The Way We Eat Now

In the absence of collective action, the main way anyone can shield themselves against an obesogenic world is through embarking on an individual programme of diet and exercise. Yet here, again, the stigma of weight serves to thwart us. There is now a gathering body of evidence that obesity stigma negatively affects a person’s efforts to lose weight. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever tried to force themselves on a diet, only to fall rapidly off the wagon, thwarted by a debilitating sense of shame.

When I was an overweight teenager, the whole experience of eating was quite different to how it feels to me now, as a so-called ‘normal weight’ middle-aged woman. It was the difference between eating in an atmosphere of freedom – as I am lucky enough to do now – and eating in a cloud of judgement. I remember feeling that I did not really have permission to eat most of the foods that I wanted to eat, especially in public. Because of my age (I was born in 1974), I feared fat more than carbohydrates. This translated into years of pointlessly and joylessly denying myself butter, because you were not allowed to eat butter – or so I believed – if you were bigger than a size 10 (a US size 6).

During my overweight years, I had two completely different ways of eating, one for public and one for private. In public – most of the time, anyway – I ate what I believed to be socially acceptable. When I was at university, my best friend was anorexic and I felt that if I followed her lead, I must be above reproach. I ate dreary salads made from shredded iceberg lettuce and dried-up chicken breast with no dressing. I ate tiny portions of unseasoned poached salmon and cottage cheese. I drank gallons of Diet Coke. All of these items had an unpleasant overtone of duty.

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