I went for my second run in ages this morning. Early sun lifting mist off the nature reserve, leaving naked branches in silhouette against the whitewashed vegetation. The first shoots of daffodils poking up from the brown of last year’s fallen leaves.
Birds singing obscenities to each other.
And I thought to myself – I like this, why haven’t I run for so long?
For a while it was anaemia (I couldn’t understand why I was getting so out of breath). But, I guess it was mostly despondency. I didn’t feel like I was fast enough. Didn’t think I was losing any weight.
I’d lost my mojo.
And with most high-street retailers not selling fitness gear for plus size women and some running apps not acknowledging someone seriously runs at my speed, it’s no wonder.
Am I just too fat and slow to be a serious runner? Does running do my overweight body any good, or am I just slogging my lumbering guts out for nothing?
Sound familiar? From talking to people on Facebook, my friends and from what I’ve read, I’m relieved to know it’s a common thing.
So, consider this.
A US study into women’s heart health found that lack of strenuous exercise was more likely to lead to heart disease and heart attack than being overweight alone (read my ramblings about it here).
Think about it.
If the numbers on the scale or the stopwatch are an impediment to my body getting more efficient at pumping life-giving blood around itself, are they helpful?
I think not.
So, scales and running app back in the cupboard of sadness where they belong, I put my running shoes on this morning and enjoyed a bit of spring sunshine.
And I got thinking about the mate of mine who I met in the supermarket the other day. She’s a plus-size honey and she’s been working with a personal trainer. Oh my, she looks sweet.
“But I’ve fallen off the wagon” she said.
“Doesn’t matter, just as long as you get back on it” I replied. I think I was talking to myself.
Weight, speed, whatever – all to one side for now. They’re not helping.
Autumn. A time when nature starts to shut up shop for the winter and the humans turn their attention to retreating indoors for cooler, darker days. Odd that it’s also a time of new beginnings, but it is.
And it’s not just the new term that I’m talking about: although whether you’re a four-year-old starting school or a forty-eight-year-old beginning the final year of your Masters, there’s the potential for new books, new people and new ideas.
It’s the concept of the summer providing a fire gap. On one side, the wind up of the old term, work schedules geared towards taking time off for a holiday and a season of barbecue weekends and cold beer in the garden. Then the disruption to the normal routine – whether there’s kids at home or not – and eventually a return to what went before.
Or is it? Do we really go back to what went before?
I spent some time working as a childminder a few years ago and during August the phone would ring off the hook with new enquiries: usually women who, with the upcoming new term, were re-evaluating their employment status or taking on new studies.
Likewise, it would seem that some women re-evaluate every aspect of their lives as they edge towards autumn, including their bodies. Social media has been wall-to-wall this morning with introspective comments, some positive, most negative, about how lazy and unfit people feel. Is this really the case? Could it be that with children back at school and/or the distractions of summer out of the way, there’s some time and space for these women to think about who they are and where they are heading?
The new term brings new beginnings for everyone, I guess.
So, I started running again this morning. I walked around the supermarket afterwards, remembering the buzz and how strong my legs feel. And despite missing the lazy, warm days of summer with my children, how exhilarating it is to be out alone under the trees, with this new beginning stretching out in front of me.
I love the chance to start again, no matter how many times I’ve done it before.
It’s the New Year and although we chinked glasses and wished everyone the best over a week ago, it’s taken for the normal routine to kick back in for me to get back to my computer and write about the subject that’s been burning away for days. In fact, it’s been burning away for years and no more so than at this time of year.
To kick this off, these are a few of the comments I have read on social media over the past few days:
“I’m overweight, I have no confidence.”
“I feel so fat, I don’t want to go out on a date with my boyfriend.”
“I lost 5 stone last year and put half of it back on, I’m such a slob. How could I let this happen?”
The diet industry has this brand of self-loathing well stitched up. Join our club, pay the fee and we’ll turn this all around for you.
Now, I’m not knocking diets. They work for some – I know plenty of people who have lost weight and kept it off. But they don’t work for everyone and I think in this case, it has less to do with the body and more to do with the mind: in particular, self-worth.
So, for everyone who’s ever felt like a big, fat, lazy failure, let me tell you something:
You are already amazing.
Do you know why?
Your liver performs over 500 vital functions, scientists don’t know about everything it does – you’d not live a day without it. Supplying glucose, fighting infections, storing nutrients, recycling waste and detoxifying your body it is a chemical powerhouse that gets on with its job without your knowledge.
Your skin spans 21 square feet, weighs nine pounds and contains more than eleven miles of blood vessels and 45 miles of nerves. Home to 1,000 bacteria (most of which are vital to its health) it rejuvenates itself every 28 days.
Your stomach produces hydrochloric acid (up to 3 litres a day) to digest your food – an acid so powerful that the stomach also produces its own neutralising agent in the stomach wall to protect itself.
Your strongest muscle? Your tongue. The smallest? Only 1mm in length in your ear, holding in place the smallest bone in your body. The hardest working? Your heart – 115,200 beats a day, 42 million beats a year, over 3 billion in a lifetime. It’s mind boggling.
And your brain? The only organ in your body to feel no pain, it contains 100 billion neurons (and there are 10,000 types of brain cell), weighs 3 pounds and contains 400 miles of blood vessels. Laughing at something uses at least five areas of the brain and it’s estimated that we have 50,000 thoughts a day, 70% of which are negative. The organ is 60% fat and it houses 25% of the body’s cholesterol: and without this, it would not be able to perform the estimated 100,000 chemical reactions a second. Information can travel at 260 mph.
Sit for a moment and think about all this.
Really think.
Granted, sometimes bodies fail but there is still so much to marvel about.
So:
How can a body be devalued because of a number on a scale or a measuring tape?
How does the size of someone’s clothing demean the complexity of the valuable gift they’ve been given?
How can something so vital, so unfathomable so irreplicable end up ready for the rubbish heap when really it’s nothing of the sort?
It’s nonsense.
However you feel today about your body and what it can do, know this: the fact that you are sat reading my blog post means that you are already amazing. The work of heart, the eyes, the brain, the liver, the lungs, the skin, the hormones and the millions of other processes going on have brought my ideas to you.
You love, you live.
Dammit, you rock!
Just breathing makes you amazing.
Consider:
Walking uses over 200 muscles. It is thought that it helps expand the hippocampus area in the brain: concerned with learning about new places, its shrinkage in women over 60 has been linked with dementia. Far from being a passive, ineffective form of exercise, there’s nothing like walking.
A recent American study found that female heart disease is more likely to be caused by inactivity than excess weight.
Swimming requires the rhythmical stretch and relaxation of the skeletal muscles, naturally inducing a restorative, meditative state. It releases endorphins, uses free floating to relieve stress and fight or flight hormones and regulates and strengthens the cardio vascular system without putting undue pressure on joints.
Regular movement like running or sport strengthens the digestive tract, making it more efficient.
So:
What if you didn’t need beast yourself at the gym or nigh-on starve yourself to be a valid human being?
What if you were to rethink the things you’ve been told about size, weight and dieting?
What would happen if you chose to nourish your body because it’s an unbelievably complex, unique, living organism?
And what harm would come from moving your body your way: making it stronger, more able to carry out your dreams, more capable of interacting with the people you love?
What if we found new and helpful ways of linking health and self worth?
Because there are those who will tell you that you need to be a certain shape or size, deny yourself life-giving food or beat yourself up on a daily basis in order to be an acceptable human being.
Ignore this: their thinking is self-defeating and counterproductive.
Because you are already amazing.
Use this as a starting point and allow everything else to follow.
I’m passionate about this subject so check out my other body confidence and plus size fitness blog posts using the tag cloud to the right. And if I’ve motivated you to re-engage with your most marvellous body, then drop me a line and tell me what new reasons you’ve found to love yourself.
I’m a plus size woman with a really bad running habit. I can’t stop. My shoes call to me from the hallway and I’m worried that I’ll get arrested for indecent exposure if I go out running in the rain one more time (an ample bust, combined with a lack of decent plus size breathable wear have too many times made for an impromptu wet t-shirt contest).
So, when the Daily Mail published an article last week about two running magazines which have chosen plus size women for their covers, I was delighted. US magazine, Running, featured Erica Schenk, a size 18 model, who is well known for her fitness habit and the UK title, Womens’s Running, pictured Lindsey Swift on their November issue. After being heckled by a van driver, Linsday’s open letter detailing why running is more important to her than what people think about the size of her body went viral, being shared over 26,000 times. To say I find her inspiring would be an understatement.
The Mail article was positive and inclusive, everything I like reading about but as usual, I was more interested in the comments section below. This is where it all started to get a bit muddy and a little less positive.
There are many obesity experts out there. Unfortunately, instead of spending their time doing research, pounding the streets or making themselves a salad, they litter perfectly healthy discussion forums with anecdotal, ill-informed soundbites about pie-hole stuffing and sofa surfing.
But what kind of message is this sending out? Should we really be discouraging women from exercising because it’s pointless if it’s not accompanied by a punishing diet and an unhealthy obsession with the tape measure or scales?
Thankfully, the real experts are out there reading books, crunching numbers and writing papers. I find their words far more helpful.
The Mail article lead to me doing a little digging around on the matter of fit but fat and I came across cardiologist C. Noel Bairey-Merz, well known in her field for investigating the differences between the ways that men and women develop and present heart disease. She wanted to explore why after years of research, mortality rates from cardio disease were decreasing in men but increasing in women. For her, this has been a matter of sexual politics as well as medicine.
From what I’ve read of her research, trends of where and how blockages and other operational problems arise in the heart are different between male and female subjects. That in mind, she published a study, examining the BMI, measurements and fitness levels of a sample of women with surprising results: “fitness may be more important than overweight or obesity for CV risk in women”.
Of course, she is only one voice amongst many and cardiovascular disease is only one area of risk reported to be higher for tubby people but it got me thinking. What if we took her research at face value? What if we just acknowledged that getting out and getting going is just good for you, whatever your weight?
The Heart Sisters blog by Carolyn Thomas, journalist and heart attack survivor, is a most excellent place to find out more about prevention, diagnosis and care of female heart disease and has a page dedicated to ‘Improving Your Odds’. I read it and realised that my running habit may be helping me to dodge the family heart disease bullet despite my weight.
Some of the major contributing factors to a higher risk of CV disease in women are:
Stress – running not only helps to readjust hormone levels, it also gets you out of the house from the kids/pets/spouse and allows thinking time or even not thinking time.
Type E-personality or being Everthing to Everyone – a study showed that women often put themselves last after house/kids/pet/spouse. This means that the more subtle symptoms of female heart disease can be easily missed or misdiagnosed. Running puts you first, even if it’s only for thirty minutes or so.
Sleep disorders – whether it’s through beneficial core body temperature changes, improvement in brain function or strengthening of the cardiovascular system (amongst a whole host of associated benefits) moderate exercise has been shown to promote better sleep habits.
Depression – you need only do a cursory search to find out how exercise can help with depression.
Smoking – a big no-no for women who want to keep their hearts healthy and it’s a bit hard to run with a fag in your mouth. I do know a few girls who’ll have a cup of tea and a ciggy after a run but they’re in the minority. At this point, I’ll add that I’ve never smoked – not because I inhabit some kind of moral high ground but because I cough, making me look like a spotty 13 year old behind the bikesheds.
Blood pressure and cholesterol – again, affected by activity levels as well as diet.
High fibre, heart-healthy diet – I have a strong body that responds well to how hard I push it – I just don’t feel like filling it full of rubbish after a run, it would just seem ungrateful. It’s all change when the fridge starts singing to me late in the evening, however, but that’s another blog post in itself.
So, what is my message to the fat but fit naysayers?
Your rhetoric is just too simple. Just as Bairey-Merz has done so much for female heart disease mortality rates just by pushing past what other physicians thought was obvious, I’m also keen to ask questions about whether exercise can inform healthier lifestyle choices, rather than just being something someone gets morally blackmailed into doing to lose weight for losing weight’s sake.
I’m calling for a change in thinking. I’m calling for an uprising of plus size people like me on the streets with their trainers on. I’m calling for a war cry of heart healthy people who are fed up with being labelled as pie-eating sofa surfers.
Let’s wobble away and damn those who’d have us believe we’re not healthy just because we’re heavy.
And now that the rain has stopped, I might just chance a run.
Big cost to tax payers, massive cost to individuals, not to mention embarrassment for politicians. Clearly, some tough talking is going to have to take place in order to bring the problem under control.
We all know the adage about how much a picture can say, so this is the kind of image the media choose to accompany articles about the obesity crisis. This gem came from the Guardian:
A pie eater? A 24-hour a day carer? Someone who has already lost 4 stone? On his way back from the gym? How could we know?
Now the NHS burden can be placed quite firmly on this chap’s shoulders and there’s nothing he can do about it. He can’t turn around and talk to you about why he’s overweight and even if he could move, his head has been chopped off so he physically has no mouth and therefore no voice.
Well, not on this platform anyway.
Being a morbidly obese vegetarian runner, I’m a regular visitor to on-line forums for the overly podgy and let me tell you about the conversations they’re having:
I’ve run out of points this week and I’m panicking about what to have for dinner because I’ve come off a twelve hour shift and I’m hungry – any suggestions?
It’s weigh in tonight, I’m having pizza afterwards and there’s a whole week to make up for it
My diet isn’t working any more. I’m fat/stupid/lazy/a slob/confused (cue reams of suggestions in reply, some genuinely helpful, some shamefully judgemental)
I haven’t lost enough weight for my wedding/my daughter’s wedding/my holiday
My eating has gone so off track since my mother died. It’s been six months and you would have thought I could have pulled it together by now
Some stranger told me today that fat people shouldn’t travel on trains/have tattoos/wear leggings
All paraphrased but all genuinely posted.
And then I came across a group for plus sized ladies with a complete ban on weight loss chat. What do they talk about?
How does this top look with these leggings? Should I wear heels?
Which chaffing shorts work the best?
Which bikinis fit best?
What I’m wearing to work today
My new hair colour
I’m going swimming today! Something I wouldn’t have done without the support of this group!
That’s not to say the other groups don’t have positive posts – they do. And that’s not to say that the weight loss free group doesn’t have posts about keeping healthy – I regularly seek feedback about running as a plus-sizer.
But the environment is so different, so energising, so self-affirming when the focus on how much weight you’re losing and how you’re doing it is taken away. My size is not the most important thing about me – I can write, sing, cook, draw. I make people laugh, I love my charity work and I’d challenge any overweight 40 year old woman to offroad on a bike like I do.
And this is the nub of the matter for me – everything is just so over-simplified and no wonder: do some digging and the advice is all so confusing. Back in the day, fat was to blame and now it’s sugar. We need to move fast food joints away from schools and teach kids how to cook. Even the school holidays are fattening. Measure these ideas against the material I was reading this morning about how the rise in obesity coincided with the rise in the anti-fat movement and a new study suggesting that a high fat diet can impair the function of a hormone that helps you to feel full. The NHS Eatwell plate still promotes ‘plenty of starchy foods’ in the face of the anti-carb movement.
But from what I’ve read recently, the cure to all our obesity problems apparently lies in:
Taxing sugary drinks and snacks
Closing/moving takeaways
Teaching people to cook
Making fat people go to the gym
Think about this for a moment. I’m overweight, so therefore I’m:
Gluttonous and weak minded
Ignorant about food and cooking
Lazy
Weak minded? Ignorant? Lazy?
Really?
Perhaps I’m a one off? I’ve read enough on-line to know that I’m not but let me tell you one thing I do know: I tend not to see fat people any more – I see survivors: survivors of bereavement, illness, depression, domestic violence and post-traumatic stress disorder. Not always but more often than not. I’m training for a 5k charity run in October, I haven’t eaten meat in nearly twenty years and I knock out a home-made from scratch dinner for four on a budget every night. Oh and I’ve survived years of depression.
Everyone has a back story which no one will get to hear if all they ever see is your headless back.
So I propose we start a real conversation – one that will work. Let’s get to the bottom of why people get fat and what they can actually do to reverse this. I’m not speaking about a silver bullet here – do this diet/take this pill/do this exercise. I’m talking about a proper strategy that uses the ingenuity and strength of the human spirit to overcome adversity and acknowledges that we are all individuals with our own metabolisms, hang-ups and personal circumstances.
The aerobics classes I took in my early twenties to lose weight couldn’t finish soon enough but feeling my strong but fat-suit hidden legs doing Zumba at the weekend made me feel completely different
– because what I was doing was utterly relevant. I’m getting fit for my health, not because being fat makes me somehow unworthy of being part of society or having a voice.
I don’t have diabetes, I don’t have any weight related illnesses but because I’m overweight there is this idea going round that I’m going to be expensive later in life, so the UK taxpayer already owns me along with the right to say what they please about me.
But I refuse to be one of The Obese.
I am not a blob with no head, with my back to the camera.
I am full frontal, full throttle and full volume.
I’m not celebrating or promoting obesity, I’m saying we have to completely re-think the way we talk about it because the conversations that are happening on a public and policy making level are not working.
So, yeah, let’s talk about obesity, it’s clear that it needs to happen – but for it to work, it’s got to be two-way. Because that’s what the word conversation means.
An obese person in trainers – a more helpful image?
Do you agree? Have I got it all wrong? How can we make things better? Drop me a line below, let me know. Perhaps I’ve missed something. And drop me a line if you’d like more information about the Facebook groups I visit.
I’ve got a bee in my bonnet again. The model Tess Holliday has come under fire again for daring to promote fashion. She’s a model. That’s what she does.
(Check out her instructions for getting a bikini body in one easy step for Simply Be here.)
Some responses on her Twitter account were unrepeatable.
Tess shows her followers how to wear a bikini in one easy step
In the light of this, consider that last week an Yves Saint Laurent advertisement in Elle magazine was banned by the UK’s advertising watchdog for featuring a very underweight model. The comments in response to this on social media ranged from motherly ‘all she needs is a good meal’ to positively inhumane rants about how the girl looked like a corpse.
Apparently both campaigns were promoting the wrong kind of lifestyle.
But stop and think. What do we mean by promotion? Why does this matter? What exactly is being promoted?
I have a friend who is a professional copywriter and she often says that the objective behind an effective campaign is to sell not the sausage but the sizzle.
In other words, it’s the emotional response to the sausage’s sensory output that is likely to bring the consumer to the table rather than the sausage itself. After all, an intestine rammed with chopped offal doesn’t sound as appealing as the smell of a Cumberland ring fresh off the grill (unless, of course you’re a veggie like me but I’m comfortable running with the sausage metaphor for now).
So, back to Tess in her bikini and the YSL girl laying on the carpet. What’s the sausage being sold here? On a simple level, it’s the fashion but we all know that the printed picture is the end product of a long creative decision making process to create sizzle, so it’s clear that there is some kind of lifestyle being promoted too. Without this spark to fire up the consumer’s emotional response, there’s less likely to be a sale.
In the case of the YSL advertisement, it’s attempting to offer a kind of sophistication but the fact that the girl is lying on the floor in an empty room with seriously wasted thighs and an emaciated chest plays right into the hands of the critics waving the anti ‘heroin chic’ banner. Body dysmorphia is a well-known problem and it’s estimated that eating disorders affect 6.4% of UK adults, so I can understand why there is uneasiness to feature this kind of image in a sphere as public as a popular magazine. At least it got people talking about YSL – and the only thing worse than that, according to Oscar Wilde, is people not talking about it.
Should the advert have been banned? Probably but not necessarily just for the model, I think the shot was poorly styled in terms of the message it was sending. This leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth if this kind of negative publicity was intentional.
Is Tess doing more of the same? What’s her sizzle?
Is Tess really promoting cake abuse as a lifestyle choice?
According to critics avidly waving the anti-cake banners, images of her should also be banned because she too is promoting an unhealthy lifestyle. I suppose if she’d been pictured laying on a kitchen floor surrounded by semi-eaten cream-filled chocolate sponge this would be a fair point.
But that’s not her sizzle. Not once has she encouraged anyone to overeat. She has referred to comfort eating as her only vice but not once has she actively promoted being overweight as a lifestyle choice, like thin people should go out tomorrow and eat the cake store. We’re talking sizzle here, not sausage. She’s not promoting cake, chips, cheese or burgers. She’s promoting fashion, looking good and feeling fabulous in the body you have.
Rather than being a target for do-gooders she should be acknowledged as a champion for the thousands of obese women in this country seeking to improve their self-esteem and lose weight for their health.
And feeling good should be the sizzle that leads to weight loss. Doctors aren’t saying that if people would just try to become a bit more beautiful it will save the NHS, so health should be the focus, not man made aesthetic standards – we’ll leave those to the shallow end of the advertising industry.
Rocking a frock Tess Holliday style – one that fits your curves the size you are now – makes a girl feel good. Who cares if it’ll be baggy in a few months’ time – cinch the waist in with a belt until it’s frock buying time again. Wear red shoes to the supermarket, pout lipstick chops at the mirror in the office and feel sexy in your own behind because it’s this kind of attitude that will get you healthy.
Why settle for the sausage when you can have the sizzle?
A treat for the senses or a plate full of dead animal?
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.
Tess causing a storm on the cover of People magazine this week
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 Mythby 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.
Sunday 9th March was International Women’s Day. Aside from the double spread in the Independent on Sunday showing the world’s most powerful women and the BBC’s World Service’s post on the BBC website simply titled ’50 Women Who Made it Happen’ (well worth making time for) there were several things of note that popped their heads above the parapet.
Sat on the sofa on the Andrew Marr show, Sarah Baxter, Deputy Editor, Sunday Times, expressed her delight over India Knights’ article in the same paper on why the best spies are middle aged Mums – “inconspicuous and able to shuffle around with shopping bags”, equipped with unrivalled powers of tickling. I have thought exactly the same thing myself many, many times. It’s why female suicide bombers are such a valuable weapon – the fairytale of woman’s innocence vs. man’s wickedness is a well-established tactical tool.
The cost of raising standards in Early Years care has to be met by someone – so think these happy dollies in the sun.
Reference was made at some point to the recently published Family and Childcare Trust’s Childcare Costs Survey. Reading the report for myself, I was shocked but not entirely surprised in the rise in cost of childcare but in particular, the statistic that part-time care from a childminder has risen by 4.3 per cent in the past year. I have many friends who are childminders and the rise in this cost is clear: the government continues to raise the bar in terms of standards of care whilst cutting funding. Mandatory training courses, which used to be free, are no longer funded and in my area, free to access Sure Start run playgroups and the like are now off limits to childminders – the costs of these have to be met somewhere and childminders already earn very little for doing a very demanding job. This in the face of the House of Lords Committee on Affordable Childcare asserting that more money needs to be spent on bringing more graduates into the private, voluntary and independent sector and that Government funded 2-year old places should be in settings that are rated as Good or Outstanding by Ofsted. More for less seems to be the way of things across the board these days but I can’t help thinking of the damage this is doing not just to working parents and the private childcare industry but also the small people who have no say in these things.
Then, a little later in the morning, the last item on Nicky Campbell’s Big Questions (BBC1) asked: is it more important for Christians to do good than God? This prompted some often heated but well-reasoned discussion between several female academics and writers. Interesting stuff, I thought, sat on the sofa in my pjs and slippers, cup of tea in one hand, six year old daughter on my knee. The issues raised included the man-made nature of doctrine and whether women were historically excluded from the process. Perfectly good points, I felt – perhaps even pivotal to the whole discussion. Bravo, I thought as I quaffed more tea.
That was until Peter Hitchens, columnist for the Daily Mail, opened his pie hole and dismissed the previous ten minutes’ discussion as “bureaucratic, theological flim flam” and continued to sum up his opinion thus:
“There has to be something in your mind which stops you from doing a wicked thing when the temptation is there to do it. If you have no doctrine, you will do that wicked thing because there will nothing to stop you. That’s why our society, each year, kills 180 thousand babies in the womb and thinks it’s good.”
And boom! We all whiz back fifty years and the women may as well have not bothered turning up (or going to school for that matter).
All dinosaurs love butter pie
So, this is where the room for growth lies. Yes it’s in speech, yes it’s in education and yes, it’s in giving women the mobility to get into positions where they can bring balance to the important decisions we make as a society but it will take a while for the dinosaurs who choose to adhere to the old ways to die out. For now, we must keep them happy with pie and wait for their ideas to fade with them.
