Diet

By Erin Deborah Waks

Trigger warning: eating disorders.

Everyone at my office is on a diet.

I’m vehemently anti-diet; I have been ever since my own ‘love’ of them spiralled quickly out of control and morphed from a penchant for healthy eating and running into an eating disorder and exercise addiction.

So when I have to listen to sentences that would, four years ago, have sent me into my own competitive spiral, it’s hard to remain neutral. ‘I can’t have cake any more’, ‘I’m on a diet so I can’t be naughty,’ ‘I’ve lost five pounds this month, celebrations in order,’ ‘No milk in coffee for me, I’ll get fat,’ ‘You’re not fat, I’m fatter,’ ‘I’m on a diet because I’ve become roughly the size of a whale.’ It's relentless.

I’ve developed such confidence in my skin that it’s hard, for myself and for those around me, to even fathom the shell of a human I used to be. I am physically comfortable being naked, where for years the thought of nudity even when on my own was horrendous. I like to cook now, where before the only time I spent in the kitchen was with a calculator and weighing scales, figuring out the lowest number of calories I could survive on. I have time for life now, where my younger self was preoccupied with poking my body as though I could transform it into something worthy of love. 

But don’t get me wrong, as staunch as my beliefs are, I do still struggle with the rhetoric I spent years trying to overcome. That’s one thing no-one tells you about eating disorders: you can beat them, for sure, but it takes constant internal and emotional effort to keep the thoughts at bay, like you’re actively fighting against a voice in your head that thinks it knows better. Listening to what I fought against for years at work is tougher than I expected. A passing remark about my body from a well-meaning relative (usually from an older generation) can send me crying to my mum. A bad day, or one when things feel out of control, shows how it’s still natural for my mind to project that outwards and villainise my body. An hour spent scrolling through social media, looking at women much thinner than me, can rekindle the appeal of dieting. After all, I do still know how many calories are in an apple. That sort of information is hard to forget. 

The fact of the matter is dieting isn’t the answer. Diets result from an internalisation of their idealisation in our society, and a discomfort within oneself that gets projected outwards. I can’t count the amount of parties I went to when I was younger where I spent the whole time sucking in. The amount of dinners I had with my best friend where dessert wasn’t even an option. The amount of days I spent starving myself in fear no one would love me if I gained even a pound. 

I went to a wedding this summer. I wore a skin-tight dress that left very little to the imagination. Classy, of course - don’t forget who’s writing - but not exactly modest. 

And I didn’t wear Spanx. I ate before, during and, of course, after the party. I had a drink with bubbles in it, so I was probably bloated for much of the night. I tasted all of the desserts with my cousins - all of them. 

And I was so busy enjoying the wedding, sobbing at my cousin so clearly in love and marrying his soulmate, sneaking my underage cousins alcohol and dancing badly to every single song, that I didn’t think to suck in once. 

It’s the most beautiful I have ever felt, I think, in my whole life.