We All Have a Bikini Body

This piece contains references to weight, dieting and calorie counting, as well as some specific calorific values and body weights. If you feel like this will send you down a dark abyss, please, don’t read it. #saveyourselves

I read, with great interest, a piece by journalist Farrah Storr: ‘Have women really stopped wanting to be thin?’

Have women really stopped wanting to be thin?

It’s less of a statistical study than it sounds, from the title; Storr is examining her own feelings about her body, and how she feels somehow left behind by the body positivity movement. At some stage, she writes, “big became beautiful, diet was a dirty word and I was left feeling like the most old fashioned woman on earth”.

Though I’m younger than Storr – she attributes a lot of her attitude to dieting to her age, to a generational trend for Jane Fonda and cabbage soup diets – I can entirely relate to her. She writes about putting Tess Holliday on the cover of Cosmo, talking the talk of body positivity and anti-diet culture while, in private, still “yearning for thin”.

I have written a lot about bodies, body image and dieting. I have also written about my own body – about the weight loss that ensued when I joined a weight lifting gym and started “eating clean” circa 2016; about the weight loss bootcamp I attended for work, along with a journalist friend of mine, doing five hours of cardio a day and subsisting on 1,200 calories; about how pregnancy transformed view of my body in the most positive ways; and, subsequently, how childbirth brought it all crashing back down to earth again.

And I have tried, honestly, not just to talk the talk of anti-diet culture, but to walk the walk. I try not to think about food in terms of calories, but rather in terms of how it makes me feel, both physically and emotionally. I eat what I want to eat, when I want to eat it (lately, that is everything, all the time – I blame breastfeeding).

I admonish my Dad when he talks about bodies – mine, or his – and I try not to talk about dieting, or fatness, or thinness, for that matter, in front of anyone, but especially in front of children, both mine and my sister’s.

And yet, every night when I go to bed, one of my last thoughts is that I will start over tomorrow. I will get back on the Peloton. I will have scrambled eggs and avocado (no bread!) for breakfast. I will delete my Doordash app and drink water when I’m hungry and go for an hour-long walk around the estate, stifling temperatures be-damned. Every. Single. Night.