Dieting, particularly the celeb-endorsed, obscenely faddish, scarily unobtainable and highly unhealthy kind, is finally starting to get a bit of a lambasting. And thank God. Kim Kardashian’s waist looks like it was drawn by a horny 16-year old boy. Even the ordinary diets, with names like Atkins and Dukan, seem old fashioned and dated, the language around them cringing and loaded. We can all agree that diet lollipops and teas that make you shit yourself have no business lurking about on social media, making young women angrily grab handfuls of their perfectly lovely and completely normal bodies and commit to starving themselves. But the thing is, this dieting culture, stoked by the patriarchy who find it convenient to keep us quiet and small and tired, gives losing weight the normal, slow, sensible way a really bad name. And in a world where self-love prevails and has entwined itself inextricably within the feminist agenda, dieting is now the ultimate, unfeminist betrayal.
Dieting; along with high heels, Brazilian waxes, girlish print dresses, Botox, smiling at authority figures to get out of trouble, makeup, not trying to Have It All, pink and many other confusing and often contradictory things, is on the Bad Feminist list. Essentially, there is a feeling that the sisterhood definitely wouldn’t approve. We’re meant to be taking up more space, not consciously trying to shrink from it. And while I don’t agree with most of the things resigned to that list (my erratic grooming regime is borne out of sheer laziness, although I admit that I like that my groin feels a little revolutionary; like a permanently defiant placard) a year ago, fresh from my marathon where I was bursting with pride and almost couldn’t believe what my amazing body had just accomplished, I would have been quite happy to lob dieting on that bonfire. But then I had a baby and my body changed.
If you know me, you know I like food. Almost all food. With my first baby, I spent my maternity leave hoovering cake at least three times a week. Every red velvet crumb and sticky Danish icing that I slurped off my fingers seemed to be counteracted by this little person hanging off my boobs all day and night long, magically gobbling all of my forbidden calories. I ate the creamy, cheesy pasta. I scoffed the biscuits. I embraced the Nutella-slathered crumpets. And while I hardly morphed into a Bambi-legged waif, the baby weight just sort of, well, fell off. I know. What a nobhead. I felt leaky and sore and a little dazed, but I didn’t feel impossibly different, and so I embraced motherhood and how fucking powerful it made me feel. But three years later and eleven weeks into a baby second time around, my body is beginning to feel alien. After an initial weight loss of literal placenta and baby, the doughy paunch that my middle curdled into has remained resolute and stubborn. Every pair of jeans I frantically try and squeeze myself into causes a comic, fleshy handle to spill out over the top. Everything jiggles, like my body is eagerly trying to escape. I wish it didn’t bother me. I wish I could tenderly take it in my hands and thank it for carrying my beautiful baby; for creating and protecting life and then carrying me through childbirth, but it’s not enough. I’m so brainwashed – the little flashy ads on Facebook telling me I can transform belly fat into muscle in three easy steps run so deep – that my cruelly perceived fatness is getting in the way of my feminism. Because when it comes to talking up other women’s bodies in all their gloriously different guises, I can shout about them proudly till the cows come home. I love that social media and even, gasp, some advertising, is beginning to show little love handles, folds, rolls and dimples. Brands like Billie and Lonely (unlike the mainstream bandwagon jumpers) are doing so much for the body positivity movement. I am overjoyed that (some) people are finally getting sick of thin white bodies, but I can’t seem to translate that joy into peace within my own new, different body. And that feels like a deeply disappointing and highly unfeminist failure. So, when did weight get so tangled up with feminism? And when did wanting to lose some of it make us get so coy and hush hush about it?
Dieting feels like a relenting of sorts – an acquiescence of power and space as we succumb to the capitalist machine that insists, we’d feel so much happier if we only had that beach body. But what about when losing a bit of weight isn’t for anyone else? Not for that hot guy on your commute. Or that hot girl where you get your coffee. Not for your partner and certainly not for the patriarchy. I want to lose a bit of weight for me. Not by starving myself, but by easing up on the crap stuff and dialling up the exercise; patiently and gently with the respect that my body deserves. So why do I feel so guilty? The cult of beauty and thinness is ugly and pervasive, and I don’t like that I’ve let that shame creep under my skin and settle there, making me feel itchy and fractious, but identity is so fragile. So much of ‘me’ is wrapped up in my clothes, and not being able to wear the majority of my wardrobe has left me feeling lost and unmoored. I’m not trying to turn myself into something I’m not, I’m just reaching for the familiarity of the clothes I carefully spent time choosing to reflect who I am. I desperately want us to normalise the sagging skin, shapeless tits, droopy arses and chunky sausages of fat underneath our bra lines so prevalent in post pregnant bodies. But I also want us to confront the double standards within feminism that cause us to nitpick and judge each other’s choices. The dogmatic approach to what self care and ‘good’ feminism looks like can feel relentless and exclusionary. It’s taken me a long old time, but I’m able to separate my body from my self worth. I don’t hate it, I’m just trying to take back some control of it, in a time where almost everything else is wildly out of my control. And that, actually, feels like the most powerfully feminist statement I can make right now.