The Skinny Epidemic

So here we are, caught in the middle of a skinny epidemic. Everyone wants to be skinny, but not just thin – everyone wants to be tiny. I don’t hear anyone saying that they want to be a skinny size 14. Even the people who are already thin want to lose weight. It makes us wonder if, rather than a skinny epidemic, it might actually be a spreading and highly contagious case of ill mental health?

The whole size zero thing is getting drastically out of hand. It’s actually almost fashionable to have an eating disorder. All we seem to see in the latest magazines are pictures of the thinnest and most unwell stars, close to deaths door just to look good. Then later in the same magazine we see pictures of the other stars who have put on a few pounds in the most un-glamorous positions possible. The media bombards us with skinny propaganda, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The negative aspects of extreme dieting and eating disorders are conveniently cloaked with how beautiful the next woman who lost 4 stone is, how it changed her life and got her a proposal from a red hot millionaire footballer. Puh-lease. We all know deep down that this stuff is a load of old rubbish – so why do we buy into it? Beats me – and I’ve been there myself, for a wasted 5 years of my life, which I’ll go into later.

You have to admit, it’s a hell of a lot harder in today’s world to eat healthily than it probably was years ago. Recently I was discussing healthy eating with my Gran, and the warnings that too many eggs are bad for you due to high cholesterol. ‘Never did me any harm,’ was her direct quote… sounds familiar I’m sure to Grandchildren everywhere. She said that when she was growing up everyone ate eggs every morning, and that my Grandpa was fed a full English breakfast every morning in life, with sandwiches or broth for lunch and always meat, veg and potatoes for dinner followed by a pudding! ‘And I’ll tell you what else,’ she said, “there wasn”t one fat person in my class at school!’ I understand that there weren’t the same fast food or takeaway options back then, or even sweets and crisps. Also I would imagine that back then, almost everyone ate in that manner because mother’s generally stayed home and cooked for the family, and they would all eat together at the same time. That idea for me is a far cry from everyday life. My mum, dad and myself work full time jobs. I have two younger brothers and a little sister. I can only imagine that when my mum gets home late at night the last thing she wants to do is cook a big meal, so we do eat a lot of quick ready-made meals. The only time that we eat meat, veg and potatoes would be a Sunday evening. Even then, everyone has their own busy agenda, so we don’t often eat together as a family.

For me, I feel my weight gain at 16 was due to fast food, which everyone was eating because none of us had much money and it was cheaper to go to McDonald’s than buy a sandwich and drink. Plus we had just moved house and had to be driven to and from school (which cut out the school walk) and our parents got home late at night which meant we generally got takeaways or fast food for convenience. I knew I had gained a bit of weight, but I felt okay about it – and I knew that this was probably the transition from girl to woman and everyone knows a teen girl’s weight fluctuates. It wasn’t really until my family made a few comments that I started to feel unhappy.

My mum encouraged me to start a diet and if I was going out and asked how I looked

I tended to get, “okay,” instead of, “nice”. That was enough. My parents always told the truth – even my granddad passed comment, so I started analysing my body. I reasoned that if they were willing to say things so hurtful to me there must be cause for concern. The more I looked at my body the more I disliked it. I had never noticed how much was actually wrong with it. With Mum’s help I started Rosemary Conley’s flat stomach plan, which my Mum had had great success with before. It was hard at first but with my prom as an incentive I worked away at my diet plan. I can remember the comment that changed it all though – my high school prom. At the very end of the evening I got out of a car and the guy I had a crush on said, “wow, you”ve put on a bit of weight.’ It made me realise instead of looking beautiful that night, I must have looked fat. And it shattered me. I can honestly recite every single comment that was ever made about my weight since then. It upsets me to remember them.

After the prom in summer I got serious. I had to lose weight fast. I started Rosemary Conley again, religiously this time. Using scales to weigh myself as well as my food. I felt worse and worse about myself. I weighed myself every single day, sometimes two or three times. I monitored my food intake so carefully. I could see the weight go down on the scales but no one said anything about how I looked. Plus, everyday I looked in the mirror I got fatter and fatter until I couldn’t actually bear to look at my body anymore. I started to wear baggier clothes and darker colours. I started to do an exercise program but it got out of hand too when I became obsessed and had to do it every single night. But still, no one even noticed. I knew I looked terrible. I used to cover my stomach all the time.

Then one of the girls at work started taking slimming pills from a shop nearby – so I did too – secretly of course. I took the highest measurable dose which was intended for people who were seriously overweight because I genuinely thought I was so fat that it was the only way I could get results. It got to the point where I couldn’t use a knife that had been used incase there was butter on it that I couldn’t see. I would make excuses not to eat a lot of the meals prepared at home, worried that they had been cooked in oil. I wouldn’t eat anything that I hadn’t seen the nutritional value label, or that had more than a 4% fat rate.. Then it got even worse. I read somewhere that the minimum fat content that you need to live is 6 grams of fat per day. So you can guess what I did. I ate my three meals a day, each with no more than 2 grams of fat, or preferably fat free, with cup a soups (o.2g fat) or fat free yogurts. I was deeply depressed but it was almost as if I was numb, and didn’t feel it. Being thin seemed more important, and I was so sure when I was thin that I’d be really happy. I stayed in my bedroom every night alone, doing my exercises and planning my meals for the next day, then going to bed because I was so exhausted. I was ill. Mum and Dad told me that they thought my eating was getting out of hand, but I didn’t listen. I figured if I was fat now, while on an extreme diet, I could never eat normally again or I’d become fatter. I used to fantasize and think how amazingly wonderful it must be in life to never have to worry about what you eat. That was my dream.

The only time I went out was every Saturday night where I went out with friends and got blindingly drunk to forget my troubles. I dare say, that the sugar in the huge amount of alcohol I consumed was probably one of the only things keeping me going. I started to get anxious. I didn’t know what it was at the time but it grew and grew until I was anxious almost everyday in life with palpitations, sweats and a sore heart and finally and to you I’m sure, inevitably, I started to have panic attacks. That was a terrible time. If you’ve never suffered from a panic or anxiety disorder I can’t possibly describe to you how it feels. It is the most gripping, fearful feeling on this earth.

It never really went away. It had ups and downs, and they always came hand in hand (eating control and anxiety). It wasn’t until my Mum talked me into starting Slimming World that things started to change (I didn’t go to the classes, I just used my Mum’s books). Looking back I’m sure she did this to save me. It would mean I was eating a balanced, varied diet – but it still came under the title “diet”. I was so sceptical at first, I had to eat things that I hadn’t eaten in so long (almost 2 years) cheese, milk, lots of meats – I was so terrified I cried to my Mum that I was scared I’d actually gain weight on the diet, because it went against everything I’d lived by for the past 2 years. 2 weeks later and I had lost some weight and I finally felt like food was fun. I even had a little chocolate eventually which I literally hadn’t touched in those whole 2 years. I’m so lucky Mum put that option in front of me, because it showed me that there was so much freedom within food and eating the way I was before didn’t do me any good at all. Gradually my clutch on dieting lessened, although it gets worse every now and then – never as bad as before. I wouldn’t let it get that bad again. My extreme control actually made me lose control, and I’m never going back there.

I’m 21 now. I still have difficulty in actually accepting my body for what it is. I think it’s just the eternal pursuit of skinny. But it’s in my mind skinny, and you really can’t achieve something that just isn’t realistic. Now I follow Paul McKenna’s program, “I can make you thin,” which I truly think is fantastic and I believe in it passionately. It’s about eating what you want, when you want, so long as you’re hungry which is the way human beings are meant to function. I did lose weight with the program and the hypnosis C.D which comes with it really helped in the way I feel about my body. I also do Callanetics twice weekly- an excellent muscle toning program and due to starting a relationship with my boyfriend 2 and a half years ago, who plays and coaches badminton, I do exercise. He helped break my barriers towards exercise. I always believed that because I was so body conscious, that everyone else would be inspecting me. He showed me that no-one actually cares to look at you in the gym working out. No-one’s going to laugh at you because they are striving for the same goal. I didn’t believe in myself before then.

What is the solution? The media could stop promoting the extremes of the weightloss category. Stars could stop conforming to the unwritten rules. We could eat differently, make the right choices. It’s hard to know what to eat, and life certainly isn’t going to slow down. There needs to be more help and advice available, especially for young people. Teaching young people while they’re still at school I feel is essential. Everyone needs good knowledge of how to eat a balanced diet, and everyone needs self confidence, which there just isn’t enough of at the moment. Self confidence seems to get killed gradually through adolescence in children today. Don’t get me wrong, there are people out there who are trying to help – these are the people who can and will make the difference for the future. At the rate this bug is spreading children of the next generations to come will suffer eating disorders and low self esteem, and so will their children, and their children’s children. We have to define here and now – what can we do to stop this inevitable outbreak from spreading further, and how can we help the people already suffering?