Dear weight-watchers (Not the company…)

I write this in a state of conflicting emotions. I write this both openly to the world and to the loving friends and family who come across me in their life. I write this in the hope of bringing attention to something that you have most likely simply never thought to consider. I write this to open up a conversation while closing down a behaviour you’ve perhaps never thought to question. I write this because I feel I need to, if only to get it all of my chest and out of my head.

Care-free Days before diet culture invaded

I wouldn’t consider myself someone who is overly concerned about my weight. I have been lucky that, despite my mental health struggles, food, weight and eating have not really been a source of anxiety. I grew up in a house that had both a vegetable garden and a consistently heavily stocked chocolate biscuit selection. I like to think I was one of few children in my year at school who enjoyed both brussel sprouts and celeriac and Sunday lunches that ranged from your standard roast chicken to pork and crackling and, a favourite of mine, Goose – on special occasions only. Did I grow up around some diet culture conversation that probably had a minor impact on my body image? Yes. I definitely have family members who talked – and still talk – about weight with a more negative view on the ‘bigger’ end. Phrases like “I need to lose some weight so I’m not eating potatoes” were not that unfamiliar and, from others, suggestions that having that ice cream on a hot day was a slippery slope to eating ice cream every day…with the dreaded possible result of – dun dun duhhhh – “getting fat”. Do I blame these friends and relatives for having these behaviours and beliefs? Of course not. Am I grateful (if only for this reason) for social media that exposed me to ‘diet culture’, ‘fatphobia’ and ‘body confidence’ at just the right age to grow up knowing what I do now? Hell yes. Does it mean I feel completely unaffected by the effect of diet culture? Hell no. Hence, here I am, writing this letter to you all.

Enjoying moving for my own joy...

...While eating what I please

So, I guess I should start by explaining what I mean when I say diet culture. Diet culture, put simply, is the belief, and the way the world validates and encourages this, that what we look like is more important than anything else. Diet culture is the way in which we are told from all directions, from the moment we are born, that we need to look a certain way to be accepted. Diet culture ignores health and focuses on size. What’s more, it changes its mind all the time about what we should be striving for. At times, it’s been the super skinny body we associate with traditional runway models, but sometimes the diet lords decide we need narrow waists but big boobs, flat tummies but big bums, gorgeous pregnant bellies but these must vanish immediately into toned tummies as soon as the baby is out…The rule of the game is, once you think you’ve understood the rules, the rules must always change. So, in conclusion, you can never win. As soon as you start going to the gym to get toned, abs and muscles on women and girls are no longer ‘acceptable’ and curves are ‘in’. As soon as you dare to accept your body how it is, you’re becoming lazy. Diet culture will spread the rumour that as soon as you gain weight, you’re less worthy. Diet culture will tell you that the reason you’re bigger is because you’re not trying hard enough; not eating enough salad or going to the gym for enough hours in the week. Diet culture will shame anyone over a size 12, telling the world that they aren’t looking after themselves or putting the work in, and that they are the ‘before’ photo of an ‘after’ that they are just not obtaining yet…but if they just eat less ‘bad’ food, they will get there.

Early days of being introduced to Body Positivity and the
dangers of Diet Culture

What’s ‘bad’ food? I don’t’ think I even need to explain this as it’s ingrained in everyone and parents teach it to their children from the moment they’re born. Bad is anything that might possibly bring you joy. ‘Bad’ is all those delicious chocolate biscuits in the tin that I routinely had 3 of – signs of my OCD evident as a child – after school. ‘Bad’ is that stack of delicious pancakes you made with flour, eggs and milk, perhaps drizzled with sugar and lemon or chocolate sauce for breakfast last weekend. ‘Bad’ is the daily ice cream you’ve had in the 40-degree heatwave just to give yourself that tiniest feeling of refreshment and joy while you’re otherwise busy melting into the floor. ‘Bad’ is the hamburger you dared to choose instead of the grilled chicken on the menu. You get my drift. ‘Bad’ is ridiculous. You know what happens when you start labelling food as good or bad? You create a hierarchy and separate foods into moral categories rather than just accepting them for what they are. Brussel sprouts are brussel sprouts. They’re a vegetable. Some like the taste of them, others don’t. They contain things that help your body but if you ate just brussel sprouts every day for a week, I can assure you…you’d probably feel pretty awful and your body probably would not thank you. Chocolate biscuits are also delicious and so is my 1kg Lindt bunny I brought for easter. I don’t care what the ‘calories’ are. My bunny will sit on the counter top, being nibbled at each time I walk past, until he’s all gone. Between nibbles, I’ll probably consume some delicious vegetables and maybe even some cheese…Food is delicious. It’s fuel for my body and I will not let magazines, adverts and voices in my head and the heads of others, tell me it’s ‘bad’.

My first 1kg Lindt Bunny...2020
not the one I'm currently consuming

I feel like I got slightly side-tracked there, but it was necessary in a way before I get onto the real crux of this letter: The response of people around me to my recent change in weight, and how it makes me feel.

Even writing this letter makes me feel slightly uncomfortable as it draws attention to exactly that which I am complaining about, and appears to almost ask for what I’m trying to express makes me uncomfortable. Last summer, as all those who have read my recent letters will know, I had a major emergency surgery, months of pretty bad recovery and general health in relation to this, and then, during it all, a significant break-up. I’d go as far as to describe last summer as relatively traumatic for me. I spent a lot of time both physically and mentally unwell and in pain, both physically and emotionally.

The beginning of my 'weight-loss journey'
if this was some disturbing article about how to lose weight fast!

I should preface the next part by saying that in the 3-4 years preceding summer 2022, I’d gained the most weight I’ve ever gained and been the biggest I’ve been in my 27 years. I think this came from becoming very comfortable in a relationship where my behaviour around food, particularly take-aways, and Ben and Jerries ice cream, changed and I found myself eating significantly more of many things that brought me joy while also bringing my waist and belly size, several sizes up. Am I complaining? Not at all. As I said before, I am lucky to have been exposed to some amazing body positive, anti-diet culture influencers that taught me to stop caring about what a set of scales – had I owned one – might say, or what number might be written on the irritating label scratching the back of my neck. I got great joy of dancing around my flat, and my boyfriend, with minimal clothes on, showing love to my belly and my rolls and describing myself as ‘curvy’. My boyfriend at the time loved my body and I spent a lot of time telling myself that perhaps this is just how my body was right now and that’s ok. When people around me discussed weight loss and not eating certain delicious things to lose weight, I would find myself feeling simultaneously smug that I was not forcing myself to stop eating anything while also feeling slightly like their choice to not eat the potatoes or the chocolate cake was a judgement towards me. I was living largely in neutrality, leaning towards kindness and love, towards my body size and shape, while also surrounded by whispers of diet culture occasionally slipping into my subconscious before I’d swipe them away and dig into my KFC bucket or Chocolate Fudge Brownie tub.

Bigger and Happier days compared to the smaller and physically/mentally unwell days

I was mentally incredibly low here and yet probably physically appeared my most 'healthy'
i.e. fitting the socially acceptable body shape of the time

heSo, back to last June. I fall ill. I have major surgery. I spend 7 weeks off work, months recovering and healing. My diet confused and my tummy shrunken from weeks of not being allowed to eat and then fearing food in case it should send me hunched, cramping and crying back to hospital. By the Autumn, I was coming to discover the effect of the preceding months on my body size and shape. My pyjamas of the previous winter fell down with every step and my previously fitted tops hung off me. Re-building my wardrobe, I was finding that that little number with so much power over so many, had shrunk by at least 2 sizes, sometimes 3 (shop dependent, because as we all know, another way you can be made to feel bad about your body is thinking you’re a ‘small’ and then going into the next shop and the small is just ‘too small’ and you’re in fact – got forbid – a ‘medium’). Diet culture would have me dancing around my flat, cheering myself on for shrinking, and what’s annoying, is that part of me does want to. Even though I call myself body positive and confident, my brain has to acknowledge the perks of being smaller in a world where this is celebrated, envied and encouraged. Yet, battling with this celebratory voice in my head, is the one screaming at everyone who dares to comment on my size change. As with every new interaction I have with someone who perhaps hasn’t seen me since early last year, or has mostly known me through photos from the past few years on social media, I am received with comments of ‘Have you lost weight?’, ‘You’re looking very slim!’ with the added insult to injury of ‘You look great’ or ‘You look so healthy’.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ I hear you asking yourselves. ‘Take the compliment’, I hear you say. But while I’d love to say it’s that simple. It isn’t. Behind these so-called compliments, is the implication that I didn’t look great before. That before the ‘great’ me of now, was a less great, larger me. And don’t get me started on the irony of being told I look healthy, when I only got to this size through excruciating pain, the risk of an imploding bowel, being unable – not unwilling, and, in actuality, starving hungry – to eat what and when I wanted and the continuing fear of it happening again. Yes, I acknowledge that my body now is pretty much what it probably is meant to be. It’s at its baseline, the place where it sits when I am just living my life, eating a relatively standard diet which includes a good mix of vegetables, meat and Lindt chocolate bunny and never setting foot in a gym or moving faster than a standard walking pace. This is the me I recognise from my late teens and early 20’s and yet I do not appreciate it being celebrated quite as openly as it seems to be.

Beach Body Ready - because everyone body is, as long as they are on a beach...with their body

I find myself struggling with what to say when told how great I look following this significant weight loss. I won’t thank them because I don’t see this as a compliment. To be a compliment implies that I am now improved on what I was before. My value is somehow higher now than this time last year. It also implies that I have done something to get this way rather than it just being a natural consequence of a combination of events: having major surgery, not eating for a while, being more anxious around eating, my relationship ending and losing certain eating habits, being sad and anxious about both the surgery and break-up and therefore losing my appetite…These reasons are 99.9% not things I’d like to repeat.

I would rather be pre-emergency me, larger but not in pain, and mentally more stable, than the me 4 months later, still healing, still fearful of hospital, still uncertain about what she can safely eat and crying daily with anxiety that also stopped me eating regularly. I would take back my bigger size in a heartbeat if it meant I didn’t have to go through any of last year again. Yet people tell me how great I look and are surprised when I'm not instantly grateful for the intended compliment... Should I be grateful for all of last years trauma? At least I know now that, in the event I gain the weight back, all I need to do to lose it is get a blocked intestine, surgery at 3am and months of emotional and physical discomfort.

“But it’s a compliment!” you say again? And we return to the problem at the bottom of all of this. I should be grateful to be smaller and that people are noticing it and congratulating me for it. My poor health, and heartbreak, behind it are not relevant. It isn’t relevant that someone double my size could be significantly healthier than me physically and just be naturally bigger. I have bigger, much healthier friends. Yet those individuals may never get the ‘compliments’, because they are not what society thinks is aesthetically ‘good’. What’s more, and what’s perhaps worse, is that part of me writing this, hopes it does draw attention to my weight loss and lead to some compliments. Because society has taught us all to be this way.

Recent photo that I like for the memories 

I sit here writing this with my self-esteem, heart and confidence playing a game of tug-of-war both wanting to scream at the world to stop treating bodies like their size determines their worth. To stop saying that smaller is better no matter the cause or consequence. To think before they speak. While from the other side of the rope, screaming ‘tell me how great I look!’, ‘hey, nobody congratulates you on your non-existent pregnancy or offers you seats on the bus or tube anymore! Win!’. It’s a constant battle but my overriding belief is this: nobody should be commenting on other people’s bodies uninvited. I specify the ‘uninvited’ part as I appreciate that some people are trying, intentionally to change their body – whether it be gaining or losing, muscle or fat – and they actively want or ask for validation.

The rule I follow, which I struggle to understand why not everybody does, is that, unless invited, do not step into anybody’s body image world. Do not invite yourself to decide how someone should be feeling about their body through choosing to give your opinion on the way they look. Of course, it’s natural, that as human beings, when we see someone, our brain may direct us to thoughts on how they appear to us: “wow, they’re so slim”, “look at his muscles”, "I would never dye my hair that shade of green" “that is a large individual. He/she must eat a lot of cake”, “I wish I looked like that” etc. but have the courtesy to not speak these thoughts aloud, and have the growth mindset to question why your brain is identifying these individuals, labelling or judging them, in this way. You know nothing about them or how and why they are the size or shape they are.

You know when you’re with a young child who hasn’t learned social etiquette and boundaries in the supermarket or on the street and someone with a visible difference walks past and the child exclaims loudly “why does that person look like that?”? The embarrassment you feel and the speed at which you intervene to hush them and rapidly move away? We are embarrassed because children are curious and haven’t learned what is acceptable to say in front of other people without a filter. As we grow-up and are exposed to the different people in the world around us and taught about what is socially acceptable, we learn not to say these things. Apart from nasty, uneducated people on public transport or who have drunk too much shouting rude things about those they deem unattractive, mostly, we know not to reference people’s appearance to their face. Yet, for some reason, when it comes to losing weight or being smaller, especially if your smallness and weight-loss fits within the current diet-culture model of an acceptable, or even highly valued, body size and shape, it is deemed complimentary and therefore acceptable to verbalise our views on these situations out-loud, without considering that it might not actually be received as a compliment.

Look at that happy face of me several sizes bigger than the smaller me,
crying every day a few months ago

Even in instances when I know someone has been trying to change their body and I notice it, I intentionally will keep my observation to myself until it is brought up by them. I intentionally did not compliment my friend who had lost weight on purpose through dieting when it was clearly visible to me, because I didn’t want to place value on her appearance above the rest of her value as a human being and friend. I waited until she brought it up and then made a comment that intended to place no particular value on her body, acknowledging her success at meeting her own personal goal but not implying in anyway that she is better or worse than she was. I simply expressed my hope that she is happy with the situation and how she got there. Because that is what really matters.

So, rant over.

I’ve said what I need to say. We live in a weird world, and we can’t be blamed for thinking the way we do based on what everything and everybody around us tells us to. What we can do, is learn to tune into those voices and question them. To ask why and, perhaps next time, to remember not to give those voices in our head the opportunity to speak out-loud because what you're thinking might not always be 'just a compliment'.

Would rather be her - bigger and in lockdown...

Than her...smaller and in pain...

Thanks for listening,