stuff & nonsense

If you follow the grand miasma that is celebrity culture, you’ve no doubt come across the name of Tracy Anderson, Fitness Trainer To The Stars! Everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow (her most famous client) to Madonna have employed her to get into shape. She’s put Jennifer Aniston on a baby food diet to drop “extra pounds” (please tell me where Jennifer Aniston has ever had extra pounds?) Most recently, I even wrote about how Jessica Simpson has hired Anderson to get slim for her upcoming wedding.

I think anyone with a modicum of common sense can see - from reading that article and hearing the stories about Anderson’s “miracle” methods - that it’s absolute insanity. Her diet plan essentially calls for you to live on a diet mostly of pureed foods (only 12 different foods, at that) that add up to only 700 calories daily. 700! Not to mention the nearly 2-hour high-intensity workout that you’re meant to perform 6 days per week. Paltrow’s body isn’t a healthy one - it’s a starved one. Restrictive diets like that can lead to all sorts of health problems including osteoporosis which, incidentally, Paltrow’s got. Coincidence? I think not.

I know that making observations about how society is obsessed with women’s weight is a bit of a “no shit, Sherlock” sitch, but sometimes it really strikes me. This is obviously something I struggle with myself - as someone who legitimately IS overweight but trying to work on it in a healthy way, it makes me even more angry to see women who are in good health now destroy it by engaging these awful techniques to try and get to some unattainable (and frankly, in my eyes, unattractive) bodies because that’s what the magazines or their boyfriends or their mothers or whoever else tell them that’s what they should look like.

I know what it’s like to struggle with self-loathing for your body. I’ve been there - I remember being 17 and living in an apartment in Chelsea and ingesting nothing for days on end except for a large glass of tea with one teaspoon of sugar. Then once a week I’d have a piece of pizza or something and then repeat the cycle. I’ve thrown up after meals - crying over the toilet and being afraid that I hadn’t gotten it all out. I don’t do these things anymore, but they say that old habits die hard and even now - as an educated and aware nearly 27-year-old - I have to pull myself up on things when I see myself falling back into potentially harmful patterns. I like the control of documenting every single thing I put into my mouth and do so to track my calories, but I notice that I’m often tempted to turn it into a game. One day I’ll somehow only eat about 1,000 calories and the next I’ll try to see if I can get just under that, to see how low I can go. I know that’s unhealthy, and an awful practice. I know that it will not work, that eventually it will cause you to gain more weight, that it causes mood swings and can damage your internal organs on a long-term basis. And I’m able to talk some sense into myself, but not always. And if it’s that much of a struggle for me, I can imagine how difficult it is for the millions of other girls out there going through the same thing.

I even see this with G, who is by far the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever laid eyes on. According to her, a nominal weight gain (self-described, I should mention) has turned her body into this terrible thing. She is nowhere near fat or even overweight, and yet she struggles so much with what she sees as a serious flaw. We had a discussion about this the other night and I nearly cried because I could see how earnestly she believes that there is something wrong with her when there isn’t at all. I, of course, will always remind her that there isn’t, in any way, but it hardly makes a difference when you’ve convinced yourself otherwise. Still, I wanted her (and want everyone else - even myself) to realise that she is not here to look a particular way for anyone else, but instead to utilise the body given to her - which is strong, capable and loyal because it keeps going - and to love it the way I love it, to see it as the beautiful and wonderful thing it is.

(Thanks to the brilliant Caitlin Moran for cluing me into this piece!)