Women laughing with salad, alone.
Jodie (not pictured) is our Winnipeg Squad Leader and this is her first piece for us! By day, she coordinates a youth program at a neighbourhood centre and by night she is a sex columnist, anti-street harassment crusader, freelance writer, and a vegan food lover.
At several points of my life I have been on a diet of some sort: the first, a simple reduced calorie and fat plan I spied in my mom’s Prevention magazine and adopted when able at the age of 11. I was a little chubby as a kid and had never let it bother me until I spied my child psychologist’s report that stated I was slightly overweight and had a tendency to overeat. Since my doctor had never seen me eat, I knew this had to be the opinion/observations of my parents and decided I would show them.
I put my little overachiever mind to it and started blending up ‘Malted Chocolate Shakes’ (ice, water, cocoa powder, and vanilla) instead of powdered lemonade. I snacked on ‘low-cal’ snacks that I measured into portions. I ran extra hard in gym. I never really ever lost a considerable amount of weight, but never really worried about it: I was incredibly active, had great grades, and forgot about it all for a short while.
Then, I started noticing how nearly all of the women in my life – both friends and family – were on a diet or trying to lose weight or had just bought some new workout tapes practically all the time. I watched them pass on bread to dip in my gramps’ famous spaghetti, wear dark t-shirts to the beach over their bathing suits, criticize the way they looked in pictures, talk about being happy once they lost ‘5 pounds’, boast about bulimic tendencies, and saw them skip out on KFC for Slim Fast.
I learned that being on diets is something that women do and if you’re stuck for conversation you can always talk about what helped your friends’ friend lose 20 pounds or about how much you want cake, but are ‘being good’ this week. Commiserating about how ‘nothing tastes better than thin feels’ and being proud of each other for our ‘discipline’ was the glue that cemented many of my teenaged bonds.
Women enjoying her Cheat Day.
There are times when I end up in a social situation where women are speaking about their lives and it seems like it will, inevitably, come to a point where it’s time to trash our bodies or to perform the act of dieting. It’s at these points that I will, inevitably, want to get the hell out of there. I am all for the ladies I know getting healthy and being active and talking about food: food is my life, it’s my shit, it’s the way I am creative. I can’t paint worth shit, but I can bewitch your tastebuds with flavors and textures of a great plate.
The problem is that even if we’re talking about being healthy, we have such a skewed idea of what that really means(thanks, media and ladymags). I cannot stand women bragging about how little they ate. I cannot stand measuring their worth by sizes and inches and pounds when I know that they’ve just gotten a promotion, been a great friend to someone in a hard time, or just finished planning a great charity event. Let’s hear about that instead, please. Tell me about your half marathon or mastering side crow pose and how strong, badass and capable working out makes you feel. Tell me how much you love growing your own food or all the colors and smells in your CSA or how you spent $250 on a meal that was totally inspiring and totally worth it or share your new relish recipe with me. Let’s focus on our accomplishments and how amazing and capable we are instead of paying penance for not being a size two.
The language of diet talk is so problematic: things are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for you. We define food by its calorie count or grams of sugar and fat, but not how it fits in with our lives or culture or personal histories. We learn ‘discipline’ and ‘restraint’. We have ‘cheat’ days or ‘treat’ ourselves so that we can ‘shrink’. The fact that the diet industry is primarily marketed to women and that so many of these words have gendered connotations is no accident and we perpetuate this every single time we use this language to describe our eating habits. We raise our hands and vouch that women should be tiny, guilt-ridden, good and restrained. If we stray from that, it makes us bad – and we know how society feels about bad girls who dare question the role cut out for them.
Friends who were much smaller than me would talk about how disgusting they were and how gross their stomach/legs/arms/chins were: not unlike that scene from Mean Girls. This hit me right in my soft tummy: if they thought that they were unbearable to look at, love, or even like what in the hell could they think of my robust figure? Diet talk hurts everyone: the more we talk about the importance of losing weight, the more we believe it and the more insecure we make those around us.
Then, I moved to Banff and being on a diet wasn’t something I had to worry about anymore. We were so underpaid and so broke that we were eating less, simply because we couldn’t afford to eat much more than the bare minimum to stay alive. Being able to choose what we ate was a luxury – eating whatever was on sale was more our style and talking about our bodies was something we didn’t have time for when we were working long shifts and pinching our pennies. At the end of the day we were just glad our bodies held us up through another 20 minute walk up the hill to our apartment.
Women with a drinking problem.
This was the age when I began to build rich and real female friendships based on more than the mutual loathing of our thighs or the mutual yearning for foods which were forbidden. We came from all corners of the world and most of us were there seeking healing from a shitty thing in our lives through distance and adventure. We talked about philosophies of homelands, our newly awakened sense of carrying baggage, the daily struggle of working a minimum wage job in an expensive tourist town, and what we were going to do after the season ended.
I’m not in poverty now like I was that winter, but I have decided to drop the diet talk and stop apologizing for my size. My health is part of my life, but it’s not all of it and the act of depriving myself simply to take up less space does not interest me like it once did. Since I started having fuller, richer, more varied conversations with my friends it’s kind of amazing how much more I love my body and how much less I worry about how I look. It’s freed me up to be a better, more inquisitive friend and to encourage self-acceptance amongst the other women in my girl gangs. This week, give it a shot: ban diet talk and see what comes up instead.
Fat Girl Food Squad 