4 hours ago
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Even during the apocalypse, I was calorie counting.
While the pandemic raged on, I was still following The Rules, a set of requirements around my eating that I’ve had since I was 12. The Rules have changed over the course of my life, but there are always Rules.
In the early days of the Covid lockdown – already anxious enough about my parents being trapped in India, my inability to return home to Canada and the government building a hospital in Central Park just in case – I was still counting my 1,200 daily calories, refusing myself bread and rice, sneaking a cookie and then thinking about it for the rest of the day.
I couldn’t stop myself: I’d wander out of my house after days of being stuck inside, buy a coffee and a croissant with the anxiety of someone being hunted for sport and then weigh myself after I devoured its crumbs, surprised that I could gain a few pounds during the day. I felt like I would surely die before the end of the year, along with everyone else I had ever known, our lungs collapsing from Covid-19, but first, it was very important that I feel bad about carbohydrates.
I’m 34 now, hopefully beyond my years of dietary self-flagellation. But in my late 20s, I had fantasies about how my eating disorder would eventually serve me. Maybe I’d get run down with some illness that sapped my appetite and I’d lose weight that way. Maybe I’d become bedridden and incapable of consuming more than clear broths and blanched carrots. Or, ooooh, maybe I’d get a tapeworm, and the tapeworm would eat all my food, and then I would become thin and have a gross but fascinating story to tell at dinner parties (where I would never eat much, of course).
While we all huddled indoors for what ended up being nearly two very surreal years, I thought about how I could emerge from my personal pandemic a little bit better, a little bit more beautiful, a little bit more desirable.
Maybe if I worked out really hard and made healthy lunches and cut down on my after-work drinking, I’d emerge skinnier than I’d ever been in my life. This was my time to pupate, if only I could stop the stress of the pandemic from making the rest of my body rebel against me. My eyes started twitching, my muscles ached every day, my teeth chipped, my nails peeled, and my hair fell out. But was I getting thinner? That’s all that mattered.
I hadn’t made myself purge since I was in my early 20s, but now I had all the time in the world to inspect myself, to criticize every morsel I let enter my body, to work out a way to make sure it would be a demon exorcised before the next mealtime came around.
I have yet to meet another woman who doesn’t eventually admit to having the same insecurities, the same anxieties about their size and shape, how much space they take up in a room, how they feel if a chair creaks under them. I’m mad at myself for being mad at myself, mostly because it’s such a jejune affliction to have. Couldn’t I instead have one of the more interesting entries of the DSM-5? A compulsion to eat dishwasher pods like the women of My Strange Addiction? Or maybe they could name a brand new disorder after me. I’m open to suggestions.
There’s something despicable about the conspiratorial way women talk to each other about food. “Should we get dessert?” we ask each other, looking coy, as if we’re asking if we should both do heroin in the streets. “Oh, let’s be bad!” we might say when ordering queso. “We’ve earned it!” is another one, as if food is something you’re allowed to have only if you put in the requisite work beforehand. It’s a language I fell into naturally, imprinted from the start.
It’s rote for a woman to blame her issues with food on her mother, but cliches exist for a reason. One Saturday, when I was 12 and my mother didn’t yet trust me enough to leave me home alone for an afternoon, she took me to her Tops Club meeting. Tops stood for “Take Off Pounds Sensibly,” a support group originally founded in 1948 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There was a diet plan, but there was also a focus on not letting idle hands be the devil’s workshop – my mother started doing childish arts and crafts as an attempt to avoid snacking after dinner. I used to admire this rainbow she fashioned with a plastic frame and multicolored ribbons, little plastic beads hanging from the ends, which I was told decidedly was not a toy.
For a year, my mom attended weekly meetings at the Cedarbrae Community Center, where she’d sit in a circle with other middle-aged women to talk about her week. “This week, I turtled,” she said, which I later found out meant she had neither lost nor gained, a victory unto itself. The women clapped modestly. I went to that meeting at a time of my childhood where I knew inherently my weight was a “problem” for a lot of people, but I didn’t yet feel like it was a problem for me. I was uncomfortable with my body but only because everyone around me kept reacting to how much it was changing. As soon as I had a handle on it, a new cup size would pop up, a new dimple of cellulite, a new inch of soft flesh around my midsection.
My mother dragged herself through every diet conceivable. She did Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig (she contests the latter but the guidebooks that littered our home tell a different story). She went low carb and high fat. She increased her protein and then cut down her sugars. One particularly restrictive meal plan left her so nutrient deficient she had to go to the doctor for weekly shots to make sure she didn’t succumb to scurvy. I hated that diet the most: her moodiness became sharp and sudden. At my brother’s wedding, she ate so little, trying to winnow herself down to a smaller size, that she fainted during one of the ceremonies. No one stopped the events; they just fanned her and offered her orange juice until she came back to the surface.
“You know how your mom is,” one of my cousins told me, as if self-torture is more acceptable if it is routine. I was at my thinnest at that wedding; I knew, because my mom told me I was. She was proud. I was hungry.
Growing older means finding out you’re fucking things up in brand new ways. When I was 16, I was a failure because I thought I was fat. In my late 20s, I became a failure because I thought I was fat and because I knew better than to think being fat was a problem in the first place.
I read books by women with active eating disorders and ones by women who claimed to be long healed. I read books by fat-positive nutritionists and body-neutrality activists. I read about real fatphobia – how it prevents fat people from getting work or boarding an airplane with a modicum of dignity – and about how mid-sized and thin women perpetrate a war against all our bodies through our anxiety about becoming fat ourselves. I read about disability and health and diabetes and heart disease and the racist history of the body mass index.
It is much easier to hate your body when you refuse to see it within a continuum of oppression. For so long, hating our bodies was viewed as a private, necessary act of self-loathing. It was important to keep ourselves in check, as if inwardly directed contempt could protect you from weight gain. But if you view fatphobia as a larger societal failure – like anti-Blackness or littering or literally anything that happens in an American post office – then it behooves you to adjust your thinking. You are no longer ruining your own life, you’re ruining someone else’s. Your ideology is contagious. Self-loathing is transmissible through the air. We can’t truly hate our bodies without hating anyone in a body larger than ours. The older I get – and the older my mother gets – the less interested I am in causing harm through my own low self-esteem.
Any attempt to lose weight purely for aesthetic reasons is, ultimately, fatphobia weaponized. Just because you point a gun to your own head doesn’t make it less of a gun; it doesn’t mean someone else can’t pick it up and then use it on themselves. You have to accept that you’re not uglier than anyone, but you’re not more beautiful. That your body isn’t just something to be admired – though it can be, if you want – but a tool that lifts, moves, twists, breaks, folds and dies. It requires the radical act of no longer comparing yourself to your friends, the radical act of loving yourself so you can love everyone who doesn’t look like you, too. It means you have to think beyond your own pain and the cruelty you learned to dig at yourself with.
My mom’s attitude about weight and diet has changed drastically in the last decade. When I texted her about Tops recently, she didn’t dwell on the year she spent picking at herself in her meetings and instead asked: “What’s the name of that frozen treat at Dairy Queen?”
“A Blizzard?” I said. “Why? Do you want one?”
“Yes,” she said, in the way that I remember my mom talking about sugar: conspiratorial and giddy. “Badly.”
I’ve been losing the fight with my own body for a deceptively simple reason: I treat it as a fight in the first place. My body has either been something to fight, like an unruly animal needing discipline, or something to shirk from. But what if instead of fight or flight, I treated my body like someone I trusted? What else could I possibly lose?
Extracted from Sucker Punch: Essays by Scaachi Koul, published by St Martin’s Press on 4 March.
