In my family, to be pinched is to be loved. Aunties and uncles would nip my cheeks between their fingers and coo. They’d grab my thin arms and ask my mother if I was being fed. She later told me this made her feel like a bad parent, but I learned that I enjoyed adults showing concern over my frame, even at the age of five.
The desire to always be thinner feels never-ending.Credit: Dionne Gain
When I became a tween, thinness was a privilege I needed to maintain. The 2010s were filled with gossip magazines and online posts celebrating disordered eating habits under the guise of wellness: the Kardashians promoted detox teas (glorified laxatives). Celebrity trainers promoted the “baby food diet” of only consuming puréed food. A two-week lemon juice cleanse to remove all the toxins from your body had “worked wonders” for Beyoncé. During these formative years, the world told me that chewing was out and liquidised food was in.
On Tumblr and Instagram, girls with aspirational “thigh gaps” shared their diets: an apple for breakfast, green tea for lunch, and three rice cakes for dinner. Somehow, they would say, they never got hungry, they just didn’t have a big appetite. I followed their directions for as long as my body could withstand before I would inevitably give up and eat something delicious, associating my appetite with failure.
As I aged out of my teenage years, this thinking continued. The issue is: I thought I’d grow out of feeling and thinking this way. That when I started working, I wouldn’t have the time to care. My life would be too glamorous, too sexy, and too exciting to be bogged down by the pursuit of thinness. Yet, I still find myself thinking about my body more times a day than I care to admit.
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Even though I’m the fittest I’ve ever been, and we live in an era of so-called body positivity and acceptance, the feeling of inadequacy hasn’t faded, and the diet recommendations never seem to abate.
The demands feel like a punishment for meeting too many levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Only eat between 1 and 4pm. Don’t eat fruit. Drink apple cider vinegar. Carry a five-litre bottle of water on you at all times.
This depressing bank of knowledge might sound like I have an eating disorder. I haven’t been diagnosed with one. Many people around me exhibit these behaviours, and if you ask around, you’d likely see their prevalence too. Older women complain about their weight and say things like, “Oh no, I just couldn’t” when they’re offered anything delicious at a morning tea. I look at them and wonder if it’s a sign of what’s to come for me, if I will still be internally battling myself at their age.
At a wedding, an older woman told me she had stopped eating to fit into her dress. At a clothing store, the salesperson, a woman in her 60s, tells my petite mum she needs to drink smoothies to flatten the lumps on her belly – a body that carried three babies. Self-hatred and the desire to be skinny isn’t a teenage obsession, as I had once thought. It’s a lifelong ambition.
