Extricating myself from the 'dieting before a holiday' hamster wheel
On finally saying FU to the endless pressure to cut weight
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For any of you who haven’t watched Battlestar Galactica (and if you haven’t, you must watch it immediately and I will ignore your feeble protestations that you don’t like sci-fi), there is a race of robots called the Cylon who are at war with humans. Some of the Cylon look like real humans, and live on Earth and other planets as sleeper agents, until bam! Their button is activated and they carry out whatever nefarious plan they are programmed to do.
This is exactly what I feel happens to my brain and my body ahead of a holiday. I am the Cylon, society is the button and diet culture is the program. Previously, it hasn’t mattered how much I’ve extracted myself from the slim-is-king world, how I’ve reprogrammed myself to think of food as neither good or bad, how I focus on performance goals with my training versus aesthetics, once that big, red button is pressed, the whole shaky, clattering machinery comes to life like a horrible funfair ride, except no one is having fun.
You have to lose weight before your holiday, comes the message, bleeding into my brain like a poison. You need to reduce your carbs. Start tracking. Reduce your alcohol. No crisps. Add more cardio. Don’t even think about that fucking mince pie. Restrict, restrict, restrict. Meep morp.
This has happened for around two decades, for almost every single holiday, with beach holidays being the most extreme in terms of pressure. I’ve never had an eating disorder but like a lot of people, I have engaged in some form of disordered eating habits especially around holidays and celebration. Even when I tell myself I’m not. (For those who don’t know what these might look like, they can range from cutting out food groups to feeling the need to work off what you just ate, it could be calling foods ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and then scolding yourself for consuming the latter.
This year, this holiday, I have finally said no. NO.
I am simply not doing it. I want off the ride. I want the mince pie without feeling shame and loathing mixed in with currants and pastry. I do not want to be observing myself from a distance. Scrutinising a menu and doing the mental arithmetic. For what? For why? None of it fucking matters. It is never enough. There is never an end point, and it is not possible to maintain.
An excellent example of this is in a video by one of my favourite Instagram accounts, Tactic Functional Nutrition, who pull apart the sentence people use ‘I’m going to do X and X diet and program, because it worked the first time’. Essentially saying that if it worked the first time, there wouldn’t be a need to do it the second time.
That I’ve decided to do this ahead of this specific holiday is significant. For this is no ordinary holiday. This is the Ninja Warrior of holidays: a trip back home to India to visit most of my extended family. When it comes to body image, a visit there is like Cersei Lannister’s Walk of Shame from Game of Thrones, except instead of a nun ringing a bell, it’s an endless parade of relatives commenting on how fat you’ve become since they last saw you.
I have never not undertaken some kind of holiday weightloss approach before an India trip. The fear of those comments as well as the pervasive pressure to be a smaller version of myself (because isn’t that what people do before a holiday), kept me in that hamster wheel. But this time, enough was enough.
I wasn’t sure what would happen, or if I’d feel terrible about it. I’m still not entirely sure how I’ll feel when I get there. But for now, everything has calmed down. Nothing feels restricted and because I’m not operating from a place of scarcity, I don’t even want the damn mince pie. This is the calmest and most peaceful I’ve felt about my body before going on holiday. I’ll explain how I got there.
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