Thoughts for the Week

I am approximately 5 feet and 6 inches tall and weigh just under 147 pounds, giving me a body mass index that is closer to the top end of average. I wear size 10 to 12 clothes, well below the British average, and have a moderately good diet. Save for a few years in my late teens I have always felt confident in my own body. This I have recently realised is a rare commodity. Most of the young women I know are dangerously preoccupied with their weight. What started out as teenage fussiness is gradually morphing into damaging patterns of self-loathing, manifesting itself in vanity, lack of confidence and habitual self-inflicted starvation.
Take one person I know, only seventeen years old she is petit and pretty. This weekend she watched a television programme about calories and decided that in order to lose weight she needs to burn off twice as much as she is eating (only 280 calories every day). To save on lost time she denied herself food for the whole weekend and on Tuesday she became delirious and blacked out before making it in to work.
This is not an isolated incident. Over half of the young women I know skip breakfast, under the false assumption that they will lose weight by starving themselves until lunchtime. That means that on any given day in my place of work half of the women present, which could be half the work force, are functioning completely without sustenance and energy from eight in the morning until one in the afternoon. If that’s true of most workplaces it’s a miracle anything gets done before twelve.
I’ve known young, active women make it through the day on caffeine and a single biscuit before heading to the gym for a two-hour work out. Others binge one day and make up for it by eating nothing the next, or starve themselves for a whole day in preparation for an evening date. How is it that intelligent, educated women can be so completely clueless when it comes to the needs and care of their own bodies? No one would ever attempt to deny themselves water for days on end so why do they insist on denying themselves food?
This destructive relationship with food seems to come from years of indoctrination from adverts, films and trashy magazines. If someone completed a survey I’m sure they’d find some sort of correlation between the number of women’s magazines bought and the number of breakfasts eaten each month. Why does the media think it has the right to tell us normal, shapely, healthy women that we are not beautiful, we are not desirable and we will not under any circumstances be involved in a loving relationship if we go up a dress size? It’s this constant comparison to other women that is the problem. Growing up with a size 8 sister never exactly boosted my body confidence and the older you get the more forcefully ideal feminine shapes are forced upon you.
The main issue I have with constant dieting is the effect it has on our relationships. Pretty much all social situations seem to involve food and if you’re desperately trying not to eat then surely that is going to have an effect on your relationships with family, friends and partners. I know that most of the time my boyfriend and I spend together is structured around meal times. We love food. We go out to dinner, we make pancakes for breakfast, my housemate and her boyfriend smoked out the house burning chocolate when making a dessert, but you should have heard them laughing about it. I suppose we are lucky in having had long-term relationships during our formative years. We had love and affection that made us self-confident and easy in our own bodies, making it much easier to ignore the boyish figures of the celebrities constantly thrust in our faces. But I truly believe that feeling comfortable in your own skin starts with how you view yourself, not now others do.
Most of all I’d like to tell all the women I know that they’re my friends because they’re funny, because they’re intelligent and because I value their conversation and their opinions. I have fun with them and that’s not because they’ve got long blond hair and a waist smaller than my thigh. These young women I know are also incredibly beautiful and I can’t understand why they are unable to see it.