Just a warning - this post is about disordered eating and if that is something which might be upsetting or unhelpful for you, go ahead and skip this one.
Two things prompted me to write this, and one was that I felt slightly defensive about Gwyneth Paltrow, which was odd. Or maybe not that odd, since one very privileged white lady defending another is not exactly rare. You might have seen the video I’m talking about - she was interviewed about her eating habits a few months back and it provoked a bit of a viral storm about how she was promoting an eating disorder.
The other reason I’m writing this is that I went on a podcast recently to talk about the joy of food, and I ended up touching on the idea that my relationship with food has at times been very tricky, something I hadn’t planned on raising. The two things felt somewhat linked.
I’ve been overweight a few times in my life. As a kid, when a stranger in a shop poked me in my stomach and told me I ate too much, and as an adult, when I couldn’t get my jeans over my knees anymore and men sometimes felt like it was their duty to tell me that I was too big for their liking as they passed me in the street. Luckily, despite the 90s bombardment that skinny was the only acceptable way to be, I avoided any kind of problem with eating through my teens and twenties and ate a lot of very bland food for comfort because I was quite unhappy. By the time I hit thirty, I almost felt victorious, to have not been hit by such a devastatingly common illness felt like a marvel.
But. But. I got divorced, and something in my mind decided that one way to deal with that sadness was to lose weight. I would finally try to stick to a diet and somehow emerge from the heartbreak victorious. I know how absurd this sounds, and I also know many of you will recognise the instinct. I lost a lot of weight fast, and the compliments came immediately which was like a soothing balm for the black hole of insecurity I was in at that moment. I guess the culture was engrained in me somewhere, just waiting to jump out.
At the end of that terrible year, I got such bad tonsillitis I had to stay overnight in hospital on Christmas Eve. On Christmas morning, a nurse found me weighing myself, and looked at me with a concern I found patronising at the time. Why was I doing that when I was so sick? Why was I? Because that brief diet had gotten under my skin and had a determination I wasn’t used to. Because I was controlling something when I felt like I had no control. Because I had to.
Calorie counting is the devil. You should not know how many calories are in a mars bar, but I do. That number has stayed in my head even if actual life memories have slipped away with time. It became a regiment, and combined with ocd, one I took seriously. Seriously enough that I look back at photos and wonder how I didn’t see what was happening.
I won’t bang on about my own experience of disordered eating endlessly, I’m sure many of you have had similar experiences and know what it’s like. But suffice to say, it’s stayed in my brain ever since. And even though I don’t weigh myself ever now, or count calories, or run purely to burn them off (which I hated the most, because running was always supposed to be my joy - something which would help my brain, not collude in damaging it), the thoughts are still there more often than I’d like. Trying to stop seeing food as a treat, a reward, a transgression. Trying to ignore guilt or anxiety about eating. Hating a photo of myself if I think my arm looks bigger than my brain wants it should be. It makes me so angry that those things embed so easily but might take a lifetime to shuck off.
This brings me to Gwyneth, a person I don’t really want to cape for because Goop seems to me to often promote things I think are quite bad for women (See Jen Gunter on this for more). So maybe I’m not trying to defend her specifically, but to argue that we’re all to some extent, damaged by the same thing and that to heap blame on the individual is to ensure that the problem continues. She’s a little older than me, but was also subjected to an era when women’s magazines drew rings around “flaws” on women’s bodies and regularly ran headlines about celebrities who’d gotten fat (read: were not a size 00, which was actually seen as attainable if you just stopped being so lazy and worked at it). If I felt terrible about myself just reading it, I can’t imagine how it felt to be the unconsenting cover star.
The thing is, it was impossible to get right (not that it’s so much better now). The goalposts kept moving. The merest hint of cellulite and you were disgusting, too thin and you were accused of being a drug addict. We mocked women in the public eye for saying they didn’t work out or for professing to eat burgers - there was even an account called “you didn’t eat that” which just posted photos of celebrities holding junk food so others could laugh at them. But if you confessed to not eating in order to look like you were supposed to, that was seen as somehow weak too. How many headlines did I read accusing woman of starving themselves as if that’s not exactly what they were constantly being told to do?
For anyone who lived through the 90s, it’s literally no surprise at all that they would have imbibed a damaging diet culture which might lead to thinking that bone broth is a suitable meal. I appreciate the argument that a victim can also become a perpetrator of the same unhealthy attitudes they were themselves exposed to, and maybe that’s true here - if even one person saw that video and decided to take her comments as advice then I guess my half hearted defence is useless, but I saw it as a small sign of progress that people were appalled by her daily food intake, not aspiring to it as they might have a few years ago. I find it oddly helpful when people at least obliquely signal they find it hard to break free from that siren call of thinness we all heard back then, and I felt mainly sadness, not anger. I saw her comments as a symptom of a problem, rather than seeing her as the problem.
Even dipping your toe into the world of this stuff can threaten to pull you under and drown you. I would like to be able to see my body in a neutral way and never spend another second of my life even unthinkingly referring back to my knowledge of how much fat is in a chocolate bar. But I know it’s probably unlikely to vanish altogether. I still struggle when I see women with what I’ve been taught is the ‘perfect body’ on social media. I mute them, but I try to remind myself that it’s not their fault. Magazines might no longer scrutinise women’s perceived flaws so blatantly now, but social media almost encourages it. The medium might change, but nothing else does.
If you need help with issues surrounding body image and eating, click here.
To read - Katy Hessel, The Story Of Art Without Men. What an incredible book, which is slowly re-educating me on female artists and their place in history.
To watch - since Succession is coming to an end, I’m going to rewatch The Sopranos and hope it fills the void.
To bake - Ricciarelli biscuits. Roll them tightly when shaping, and be sure to put them in the fridge for at least an hour before baking. Make sure they’re completely covered in icing sugar, more than you think you need.
Incredible post. I feel sad for her because I see her strict diet and constant detoxes as a symptom perhaps of obsessive compulsive. She may live in constant anxiety about what goes into her body or feeling unclean or unhealthy. We don’t know. I know I feel that way a lot.
I’m trying to rid myself of the shame of gaining 15 pounds post-op from surgical menopause and every time I need to buy a new bathing suit and I have to select large or even XL instead of medium I panic. I would love to shrug it off, like my husband unhelpfully suggests (with the best intentions), but it was ingrained in the teen years and I feel like I can’t afford to lose the social currency of thinness.
And yet this is my only life, so. There it is.
I have mixed feelings about this. Whilst I absolutely agree that we should have compassion for those who suffered with disordered eating, I cannot accept her tacit encouragement of others to engage in disordered eating in the way she does by publicising her food intake and exercise regime like this.
I developed anorexia in 2013, the era of Supersize vs Superskinny, Fat Families etc. Information about restrictive diets was everywhere and encouraged. It would be far too simplistic to say that this caused my eating disorder. However, it would be reasonable to say that a combination of my genetic predisposition, the impact of my dad having affair on my 'safe' home life and the promotion of restrictive diets everywhere were contributing factors.
At the age of 33 (following various hospital admissions and bouts of therapy) I am now in recovery and a healthy weight, yet I must be vigilant every day to eat enough and ignore the compulsions to restrict my intake otherwise I risk falling back into the anorexic operating mode. Recovery is life long and despite being a healthy weight now I am still suffering the physical effects of years of starvation - osteoporosis, infertility etc. I lost my teenage years and twenties to anorexia and I say this to emphasise that eating disorders are serious and can be life long conditions.
What I can't get my head around is why, if Gwyneth knows the abject hell of disordered eating - the utter misery, isolation and loneliness - she would mention her own on this podcast. As a global celebrity, she must know she has a wide range of fans/followers and that many, many, people would be listening to her podcast. Why would she share this information? Does she have no consideration for the people listening who may be susceptible to anorexia or other EDs who may follow her example and develop a full blown eating disorder? It would be slightly different if she was advising against her lifestyle, but she wasn't. Ultimately I think it was irresponsible of her to share this and, like you, I am glad to see the backlash it got.