Driven Mad by the Mirror: 'Ellie's' Experience of Body Image and Food

We made it through January! And we made it through the tornado of aspirational diet and body content swamping our lives and our social feeds! One of my most popular posts ever (by a long shot) was this piece about my experience through a period of disordered eating and how I recovered. The responses to this post floored me. Friends I considered close admitted their internal and invisible struggles with eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and general food/body anxiety. Upon receiving these messages, I kept asking myself ‘how did I not know ____ was going through this?’. But then I remembered that no one had noticed my descent into obsession either. Since I wrote that post, nearly two years ago, my astonishment at the amount of people who suffer from internal turmoil over their diet and body, and the extent that they suffer from it, has only grown. My issues with eating were largely attached to my relationship with my body as a dancer, and since I have stopped dancing, I’ve been fortunate enough to have felt a lot of these pressures lift. I remain nervous of restricting myself with food though, as I fear that even slight restrictions on my diet will send me head first down the rabbit hole once more. I wanted to talk about these issues again, but not from own point of view. So I spoke to someone who epitomises the shock I’ve felt from the responses to that original article. Someone who is successful and adored and, in general, happy. Someone you wouldn’t believe thought hateful things about their own body at all. (Their name has been changed in this post, and out of concern for anyone who might need a trigger warning, there is reference to body shaming and diet control).

In contrast to my own experience of food guilt stemming directly from dance training, Ellie can’t pinpoint exactly why or when her negative thought patterns began. Although she doesn’t think she’s always had them, she can’t pinpoint a start date or a catalyst. I asked Ellie some questions about her thoughts on food, and was taken aback by how vividly she FELT the thoughts she had about her body. Desperation and dissatisfaction are two words she used to describe the feeling she gets when looking in the mirror. She notices that she gets a rush if she notices that her tummy is perhaps flatter than yesterday or her legs slimmer. These aren’t just fleeting naggy thoughts or passing wishes, they’re powerful feelings that allow her perception of her body to directly influence her happiness, and her sadness. And it’s not just the dislike for her own body that upsets her. It’s knowing that the self-criticism will start as soon as she looks in the mirror. In that sense, it’s not just the constant self-criticism that wears her down, it’s the criticism she then gives herself for being self-critical! Like most people, Ellie knows it’s wrong to berate her body for what it is, but once you’ve started, it’s just so fucking hard to stop. It becomes a constant loop, beating yourself up about your body, and then beating yourself up for beating yourself up.

One of the biggest flaws in the way we eat as a society is exemplified in Ellie’s attempts to constantly compensate for her eating and fitness habits one way or another. She’s aware that she’s constantly measuring up what she’s eaten in the past few days and trying to ‘even it out’ with exercise and smaller meals. A weekend away with a few meals out equals an extra gym session and a skipped lunch. A dessert on one day means a carb-free day the next. There’s a constant evaluation of the food she’s eaten and the exercise she’s done, keeping track of everything to make sure it all ‘balances out’ and she doesn’t gain any weight. Reading Ellie’s obsession with everything balancing out here, it’s obvious it’s unhealthy. But in conversations about food, aren’t we all told to strive for ‘balance’? People who smugly oppose fad diets and calorie counting often spout the ‘it’s all about balance’ line. But that idea is so vague that it’s only a trip and a slip away from constantly watching and measuring, one piece of pasta or minute on the treadmill at a time. This so-called ‘balance’ might seem to tick the box for being healthy, but it’s far from it when Ellie can’t remember the last time she took a bite without thinking: ‘should I be eating this? How will this change my body? Have I eaten “well” enough over the last few days to allow myself this bite?’.

Hearing how she thinks broke my heart. I had no idea Ellie felt, thought and lived this way, and we’re pretty close. And since she’s told me, every time she’s spoken to me on a particularly bad food day I’ve still been just as baffled that she can hate her body as I was the first time I found out. And I can’t help thinking that if Ellie quietly lives this way, then many of us probably do, measuring, counting, criticising. And if it IS that common, and it’s making us all so unhappy, who are we doing it for?

It seems to have something to do with that big judgemental bully – society. Society pressures us to look a certain way and be a certain way. That’s the simple answer. But, I hear you say, we ARE society? So surely we can just all stand up and say ‘hey let’s all just be the size we want’? If only it was that simple. Perhaps these ideas have become bigger than us. Even if we want to change our attitudes to our bodies and health, the ideas of good foods and bad foods and good bodies and bad bodies are stuck in our rhetoric. Things like ‘ooh you look well, have you lost weight?’ being a positive comment. Things like brownies made with avocado being labelled ‘guilt-free’. It even comes from the mouths of those who’ve struggled with body image in the past, as they upload progress pictures with captions like ‘who let me leave the house looking like that’ under the larger picture.

What kills me about Ellie’s struggle is that even though I relate to it as something from my past, having got away from those thoughts now, I don’t really know what advice to give her. I feel hopeless, I only know what worked for me, and that was months of forced repetitive thinking: ‘you are allowed to enjoy this pizza’, ‘food has no moral value’, ‘do not feel guilty while you eat this’. I’d like to believe that one day we’ll be able to change how we think and speak about our bodies in society, and if we do, our strength will come from the number of us that struggle with these issues. So much of the battle is realising that you’re not the only one on the beach ashamed of their not-so-toned stomach. We are all in this together. Food has been made complex and difficult, diets have been made classist and shaming. How on earth can eating be simple when a choice between an apple and a chocolate bar is also a choice between being inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Real widespread happiness over our bodies and food will only come when we don’t label any particular food or size with a label of good or bad. I really do believe that if we all made conscious decisions to change the rhetoric we use about our bodies and our food as a society, we might get somewhere. Maybe if we can get to a place where Ellie doesn’t feel her stomach drop and her brain say ‘bad’ when she sees the words ‘sticky toffee pudding’ on a menu, we can get to a place where we can tear ourselves away from our mirrors to enjoy a meal together where every one of us is guiltless.

  

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Thanks to ‘Ellie’ for all the thoughts that went into this post, sharing your experience on this issue is such a difficult thing to do.

I’m halfway through Eat Up by Ruby Tandoh right now, a book that celebrates food and encourages eating what you want, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who struggles with their relationship with food.

Also, I’ve really had my eyes opened to fat-hate and fat-phobia through the amazing Twitter account Your Fat Friend and I’d really recommend reading some of the articles she’s written, because there is no body positivity if it’s not for ALL bodies.