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. 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” 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?
Holy grail that can hide but not banish
While I’m on the subject of the peculiar relationship between women and their
bodies, can someone explain to me the point of the control tights heralded
this week as “the holy grail of plenty gain for no pain”? Curious how I
can’t remember the bit in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur about the Arthurian
knights questing after the magic thingy that would squash fat arses into
shape. But never mind that now. The point is that for £12, Aristoc’s
Hourglass Toner tights, “finished with a touch of silk which helps to
moisturise skin”, promise to do just that, and reduce your waist by two
inches as well.
So what I am wondering is this: you spend your £12. You stuff yourself into
this magical sausage-skin. It does the trick. You make all your girlfriends
spit with envy and whip out from under their noses the George Clooney of
your local manor. Then you get him home and at some point you have to divest
yourself of the Holy Grail of blah-di-blah. So what exactly happens when the
unconfined wobbly bits of you fall out? I’m sure someone from Aristoc will
call and explain, and as soon as they do, I’ll let you know.
My café snobbery
The Times obituary of Professor
Michael Frede, an “authority on Aristotle and the Stoics” who died
untimely while swimming in the Gulf of Corinth, mentions, among his other
admirable qualities, that he used to give supervisions at the Little
Clarendon Street branch of Café Rouge. On reading this, a small battle
breaks out between my inner food snob, which has found no empirical evidence
of the Café Rouge claim to offer honest French bourgeois cooking, and my
inner intellectual snob, which thinks that what is good enough for an
authority on the Stoics should certainly be good enough for me . . .
