed there. Recently, I have lost weight. Or, so people tell me. I have lost weight because I, on occasion, not all the time, and definitely not deliberately, keep being sick. I have developed an intolerance to something and the smart thing to do, the actually healthy thing to do, is to keep a food diary, figure it out and stop eating whatever it is that is tearing my stomach lining to shreds.

But I’m not. Why? Because I am being told how good I look, how healthy I look. I hope this speaks for itself, how fucked up as a society we are, that – at all costs – slimness is rewarded. It’s always been this way. All my life the quest has been sold then repackaged, over and over again. We went from Special K to clean eating to Ozempic.*** If you’re not losing weight the right way, or you’re doing it obviously, then god, why do you care so much about your looks? Shouldn’t you be smarter than that?

What I’m trying to say is. I’m tired. I’d love a solution, but a solution for decades of conditioning does not exist. I don’t want to be this way. I don’t want my first thought to be, when I catch an illness that means I cannot eat, to be: oh you’ll lost weight.

But, a week or so after that night, I did find something.

The vicious voices still playing in my mind, one evening, I went to a community spa****. I lay naked in a sauna, surrounded by bodies. All ages, all shapes, all beauty. I listened to the women speak to each other, laugh, support one another. We so rarely see this, ever, bodies just being there, just for ourselves, for sweating, for scrubbing, for laughing, for dunking into cold water and then shaking ourselves off, the freezing tingle enveloping our skin.

I’d entered that spa hungrily. I’d had lunch with a stranger earlier and I’d only eaten two sides, because I did not want her to judge me for eating more. As I sat in the heat, I shakily realised what I needed. This. Women in all of their glory, to remind me that I am more than the flesh on my bones. I am loved, I am healthy, I am happy. Truly…

(oh and a flapjack from the spa’s canteen…)

*I did write to the PR expressing how concerned I was that this event didn’t come with any form of trigger warning, and how damaging it could be for people with eating disorders.

** Hopefully you can detect my sarcasm, but here’s a piece I wrote on how I feel about the simplistic attitude of “have you tried therapy?”

*** I don’t want to get sued. Ozempic when used to weight-loss is being used off-label. It was prescribed and has always been intended for people with diabetes.

**** It was the Porchester Spa, London. It’s £30, for all day long and it’s very healing.