You've Been Failed

For this month I decided on the theme of failure. Now there are as many types of failure as there are love, grief, laughter etc. but my particular focus will be on failure in terms of body image and self worth. It’s so strange to think that when I began this blog four years ago, I didn’t associate my body image issues with my sense of self-worth and now I can't understand how I ever separated them.

For this blog, I want to look at diet failure particularly feeling like a failure post diet. In case you didn’t know, 95-98 % of all diets fail. They are designed to. There is not much money in the diet industry if everyone gets the body they want on the first try. The diet industry in the UK is currently worth an estimated £2 billion a year. If you can’t understand how much money that is then this image below may help.

I could never afford to go on diets when I was younger and plus I was living at home so I couldn’t demand what was bought in the shopping. Instead I developed horrific, binge eating habits which made me miserable and confirmed all my thoughts about how useless and weak I was which, in turn, made me eat. When I went to university I was living on my own for the first time. My mam had rejoined Weight Watchers so I had all of her booklets and calculators from the first time she went so I was ready to start my first real diet.

Something you should know about me, is I am very good at following the rules or the steps of a task. Once I have a goal and clear steps to get there, I will follow them to the book. I counted the calories of everything I ate religiously; even factoring in three skittles one day to the dismay of my classmate. I was a carnivore at this time and didn’t eat vegetables that would have allowed me more freedom instead I ate tiny portions of highly processed food which left me tired all the time.

But I did do it and I lost lots of weight. Quickly. I felt great. I bought a very tight dress that I would never in a million years have bought before. I took the “after” photos and felt great about myself. Then my friends approached me and said they were worried about me and thought I had an eating disorder. I was devastated - after all my hard work and still I wasn’t enough. I felt like an idiot for thinking a diet would change what a failure I was. I came off the diet.

However, all that calorie calculating stays in your brain. I didn’t have the calculator with me anymore but I had used the system for so long that I could work out whether something was “good” or “bad” very quickly and so the weight loss stayed off for a bit longer. I went on holidays with my best friends and because I wasn’t officially dieting anymore I felt like I was huge in comparison to them so missed out on the fun time in the pool and just tried to cover up as much as possible.

I felt like a complete failure.

I couldn’t do diets properly and I wasn’t naturally skilled at being thin.

Do you hear that? I couldn’t. I wasn’t naturally skilled at being thin. As if it’s a skill. As if our body shape is a test or an exam to be aced or cheated at. As if life is a test. It wasn’t me that was the failure. I did my side of things. It’s the diet industry and how it has warped society so much that we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Diet culture has convinced us that how we eat and look is an indicator of who we are as people.I know people who have been on diets on and off their whole lives thinking they are failures and not once considering that perhaps it’s the diets that are the failures? We’ve put our bodies through this yo yo experience repeatedly and yet they don’t give up on us. We are not the problem. We are not failures.

For me, now I am trying to repair my relationship with food and the warped way diets and diet culture have led me to see it. I am researching intuitive eating and trying to slow down when I eat. I eat so quickly because I always felt so guilty for eating. Now, I am really trying to savour the taste of each bite in order to figure out if I really like the taste of what I am eating (a side effect of eating quickly is that you don’t really get a sense of what food tastes like!). I am thinking about what I am in the mood for and what I’m excited at the prospect of eating, rather than what I feel I have “earned”.

I am exploring foods I have never eaten before and now that I actually eat vegetables (I’m now a vegetarian - not for weight reasons!!) there is a whole world of deliciousness to discover. I am trying to think about the journey that the food has been on to make it to my plate and being grateful to have it - growing our own vegetables this year has been a huge reminder of the many steps in food production. I am just trying to be curious in general about my food. It is not my enemy. I am not a failure for wanting to enjoy it.

I can’t do diets and I’m not naturally thin.

That doesn’t make me a failure.

I won’t do diets and my body will look how it looks.

That doesn’t make me a success.

I am not my failures. I am not my successes.

I have had failures. I have had successes.

I will have failures. I will have successes.

I am still myself. I am still in this body. I am still worthy.