Demi
Fri, Oct-12-07, 05:28
The Times
London, UK
12 October, 2007
Women and food: a grotesque relationship
Jane Shilling
My name is Jane Shilling. I eat three cooked meals and drink half a bottle of wine every day. I am 5ft 7in tall and weigh 8½ stone (119lbs). I have never knowingly consumed skimmed milk, margarine or low-fat anything. I have never described any foodstuff as “naughty” or “indulgent” before putting it in my mouth. I have never been on a diet in my life.
Very nice for you, I’m sure (I hear you say). But why are you telling us this? Well, because I’ve been feeling awfully lonely lately, and I thought it might help to set up a support group for British women who have a normal relationship with food. There must be a couple of you out there.
Hmm. And would you like to explain what has suddenly brought this on?
Thank you for asking. It was the sight of an article in Monday’s Times, headlined, “ ‘Intelligent’ shopping trolley is new front in battle against obesity (http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?t=351148)” in which our consumer editor explained that technology experts (having presumably despaired of finding any sign of intelligent life in supermarket shoppers) have come up instead with an “intelligent” trolley that will alert customers when items of junk food are dropped into it.
The trolley story coincided with the new Vogue, which contains a brilliant piece on women, food and body image by Alex Bilmes, the features editor of GQ. The moderate and affectionate tone of his article – he is evidently a man who likes women – imperfectly conceals a bemused horror at the grotesque relationship between the female half of the population and what it puts in its mouth. “Grotesque” is my word, not Bilmes’s, but I use it advisedly. What other word is adequate to describe the mental state of a population in which there is raging simultaneously a crisis of obesity and a crisis of excessive dieting – the latter heralded twice yearly with grave ministerial diktats as to the body mass of the teenage starvelings who are to model the new season’s collections.
The bleak truth is that among British women the disconnection between food and body image is so absolute that it is pointless to talk of a “normal” body shape. Polarised by the twin crises of thinness and fatness, what used to be the median dress sizes – 8, 10, 12, 14 – are now regarded by half the female population as signifying obesity, and by the other half as unattainable ideals of thinness.
In Britain (following, as always, the lead of the US) abnormal relationships with food have become the female norm. The anecdotal evidence of this is widespread and bizarre: impossible to open the plethora of women’s magazines without encountering a dire monotone discussion of body shape. Bad enough, you might think, that the obsession with body image impoverishes the intellectual landscape of women who might be thinking about all sorts of more interesting things.
Bad enough, as Alex Bilmes persuasively argues, that thinness – both the state and the aspiration – are categorically not sexy, so the object of all this fussing about food is pure egotism, not even a generous notion of trying to please someone else. Bad enough that the preparation of food, which ought to be an act of domestic creativity and love, should have become a battleground.
But for the worst results of our dysfunctional relationship with food we can turn from the anecdotal evidence to early statistics from the Department of Health, which is conducting a study of childhood obesity.
The full results will be released next spring, but the early indications are that one in four children is overweight when they enter primary school, a figure rising in some areas to a third of children at age 11. The consequences, says Dr Colin Waine, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, are “type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and certain cancers”.
This, too, is a female problem, since women still take primary responsibility for family food shopping and preparation. It may not be fair – we haven’t space here to discuss the ethics. But the reality is that, as things are at the moment, a great many women perceive as “normal” a relationship with food that involves boring their lovers and damaging their children. In any other realm of social behaviour this kind of selfishness would be described as mad (or, more modishly, “abusive”). But because body image is implicated with fashion, media and other commercial interests, including the vastly lucrative diet-and-treat-ment industry, the “madness” continues to be treated as an idiosyncratic indulgence, like a taste for couture frocks or expensive facials.
The origins of our pathological relationship with food are too complicated to unpick here. The secret of getting over it, however, is not. I know it, which is how I come to weigh the same in my late forties as I did at 18. And I am happy to share it with you. Free. No gimmicks are involved, no fancy treatments, no calorie-counting, no McKeithian analysis of turds in surgical containers. Are you ready? Here goes.
Step 1. Eat three proper meals a day, made from fresh ingredients. Eat nothing else in between. You are not hungry. You are bored. Go for a walk or have a glass of water. While you’re at it, think about people who are properly hungry and feel ashamed. 2. At mealtimes, stop eating when you are full. We’re not on the ration now, it is fine not to finish your plateful. 3. Walk briskly around the park in your lunch hour (or walk to work, or walk the dog after work, or whatever). Take the family with you and save the money the gym would have cost you to go out for supper and a movie. Er, that’s it. Now, please can I have my own telly series?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/jane_shilling/article2638990.ece
London, UK
12 October, 2007
Women and food: a grotesque relationship
Jane Shilling
My name is Jane Shilling. I eat three cooked meals and drink half a bottle of wine every day. I am 5ft 7in tall and weigh 8½ stone (119lbs). I have never knowingly consumed skimmed milk, margarine or low-fat anything. I have never described any foodstuff as “naughty” or “indulgent” before putting it in my mouth. I have never been on a diet in my life.
Very nice for you, I’m sure (I hear you say). But why are you telling us this? Well, because I’ve been feeling awfully lonely lately, and I thought it might help to set up a support group for British women who have a normal relationship with food. There must be a couple of you out there.
Hmm. And would you like to explain what has suddenly brought this on?
Thank you for asking. It was the sight of an article in Monday’s Times, headlined, “ ‘Intelligent’ shopping trolley is new front in battle against obesity (http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?t=351148)” in which our consumer editor explained that technology experts (having presumably despaired of finding any sign of intelligent life in supermarket shoppers) have come up instead with an “intelligent” trolley that will alert customers when items of junk food are dropped into it.
The trolley story coincided with the new Vogue, which contains a brilliant piece on women, food and body image by Alex Bilmes, the features editor of GQ. The moderate and affectionate tone of his article – he is evidently a man who likes women – imperfectly conceals a bemused horror at the grotesque relationship between the female half of the population and what it puts in its mouth. “Grotesque” is my word, not Bilmes’s, but I use it advisedly. What other word is adequate to describe the mental state of a population in which there is raging simultaneously a crisis of obesity and a crisis of excessive dieting – the latter heralded twice yearly with grave ministerial diktats as to the body mass of the teenage starvelings who are to model the new season’s collections.
The bleak truth is that among British women the disconnection between food and body image is so absolute that it is pointless to talk of a “normal” body shape. Polarised by the twin crises of thinness and fatness, what used to be the median dress sizes – 8, 10, 12, 14 – are now regarded by half the female population as signifying obesity, and by the other half as unattainable ideals of thinness.
In Britain (following, as always, the lead of the US) abnormal relationships with food have become the female norm. The anecdotal evidence of this is widespread and bizarre: impossible to open the plethora of women’s magazines without encountering a dire monotone discussion of body shape. Bad enough, you might think, that the obsession with body image impoverishes the intellectual landscape of women who might be thinking about all sorts of more interesting things.
Bad enough, as Alex Bilmes persuasively argues, that thinness – both the state and the aspiration – are categorically not sexy, so the object of all this fussing about food is pure egotism, not even a generous notion of trying to please someone else. Bad enough that the preparation of food, which ought to be an act of domestic creativity and love, should have become a battleground.
But for the worst results of our dysfunctional relationship with food we can turn from the anecdotal evidence to early statistics from the Department of Health, which is conducting a study of childhood obesity.
The full results will be released next spring, but the early indications are that one in four children is overweight when they enter primary school, a figure rising in some areas to a third of children at age 11. The consequences, says Dr Colin Waine, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, are “type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and certain cancers”.
This, too, is a female problem, since women still take primary responsibility for family food shopping and preparation. It may not be fair – we haven’t space here to discuss the ethics. But the reality is that, as things are at the moment, a great many women perceive as “normal” a relationship with food that involves boring their lovers and damaging their children. In any other realm of social behaviour this kind of selfishness would be described as mad (or, more modishly, “abusive”). But because body image is implicated with fashion, media and other commercial interests, including the vastly lucrative diet-and-treat-ment industry, the “madness” continues to be treated as an idiosyncratic indulgence, like a taste for couture frocks or expensive facials.
The origins of our pathological relationship with food are too complicated to unpick here. The secret of getting over it, however, is not. I know it, which is how I come to weigh the same in my late forties as I did at 18. And I am happy to share it with you. Free. No gimmicks are involved, no fancy treatments, no calorie-counting, no McKeithian analysis of turds in surgical containers. Are you ready? Here goes.
Step 1. Eat three proper meals a day, made from fresh ingredients. Eat nothing else in between. You are not hungry. You are bored. Go for a walk or have a glass of water. While you’re at it, think about people who are properly hungry and feel ashamed. 2. At mealtimes, stop eating when you are full. We’re not on the ration now, it is fine not to finish your plateful. 3. Walk briskly around the park in your lunch hour (or walk to work, or walk the dog after work, or whatever). Take the family with you and save the money the gym would have cost you to go out for supper and a movie. Er, that’s it. Now, please can I have my own telly series?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/jane_shilling/article2638990.ece