When my sister and I were teenagers, our parents went away for the weekend leaving us to our own devices.
Is this a tale of wild parties? Nope. We were far too boring.
Instead, we started a two day super low calorie diet.
Started.
The first meal was a raw egg beaten into orange juice.
One sip was enough for both of us. We’d been brought up not to waste food, but…down the sink it went and the diet went in the bin.
At the time, my sister and I were slim, healthy and fit, but we were both self-conscious about our busty figures. ‘You’re an inverted triangle shape,’ the magazines told us (apparently is a carrot shape now). We could have been apples or pears or hourglasses. We didn’t want to be any of them. We wanted to be like the girls on TV.
The negative body imagery I grew up with was not simply through media and peer-pressure (then nowhere near as bad as it is nowadays) but from years of little comments (made as if we weren’t there) by the extended family:
- ‘He’s rather a trencherman isn’t he?’ (*)
- ‘Her feet are large – I imagine she’ll grow up to be big.’ (She didn’t.)
- ‘You’re not as thin as you used to be.’ (I’d just had a baby.)
- ‘Isn’t that dress is a little tight/low cut/short?’ (No.)
- ‘Their busts must be from their Polish great-great-great-grandmother.’ (She wasn’t Polish and no one knew what she looked like.)
(*In case you don’t know, a ‘trencherman’ is an old-fashioned term which suggests someone who’d not only eat their meal but what it was served in (a trencher originally being a piece of stale bread used as a plate).)
One of my earliest memories was hearing someone say Dad ought to lose weight and being upset because I thought he was lovely and cuddly. It wasn’t till much later that I realised the risks to his health.
He really did try.
He started every fad diet going, and what Dad ate, the whole family ate. Luckily for us the diets only lasted as long as Dad could bear them (generally about two days).
He kept a complicated graph on which noted his weight daily down to the quarter pound. When later quizzed as to why, he said it was because of a diet he’d been on which had worked. Was he still on the diet? No. He’d just kept the graph habit. My sister and I rolled our eyes. We didn’t understand the genetic element of the situation nor the psychological one.
I had a different battle at eighteen. A combination of negative body image, a broken heart and struggling with my A levels meant that my life felt out of control, so I controlled the one thing I could: eating.
I wasn’t trying to make myself ill. I’d had a friend who became anorexic and was taken out of school a few years earlier. But caught up in my own misery, I couldn’t see I was risking the same.
There was little recognition of eating disorders then. They were seen as a lack of self-control rather than a psychological issue. The parents of the friend with anorexia initially insisted she was just losing puppy fat. But she’d told me she’d started cutting out food because bullying from boys at school and feeling second best to her brother had become too much. I hope she got the treatment she needed. The parents completely cut her off from her former friends and I never found out.
I myself didn’t become anorexic because Dad spotted how thin I’d become and said so. I realised it must be bad if he noticed and started to change what I was eating.
It was a struggle to get back to normal, not least because shortly afterwards I went to university (despite duffing up my A levels) and was too shy to go to the refectory to eat with strangers. I fundamentally lived on crackers and soup until I made lifelong friends and started reaching a sensible weight.
You might not believe that if you saw me now. A combination of menopause, medication, genes (perhaps) and a sedentary job mean I’m no longer a carrot but an apple and need to lose several pounds.
Proffered help is sometimes trying.
A (male) doctor said ‘It’s so easy for post-menopausal women to gain weight but so hard to lose it.’ Little chuckle. ‘My wife’s forever complaining when I tell her she can’t eat carbs!’
How humorous.
I drink wine and I don’t exercise near enough, but I prefer healthy food. I’ve never been a comfort eater, but I am a boredom eater.
I explained all this to the doctor, who said that my ideal diet was poached chicken, poached eggs, lentils and no carbs. Thinking I’d infinitely prefer to give up wine than pasta, I got off the call with a desperate urge to make a massive bowl of macaroni cheese.
Instead I cooked eggs. (Poached, with no orange juice in sight.)
My paternal grandmother despaired over her post-menopausal but quite average weight and her greying hair and her soft face. I loved all of it and couldn’t see the reason for her distress then. But I understand now.
I’d like to be thinner not just – or even – because it would be healthier, but because deep down I still want to look like women on TV, even though they’re the middle-aged ones not the teenage ones.
Is that a society thing or a me thing? Dad and his daily weight graph is no different to me and my weight-loss apps which are only relevant if I’m eating less and exercising more.
Part of me wants to say ‘Come back next week and see if I’ve rejoined the gym and lost some weight.’
The bigger part knows ‘Maybe I will, maybe I won’t, but I need to love myself as I am either way.’
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Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI). Image credit ID 21036277 | Apples And Pears © Elena Schweitzer | Dreamstime.com