How to get the body you want this summer

Start loving the one you already have…

I’m feeling excited.  Not just because summer is coming but because change is afoot and I like it.

After having seen the fun pictures of fashion blogger Callie Thorpe and friends at Evans’ #stylehasnosize launch last night, I felt something stir from within.  It was a feeling of excitement: that a culture of not just body acceptance but body celebration is growing from within the fashion industry and it’s been a long time coming.

Add to this, plus size model Tess Holliday’s feature on the cover of People magazine published today.  According to her Instagram post this morning, her remit to the magazine was “I wanted show my body off & they listened”.  The result?  A beautiful woman creatively captured by photographer James White at home in her own body.  She was not an unwanted guest there – she was there by choice and it shows.

Like just about every woman I’ve spoken to, my body has never really felt like my own.  Granted, I had some special circumstances to deal with – I grew up as part of a controlling religious organisation that dictated just about every aspect of our lives right down to what we thought and how we acted when we were alone.  As young women, our bodies were already owned by our future husbands and children and by the congregation for acquiring new recruits and serving the elders.  Man-made rules were handed down as the pronouncements of their god.  It never quite rang true with me.

So, when I left at 24 and finally got the education I deserved, naturally I had a teensy bit of a leaning towards feminism.

There, I’ve said it.  The dirty word that’s been spat out too many times with regard to body issues and obesity.  It’s as though the title of Susie Orbach’s totem of a book ‘Fat is a Feminist Issue’ has become an ignorantly misused sound bite for the fat shamers.  The loving and taking control of our bodies has become a feminist issue and therefore all about man-hating – like we’re spiders seeking to eat the men that come anywhere near us.

Balls.

They’re our bodies and we want them back because we like them.  Incidentally we like men too.  The two are not mutually exclusive.

Now, I realise that not every woman has had the same prescribed and damaging upbringing as I had.  But I do talk to a lot of women and the same issues keep coming up.

• The need to prescribe to a diet – low fat, low carb, no biscuits/cake/chocolate for a month diet.  Are you in the Weight Watchers or Slimming World camp?
• I’m dieting for my holiday.  I’m dieting for my wedding.  I’m dieting for my sister’s wedding.  It doesn’t matter what the reason is, there is always some external force at work to change the way we look.  Somehow this body won’t be acceptable for whatever we are working towards.
• I have to lose my baby weight.  As if pregnancy, childbirth and the endless sleep deprivation coupled with unbelievable pressure to breast feed isn’t enough (don’t get me started on breasts by the way), then the media is obsessed with dropping the fat ten minutes after you’ve left the labour ward.
• A suspended disbelief that one size fits all.  If it did, we’d all be wearing the same shoes.
• The need to buy and consume what the dieting industry and media are offering, unaware of the irony that our bodies are bought and consumed by the dieting and media industries.  Like Tyler Durden in Fight Club says – we are having our own fat sold back to us.

Good grief, this is all starting to sound a little political.  Apologies if this isn’t your bag (but if it is, Fat is a Feminist Issue by Susan Orbach is not just a cracking good read, it’s also a practical approach to controlling your weight and The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf is also worth checking out).

We’ll return to the fashion bloggers and why what they are doing is so exciting.

I’ve read enough clinical papers, newspaper articles and media sound bites now to know that the medical community are worried about our health.  We have a rising obesity problem in the West and the strain this will put on services is causing great concern.

In some minds, frocks to fit a full bust, bigger belts to cinch a waist over rounded hips and a bikini that celebrates rather than hides a gloriously chunky body are going to normalise fatness and make the problem worse.

But don’t they see?  Rather than being part of the problem, beautiful, well cut and on-trend clothes are part of the solution.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that I believe we should normalise fatness and please don’t quote me out of context.  I believe we should normalise people being comfortable with the aesthetics of their own body – in that they should take ownership of whether or not it is beautiful.

So whether you are fat, thin, dark skinned, pale skinned, male, female, short, stocky, tall, lean or whatever innumerable permutations of the human body apply to you, they are yours and no one should be making money out of telling you that they are ugly and you need to change them.

What about health?  Improving health is part of this, it has to be.

So to this end, let’s do something radical and separate health from aesthetics and moral judgement.  Lumping these things together is not just insulting it’s profoundly unhelpful.

As I’ve said before, a body that feels strong and cherished is worth taking care of.  We can’t all be skinny but we can all tweak our lifestyles (or overhaul them if we chose) to make them happier and healthier.  And this doesn’t necessarily have to involve giving our money and self-esteem to a multi-billion pound industry bent on getting us to spend more by hating what we already have.

I digress again.

Back to my excitement.

I am old enough to have lived through the fledgling but influential low-fat movement of the 1980s.  Protein came under fire off the back of the food combining adherents of the 1990s and I’m now sitting back and watching the anti-sugar/anti-carb evangelists with some interest and maybe even a little cynical amusement now.  As a seasoned 40-year old I can’t say I’ve seen it all but I’ve seen enough to know that things move in cycles, absolute truth doesn’t exist and prescriptive diets are not an effective long term solution for everyone.

My interests have lead me to read so many inspiring, insightful and sometimes utterly radical and frankly confusing books about the body.  About how it is so much more than skin, bones and organs – about how society paints meaning onto it, how the image we see in the mirror is not always what’s there and how it is used as a tool to control our choices.

And I feel like we have reached a point where if we see enough images of fuller figured girls wearing bikinis, beautifully tailored clothes and red lipstick, proudly showing off shapely legs and glorious acres of creamy white bust, the aesthetics of this will no longer be wrong, evil and worthy of distaste.  In a utopian future, self-body-hatred, which so often leads to a negative relationship with food will be gone, leaving us big bottomed girls to get on with riding our bikes, safe in the knowledge that each heartbeat will be a little stronger than the one before, even if we’re wearing size 20 Lycra.  Perhaps next year we’ll be wearing size 18, maybe even a 16 but this will be a by-product rather than a focal point of a healthier lifestyle.

Perhaps this new aesthetic environment will bring a smile to the writers and theorists of my university days – who knows but I like to think that the girls in London this week are edging us closer to our utopia and having a massive amount of fun while they’re doing it.

 

Notes:

In  the film The Full Monty, Gerald says “Fat, David is a feminist issue…I don’t bloody know (what it’s supposed to mean) do I?  But it is”.  Body dysmorphia and the male body is just as important and I’m sorry I haven’t had the space to include more about this in my blog post.

You’ll notice the bevy of beauties I’m referring to in my post are pretty young women with luscious, bouncing curls, milky skin and wickedly long eyelashes.  I realise that some critics, with some justification, will point out that in this they are as much buying into the beauty myth as the rest of the industry but  – one step at a time eh?

Weight Watchers, Slimming World and the dieting industry as a whole: prescriptive diets work wonders for some people – they take the weight off and keep it off.  For these people, I can only feel joy, it must feel wonderful to feel the benefits of their hard work.  It doesn’t work for me and it doesn’t work for others like me – we must find our own way of taking control of our weight.  Shaming and name calling isn’t likely to work either.