We Started Dieting at Fourteen

We Started Dieting at Fourteen

I was talking with a friend recently about dieting. Not a particularly unusual conversation between women. We’ve been having versions of that conversation most of our lives. But then we started talking about when it began.

Fourteen.

We started dieting at fourteen years old.  I keep coming back to that number.

Fourteen.

We weren’t women trying to manage our health. We were girls. Our bodies hadn’t even finished growing, and somehow many of us had already gotten the message that they needed correcting.

We Learned to Look for What Was Wrong

I grew up in an era of magazines and television shows that were very good at teaching girls how they were supposed to look.

There were diets everywhere. Celebrity bodies were discussed as though they were public property. Lose ten pounds. Flatten your stomach. Get ready for swimsuit season. Fix this. Hide that. Shrink something else.

And it didn’t only come from magazines and television.

It came from friends.

It came from family.

It came from other women who had probably learned exactly the same things themselves.

Sometimes the comments were meant to help.

Sometimes they weren’t.

But we absorbed them either way. We learned that gaining weight was bad. Losing weight was good. Smaller clothes were an accomplishment.

Compliments arrived when our bodies got smaller. And somewhere in all of that, many of us learned to look at our own bodies and immediately search for what needed improvement.

I Remember Being Very Thin

There was a period in my life when I lost a lot of weight. I was incredibly slender. I remember eating grapes and cheese for lunch. I worked out for an hour. I became thin enough that some of my friends were concerned about how much weight I had lost. I wasn’t anorexic. I’m not using that word to describe myself or diagnose what was happening. I simply became very thin.

And today, when I see photographs of myself from that time, sometimes I have the same thought:

I wish I could be that weight again.

But here’s the part that stops me.

I didn’t think I was thin enough then either.

I remember criticizing that body. I remember looking at myself and still seeing too much. I remember believing I needed to lose more weight.

So now I look at photographs of a body I wish I had again and realize that when I actually lived inside that body, I was beating her up too.

That realization hurts. Because apparently the finish line wasn’t a particular weight. The finish line just kept moving.

When Was I Going to Be Enough?

That’s the question I wish I could ask the younger version of myself.

What number would finally have done it?

What dress size?

What photograph?

What reflection in the mirror would finally have made me say:

There. You’re allowed to stop criticizing yourself now.

I don’t know that there was one. Because if I couldn’t recognize “thin enough” while I was living inside the body I now wish I had, maybe the problem wasn’t simply the number on the scale. Maybe somewhere along the way I had learned that my body was always supposed to be a work in progress.

Something to monitor.

Something to discipline.

Something to shrink.

Something that would eventually become acceptable if I just worked hard enough.

We Learned Calories Before We Learned How to Feed Ourselves

That’s another thing that strikes me now. Many of us learned how to diet before we learned how to cook. We knew foods were “good” or “bad.” We knew dessert was something you had to earn. We knew eating too much meant you had “blown it.” We knew exercise could compensate for food. We knew Monday was apparently the official day for beginning again.

What I’m not sure we learned was how to make ourselves a satisfying meal.

How much protein helps us feel full.

How to cook vegetables so they actually taste good.

How to notice hunger before we’re ravenous.

How to recognize comfortable fullness.

How to eat something simply because we enjoy it without immediately calculating what we need to do afterward.

How to feed ourselves.

I’m learning some of those things now. In my fifties. Better late than never, I suppose.

The Voice Doesn’t Automatically Disappear

I wish I could say that once I recognized all of this, decades of conditioning evaporated. They didn’t. Just today, I ate too much lunch. It was tofu and a truly impressive quantity of vegetables.

I enjoyed it, so I kept eating. When I finished, I wasn’t miserably stuffed, but I was fuller than I wanted to be.

And one of the first words that popped into my head was:

Glutton.

There she was.

That old voice.

I had eaten more than I needed, therefore apparently we were no longer discussing lunch.

We were evaluating my character. That’s what I’m trying to change. Not by pretending portions don’t matter. They do.

Not by telling myself vegetables don’t have calories. They do.

Not by pretending I don’t want to lose weight. I do.

I’m trying to change what happens next.

I want to be able to say:

That was too much food. Next time I’ll serve myself less.

And stop there.

No insult.

No punishment.

No skipped meal.

No exercise sentence handed down by the imaginary Food Court.

Just information.

I Still Want to Lose Weight

This matters to me because I don’t want this to become another rule.

I don’t want someone telling me that wanting to lose weight means I haven’t learned to accept myself properly.

I am allowed to want things for my body.

I want to improve my health.

I want better blood sugar.

I want to be stronger.

I want to move more easily.

And yes, eventually, I would like to weigh less.

But I’m beginning to wonder whether I can pursue those things without requiring myself to hate where I’m starting.

Those are not the same thing.

Taking care of myself doesn’t have to begin with rejecting myself.

Don’t turn health into another excuse to punish yourself.

That’s the line I’m trying to protect. Because punishment can disguise itself remarkably well as “being healthy.”

Eat as little as possible.

Never have seconds.

Skip the thing you really want.

Exercise because you ate too much.

Feel proud when you’re hungry.

Feel guilty when you’re full.

Call yourself names when you don’t follow the rules.

I’ve done enough of that.

I don’t want to see how little food I can get away with eating. I want to learn how much food helps me feel satisfied. I don’t want exercise to erase dinner.

I want to move because my body benefits from moving. I don’t want to cook vegetables because I’m being punished for gaining weight. I want to cook vegetables because—much to my continuing surprise—I actually like the damn things.

Maybe you started dieting at fourteen too.

Maybe you were twelve.

Maybe twenty-five.

Maybe nobody ever explicitly told you there was anything wrong with your body, but somehow you still got the message.

Think about the photographs you dislike of yourself.

Then think about photographs from ten or twenty years earlier.

Have you ever looked at one and thought:

God, I looked good. Why did I think I was fat?

I have.

And maybe that’s worth noticing. Not so we can mourn every younger body we’ve lost. But so we don’t spend the next twenty years doing exactly the same thing to the body we’re living in today.

What Would I Tell Her?

Sometimes I wonder what I would tell fourteen-year-old me if I could sit beside her now. I don’t think I’d tell her she was beautiful. She might not believe me. I don’t think I’d tell her never to care about her weight. That feels too simple.

Maybe I’d tell her:

Your body is going to change many times during your life. That isn’t a failure.

I’d tell her that food isn’t something she has to earn. I’d tell her movement can feel good instead of being punishment. I’d teach her to cook. I’d show her how good zucchini can be when you don’t murder it. I’d introduce her to salmon.

I might hold off on tofu until she’s emotionally prepared.

And I’d tell her something I’m only beginning to understand myself:

You don’t have to dislike yourself first in order to take care of yourself.

We Started Dieting at Fourteen

Fourteen.

Before we’d finished growing, many of us had already learned to shrink.

We learned calories before we learned how to feed ourselves.

We learned which parts of our bodies were “problems.”

We learned to compare.

We learned to criticize.

And some of us carried those lessons for decades.

I can’t go back and teach that fourteen-year-old girl something different.

But I can decide what I teach the woman I am now.

I still want to lose weight.

I also want to cook.

I want to eat food that tastes good.

I want to move because taking care of my body feels good, not because dinner requires repayment.

I want to recognize when I’ve eaten enough without calling myself ugly names when I don’t.

And if I become smaller along the way, I don’t want to reach that smaller body and immediately begin explaining everything that’s still wrong with her.

We started dieting at fourteen.

Maybe it’s finally time to learn something else.

Maybe it’s time to learn how to take care of ourselves without first deciding that we are unacceptable.