Page Text: Hitting below the belt: how a pair of pants ruined my recovery
I laid the clothes out carefully on the bed.
They were clothes to fit my new, healthier body, clothes that wouldn’t hug and pinch in ways that made me miss the sick one. They were clothes to prove every self-loathing thought wrong, clothes with room for hips and breasts. They were clothes to conquer the world in, starting with the pants.
Pulling the soft, dark black denim over my legs, I immediately knew something was wrong. As I wrestled them over my thighs, a wave of hot nausea hit, building behind the eyes. I started to panic as I fumbled and pulled at the zipper, each tug unearthing a silenced fear or hurtful thought from the graveyard in my mind where I had wrestled them to rest. Now the tags jeered up at me, the tiny M’s laughing at this sad scared sausage in front of them, teetering on the edge of tears because the number on the tag didn’t match the number in her mind - afraid that it wasn’t that the pants were too small, but that she was too big.
Funny how your world can be turned upside down by a pair of pants. Or, at least mine can. Photo by Brittany Ekelund
In the bible, the fall of man can be traced to one event– a woman eats the wrong thing. A sinfully delicious guilty pleasure.
Food with morality go hand in hand. From the religious asceticism leading to Saint Catherine of Siena’s death by starvation to the corseted waists of the Victorian woman - pale, fragile and cinched to the gods, she was a picture of piety, her mind cleared of masculine thoughts by a diet of light foods. Now, women nibble Organic Girl salad greens and sip Skinny Bitch vodka sodas while men chow down on Hungry Man dinners and drink men’s only Dr. Pepper 10 – with ten bold tasting calories, it’s not for women.
“There’s these certain body types that have been held up to be the ideal standard of beauty,” says Helen Valliantos, a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, whose research focuses on food, gender and identity. “Women in particular are supposed to be skinny.
So we have Skinny Sauce salad dressing and Skinny Cow ice cream. Skinny Syrups and Skinny Cheese and Skinny Vodka. There’s even a Pepper Jill cheese, a lower-fat version of pepper jack for the feminine fromage fan. Say goodbye to cheat days, Keto Queen Kreations has you covered - with just one gram of carbs, you really can have your cake and eat it too.
“This is connected to ideas of what a body should look like and what kinds of foods produce what kinds of bodies,” says Valliantos.
“To maintain that kind of skinny body, a normal diet is impossible. You would have to be eating very little, and so dieting goes hand in hand.”
My own relationship with dieting started young, studying my mother’s meal plans pinned on the fridge beside the emergency phone numbers, fascinated by this recipe for whatever it was that she, and I, were supposed to be. I ate big salads like Elaine from Seinfeld and learned to avoid anything that Friends’ “fat Monica” fawned over. Playful avoidance soon became a visceral fear of eating the wrong thing. I stopped joining friends for meals or made excuses to not eat, afraid of foods I hadn’t made myself. Every meal was an agonising tug-of-war between what was allowed and what was wanted, even needed - a moment on the lips, forever on the hips.
A small ringed notebook never left my person, a talisman where I tallied the day's calories. As technology improved and smartphones slid on the scene, things got even easier. Now, I can scan a barcode or take a picture and the apps do all the work. Synchronized with my Fitbit or step counter, they elegantly calculate ingestion and expenditures, letting me know exactly how much I can afford to eat. Increasingly visible calorie counts on menus make decisions even easier. Screw what I, or my body wants. 150 calories less? Sold.
Raffela Mancuso has lived with an undiagnosed eating disorder for most of her life, and she says that having calorie counts everywhere is doing more harm than good.
“We're looking at them thinking like what's like the lowest calorie thing I could have,” says Mancuso, a 24-year-old body-positive Instagrammer and psychology student at the University of ALberta. “That just brings you back to the days when you used to count calories, or you used to be terrified of eating.”
While other little kids were worrying about whatever little kids worry about, Mancuso was worried about her weight.
“You didn’t get invited to his party because you’re fat,” Courtney said nonchalantly, her back to the kindergarten mailboxes, their cubbies filled with newsletters and the kind of adorable “homework” that five-year-olds get. Mancuso was stunned, but not by the news of the party (she hadn’t even known there was a party). It was the first time anyone outside of her family had said that to her, you’re fat.
“Oh,” she thought. “Other people see it too.”
She was used to hearing it at home. Stand up straight, suck in your stomach, hide your gut. Health meant losing weight, plain and simple. At twelve, she started on Weight Watchers, a program for adults, where she learned to count points and count calories to get “healthy.”
“I knew it wasn’t for kids,” says Mancuso, whose parents were on the program. “But it felt like, ‘oh, well kids aren’t supposed to be big like me,’ so maybe this will work.
I grew up in a very fatphobic household, so I never had a chance in hell.”
Before the 18th century, fat was something to be celebrated; it signified health, plenty to eat and no toiling in the fields to get it. But as food became more plentiful and work habits became increasingly sedentary, it fell out of fashion. In 1863, undertaker William published A Letter on Corpulence , widely regarded as the first weight loss manual. Weight, he claimed, could easily be lost by anyone educated or determined enough. Fat was an illness, he said, and he should know since he’d cured himself of it. Happiness, he promised, came with thinness. This proto-diet culture soon spilled across the sea into North America. Lillian Russell, who at 200 pounds had been a reigning sex symbol in 1880s America, was described by critics as “an elephant” in the 1890s. During the First World War , fat was further stigmatized as unpatriotic amid rationing and food shortages. By the 1930’s the last of the fat men’s clubs , like the Fat Men’s Association of New York City, had shuttered their doors. The ideal, for both men and women, has only trimmed down since.
Fatphobia lives on is the war on obesity, which has been criticized as contributing to the over medicalization and stigmatization of fat. Body mass index ( BMI ) is still used to assess health despite not actually being able to, and weight bias is now the most socially acceptable and widespread form of prejudice (with studies showing that fat bodies receive poorer treatment in employment, medical and interpersonal settings). Cultural cringes like Flab to Fab, The Biggest Loser and Thintervention perpetuate the myth that fat is a personal choice, suggesting, like Banting, that fat can be willed away with happiness waiting on the other side of the scale.
“I recall purposely leaving my lunch at home in the second or third grade to try and starve my way to skinny,” says Karimah Marshall, a model and singer-songwriter in Edmonton, Alberta. “I correlated starvation with weight loss, with ultimate fulfillment, as early as I can recall going to school.
I just wanted to be thin.”
Her tenth-grade teacher didn’t bother taking her aside to gift her the Weight Watchers guidebook after seeing her bullied for her weight. Already a seasoned dieter, Marshall was soon gaming the points system and losing weight fast. At a party, her crush’s bestie pulled her aside. His friend had noticed the weight loss, he told her, and if she lost a little more then maybe, just maybe, he might ask her out. “I was actually excited. It was like, this guy is paying attention and he notices me,” said Marshall. “I was deep in thinking that I need this attention, I need people to validate me through my body.” Dieting soon became a fully fledged eating disorder (ED). At times, Marshall felt like a superhero - weight loss her Lasso of Hestia, willing her body into submission. Other times, she was the villain, ugly and unlovable - hated by all. “It becomes this cycle, like this self-worth cycle,” Marshall says. “It's the connection between your worth as a human, and how much you eat and how much you exercise.”
Studies have shown that not only is childhood dieting ineffectual , it’s dangerous. It’s the single greatest predictor in the development of EDs, which are the third most common chronic condition for adolescents, and research shows that even talking about weight around kids can lead to body dissatisfaction and extreme weight control behaviours. In 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that weight-management be health-focused, as trying to tackle the childhood obesity epidemic with weight-focused approaches was hurting more than helping.
And yet, in 2019, Weight Watchers (rebranded at WW) launched Kurbo, a meal tracker for kids as young as, to tremendous protestation . Branded as healthy-focused, success stories include twelve-year old Gracie’s 11-pound drop and 14-year-old Maisarah’s 10-point reduction of her BMI percentile. The system is based on Stanford University’s pediatric weight control program, using a stoplight system to categorize foods. Like WW, most fruits and veggies are green - eat all you want. Meat, beans, carbs and low-fat dairy are yellow - okay, but watch your portions. Sugar free peanut butter, cupcakes, greek yogurt and french fries all (bizarrely) fall under red. You only get so many a week, so “stop and think how to budget them in with everything else.”
Red foods, which include healthy fats like olive oil, natural peanut butter and Greek yogurt, have to be budgeted in, teaching kids to start assigning a number value to food regardless of the benefits it may have for overall health. Photo by Brittany Ekelund.
As a bit of a budgeter myself, frankly, I’m alarmed. So, I download the app. I choose an avocado (yellow) as my avatar. I enter my height and weight to calculate BMI and I choose “reach a healthier weight,” as my biggest goal. Then, I log my meals - logging the same foods in an *adult* dieting app. A banana for breakfast, two boiled eggs for lunch. Dinner is vegetarian chili with a baked potato (butter, low-fat sour cream and reduced-fat cheese). For my exercise, I add twenty minutes at the park and another twenty walking the dog (a grand lie since I never actually walked the childhood dog, despite promises made in bargaining for said dog).
Kurbo claims to be a health-focus approach, but a walk through of the app suggests otherwise. Photo by Brittany Ekelund
A red six glares up at me, taking up half the screen. I’m confused; there were no cookies, no candy, no cheeseburgers or pizza. And yet there it is. I click on the big red circle, looking for answers. Instead, I find a calculator for the week’s remaining 36 reds. Clicking on the green 12 takes me to the same screen. I try my profile section, no luck. Just three charts, with weight and BMI up first.
Nowhere does the app tell me why my bland boiled egg lunch cost me two reds, or why the olive oil to cook my chili has cost me another. Nowhere does it let me know if I’ve gotten enough protein, carbohydrates, vitamins or minerals to fuel my growing body. Nowhere does it tell me that the 750 calories I have eaten today are barely over a third of what I need.
I logged the same day’s worth of food into an adult weight loss app. At the end of the day, Kurbo didn’t let me know that 750 calories is only a third of what a child needs to function and grow properly. Photo by Brittany Ekelund.
“I think their kids app should not exist. I think it’s disgusting,” says Mancuso, who may never repair the damage done by so many years of dieting and trying to fit in to what she was being told she should be.
“They say it’s about being healthy and taking care of your body,” she says, the spite audible. “It’s still the exact same mechanism as calorie counting and restriction.”
Her anger is the same anger I feel, knowing what a life terrified of food looks like. You might not be throwing a calorie count on it, but teaching kids to fear foods like peanut butter or avocado because of the fat content is teaching them to fear fat - completely ignoring the vital role that it plays, on our bodies and in our diets, in keeping us healthy.
The second blow came a week later.
The second blow came a week later.
“Hey Nicole, did you try those pants on yet?”
“Yeah, they were just a bit too big,” she said, her exposed waistline squirting lemon in the eye of my self-esteem as she reached up to write the week’s reservations on the whiteboard. Within an hour, I had re-downloaded my favorite weight loss app. On the way home from work, the offending pants in my backpack burning a hole in my tenderly mended self-worth, I stopped and got a gym membership. Pandemic be damned, COVID-19 was a risk I was willing to take to lose the weight I had once been proud to have gained.
I laugh at Pepper Jill cheese, but I would buy the shit out of it. I am a fat-positive, body-positive feminist, and one pair of ill fitting pants later I’m back at square one - just a girl in a grocery store telling the man that she loves that she would do anything for him - even die for him - but she won’t buy the bread he likes because it’s 20 calories more.