I take it all back, intuitive eating is a joke

I used to believe in, and try to follow, intuitive eating. Partly for my health, and partly to try to counter the destructive effects of our food-obsessed culture. It worked really well for me because whenever I was hungry and looked deep down inside myself, and said "you can eat whatever you want" I would almost always crave something good for me - steamed fish and salad, vegetable curry on brown rice, an apple, a kiwifruit, celery sticks for fucks sake.

And then I got pregnant.

Now when I look deep inside myself and say "you can eat whatever you want", my body screams "Huge serving of wedges with sour cream!" or "CHIPS CHIPS CHIPS CHIPS CHIPS" or sometimes "White chocolate with almonds, STAT!".

Sigh.

Why I always wear high heels when I visit my mother

A hint, not too much, of cleavage, under a v-neck top which slims the hips. A belt, or a cross-over top, all designed to emphasize the smallness of my waist. High heels, to improve the width to hight ratio, and tone the legs and butt. Strictly smooth lines over the hips and butt, its all about the silhouette. Clear but not overdone make-up. Hair styled. Long earrings to emphasize the statuesque qualities of my neck.

I've turned my sex on baby. I haven't turned it on for my husband, or to aid some sort of career goal, or even just to get some damn service in a jewelery store. I've turned it on for my Mum. Because if I wear enough flattering (read: slimming) clothing, and dazzle her with enough male-gaze pleasing sex appeal, she forgets for a while that she lies awake at night worrying that I'm fat, or not slim, or whatever she thinks. If I turn it on enough we can have a proper conversation, about something other than the calorie content of what she assumes I had for breakfast, or about how to fit the exercise she assumes I'm not doing into my schedule.

It didn't work this time unfortunately, she saw through my efforts. Should have worn higher heels.

The scene: dinner at my folks' place, after dinner Dad brought out some cheese, a risky thing to do he knew, later "I shouldn't have brought out the cheese" he lamented. As the cheese is slowly devoured by the four of us, unbeknown to the men, Mum and I play a perverse game of voyeurism with each other. I let her take a piece first, then I take a piece; I would never appear too eager, it gives her too much angst. I only eat the cheese at her pace, one for her, one for me. She watches the size of the piece I take, modest of course. Despite my careful efforts she eventually decides that I've had too much. "No more cheese" she declares, as she pulls the board away from me and towards herself. "I've only had as much as you, you know" I reply. Her face is a little shocked at this, usually I don't bite back. She has an almost embarrassed look, who knows what it means, the more cynical part thinks it means "yeah well I can afford to have more cheese than you".

I finally crack. The wine had more than a little to do with this. Mr T wasn't shocked, not one bit, after years of threatening to tell her off himself, I think he was actually glad.

"Why?" I demand, nasty, not how I would have preferred to have this conversation. "I'm sick of my body and everything I put in it being under constant surveillance!" Shit I've jumped in too quick, its a more nuanced argument that she probably won't understand at this juncture. I'm right, she goes on the defensive "Oh darling you've had too much to drink" as she rolls her eyes at my melodrama. "Well then so have you, I've been drinking you drink for drink as well!". Ha that got her, and she knows it too.

"Well weight watches says a match-box size piece of cheese" ... "Do you think I need to go to weight watches?" ... "I didn't say that" ... "Yeah but you think it, we all know you do, and I'm sick of you being obsessed with the size of my butt!".

Really eloquent. Not.

She cracks it, gets up and leaves the room. I cry, get up to leave, try to drag Mr T with me as he and Dad try to sit me back down.

Dad questions me, if I think she's wrong, why do I care what she thinks? Because she's my Mum of course, and I'm sick of the constant comments. I don't know what he's getting at with this line of questioning, whether he thinks she's right and is trying to prove to me that I do too, or whether he thinks I should just ignore her obsessions.

She comes back. Her emotions have cut through her defensiveness, she feels bad. I'm still too angry to care that she feels bad. I push it, years of saying it in my head all come forth like a torrent. Maybe just because you're obsessed by the size of your own arse you shouldn't expect me to be too! Did you think all your comments about big titty wop wops weren't going to impact your big breasted 16-year old daughter?! You always assume the worst of me! Can't you see the good job, or the academic success, or the happy relationship, or the good friends, or the positive attitude to life - no all you see is the size of my butt!!!

Now she's crying. "I'm your mother, I'm allowed to say those things, I didn't think they impacted you! I don't think you're fat, I think you have a great figure, your body has hardly changed in 8 years!"

Rubbish. Utterly incomprehensible, contradictory rubbish, which we all know is a lie, her opinions on the acceptability of my body are well known, she is as transparent as a window. Even Dad nods in agreement. I point all of this out to her.

She cries. I cry. Dad and Mr T point out that she loves me very much. Which I know she does. We have a hug. Mr T and I leave.

She calls the next day but I'm too...emotional...to talk to her. I don't want to talk about it. Mr T spends the next two days nagging me to call her, he doesn't want this to fester and damage our otherwise great relationship.

I don't want to call her, because I don't know that I can explain it to her. I know if she says I'm too fat then that should be the most terrible thing on the planet. But even if she does say that, my problem is that I just don't care that much. I'm on a path of body love that values how my body feels for me, not how it vainly looks to anyone else. Maybe the fact that I like eating good, healthy food and I enjoy the energizing effects of running and swimming, have fooled her into misinterpreting my behaviour as someone who wants to be skinny, not someone who just likes feeling good on the inside. Maybe I should talk more about just how low in calories my lunch is, or just how many kms I swam or ran this morning, maybe that would make her feel better, I don't know. But I find that kind of conversation so intensely boring, and it sounds like bragging, so I'm just not interested.

And having to explain all that to her, even if I could make her understand, I am afraid it will be taken as an implicit criticism of her - because she values being slim pretty much over everything else it seems. And I want to tell her just how goddamn sexist her opinions are, but I don't think we're on the same page enough for that to make sense to her.

Anyway I finally did call her. I apologised for having the conversation in the wrong way, and she apologised for being obsessive. We then talked a bit about her obsession, and she admitted that it really takes over her mind, like she sat next to a fat woman on the train the other day, and she couldn't stop thinking about it for ages. She said that when she would tell me to stop eating cheese, she was actually also saying it to herself. I said maybe she should cut herself some slack, she's on a constant calorie restriction diet and does like two classes at the gym everyday, perhaps she should just accept herself. I tried not to sound preachy.

It wasn't the right way to have this discussion with my Mum, yelling while we were both under the influence I mean. But I feel better for having had it anyway. There are things that I would have liked to have made a little clearer to her. Like that I don't actually even mind if she thinks I should lose weight, its more that she sees nothing else that really bothered me. And the fact that she sees it as such a central issue to a women's self worth that she couldn't come out and say something plainly, she had subject me to a constant drip of negative comments, almost like she was trying to subliminally make me hate myself slim.

But we resolved things well enough, and hopefully I'll get a break from it for a while (I'm not holding my breath that it'll be forever) and she can cut herself some slack, and give her mind a break from obsessing over fat people for a while.

Objectifiying our bodies drives us from them

There is an idea I've been toying with for a while, its not well developed yet, but the bones are thus: our obsession with physical attractiveness (heck let's just say it - BEING SKINNY) is in a huge part responsible not only for eating disorders that restrict caloric intake, but also obesity and the pandemic problem of not finding enough time to exercise. Yes, I think people are generally fat because we're obsessed with not being fat.

Appearance obsession is I think, for some people, causing them to hate and flee from their bodies. We constantly dissect and criticise our bodies - my thighs are x, my belly is y, sweet Jesus help I HAVE CANKLES!

One idea floating around is 'The fantasy of being thin', where people image how wonderful their lives will be when they're thin; where when we imagine the future, it always seems to include a better, thinner you. When we attempt to fulfill this fantasy by dieting and apperance-orientated exercise, the majority of people fail because they want to be instantly thin, because they're hurting themselves, physically and mentally, by being driven by body-hate and the shadows of a shallow fantasy.

Our bodies feel neglected, they're not an ally in the change, and they fight back. The more you say "no chocolate", the more your body craves chocolate. The more you say "run you fat ass!" the more your muscles scream for you to stop; I don't think they appreciate being spoken to like that. And finally failure comes, thank god because changing your life based on body-hate and image-obsessed fantasy is cruel to your body and soul.

And with failure we retreat again from our bodies. We're not on speaking terms with our bodies because we feel they're letting us down so devastatingly. And I think, for some people, this is where overeating and sloth take over, cue obesity crisis. Stuffing yourself and lying about for more than a few hours does NOT feel good. But we're too angry with our bodies to listen to them, so instead we seek a quick-fix physical pleasure, and we punish our bodies. It's a nasty, nasty cycle.

Perhaps the only path to good health, for both the individual and society, is through body-love, not body-hate. If we took some time to be nice to our bodies, to listen to them, we would realise they're not actually telling us that they want lard and laziness, but that they want good nutrition and healthy exertion. And in this scenario the same activities - good diet and exercise - are not a painful chore but a pleasurable fulfillment of a physical need. So in order to be healthy we need to stop worrying about what our bodies look like, and start listening to what they feel like on the inside.

I'm touching heavily on ideas of body acceptance, of which there is way more coherent literature than I want to focus on here. However one issue relating to body acceptance that is pertinent here is the power of the fantasy of being thin, where people espouse body acceptance, but in the back of their minds it's still the same - "I'll accept my body with all its 'flaws'....when I've lost 15kgs."

I think body-love makes people healthier, and in some cases that may mean slimmer; but attempting to use body-love to achieve some goal of weight-loss is never gonna work. After all, your body will know the love is shallow, cos your body is you! lol.

Anyway, that's just the first rambling on this issue, I'm sure there'll be more to come.

(Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting obesity is caused solely by image-obsession. There are significant issues relating to socio-economic status and access to healthy foods, education about healthy diet, medications and weight, obsessive and compulsive mental illness etc. My musings are based entirely on my own experience, and the experience of my mainly white, university-educated, middle class girlfriends.)