Give Me a BreakI'm trying to remember the last time I sat down for a meal without people discussing their weight. Even 10-year-olds are asking, "How much fat is in this?" It's only a matter of time before a toddler's first word isn't "potado" but "carb". Anxiety around food has taken the joy out eating and even motherhood, as women feel the pressure to get their pre-pregnancy figures back and to feed their children food that will help them grow - but not too much.
We're suffering a collective craziness around food. We're obsessed with weight. Yet while we've never been more aware of the dangers of obesity, obesity is on the increase. Anorexia is rising too, and not just amongst sensitive, perfectionistic teenagers, but also amongst high-achieving women in their 40s and older. With the numbers of extremely thin and extremely overweight people growing, the number of normal-weight people without food issues is dwindling.
And women are to blame. Or so says Alex Blimes, editor of GQmagazine and, it's relevant to say, a male.
"Women don't diet to please men but to feel superior to other women," he declared in the November issue of Vogue. When I read the quote aloud in the office, three out of four people agreed.
"We don't do anything for men," quipped a wry sub-editor.
"Starvation disfigures young women," Blimes also said, arguing that men don't think very much about body shape - they just know what they like (boobs, large).
Even if you avoid women's magazines, it's impossible not to see the freak show of competitive thinness displayed in newspapers and TV. Starlets can starve themselves and get breast implants for an illusion of curves; that's their choice. What worries me is the almost universally dysfunctional relationship with food that has filtered down into family life.
Because the starvation culture is disfiguring our emotions, too. "You're fat" has become the worst insult that one child can throw at another. The three little letters in "fat" mean stupid, unattractive and lacking in self-control. With obesity being blamed for rising health budgets, eating too much has become an anti-social act and children know it. The girls, especially, know that their worth is measured in relation to their physical beauty as much as their achievements.
So are we mothers to blame? A few years ago I asked that very question of Susie Orbach, author of Fat is a Feminist Issue, first published in 1978. Her answer was "no". The collective obsession with body image is a social virus, she believes, that even the most careful mother can't protect her children from.
Obesity is contagious, too, a Harvard study recently reported. If you have overweight friends who binge-eat, then you're like to be overweight too. If dinner for your best friend is a glass of white wine and one tsp of artichoke paste on half a crostini, that's probably how you're eating too. Other scientists have found connections between obesity and sleep deprivation, the cold virus and our genes - which makes it seem all the more unfair that children are being bullied for a condition that they'll be struggling with all their lives.
Whatever the cause of obesity, it's the stigma that is so destructive, possibly far more destructive to the individual - emotionally, at least - than the extra weight. Children are made to feel ashamed. They're sometimes tormented in the schoolyard and even by siblings at home. When they go shopping for clothes, nothing fits them because, with pre-teen clothes, the fashion fascists are already pushing what they see as the reality that if you're not thin, you can't be stylish.
On the TV show Cirque de Celebrité, one of the contestants, Hannah Waterman, is routinely presented as a clown because she's short and plump compared to the rest - and she seems willing to go along with it. Everywhere children look they see the media portraying healthy, happy and successful people as "thin". And since these people are photographed, which makes people look bigger, the people they're seeing are actually unnaturally thin. On the set of Friends, Courteney Cox and Jennifer Aniston used to breakfast on bagels with all the bread scooped out, to make them low-carb. The Desperate Housewiveshave gotten skinnier with each season. Sienna Miller claimed to have lost weight for Factory Girlby drinking shots of vodka to suppress her appetite. And Amy Winehouse famously blamed binge drinking and hard living for her weight loss. No wonder teenaged girls risk lung cancer by smoking - if given the choice between being fat now, and getting cancer later, they'd rather stay thin and die young.
Because there is nothing worse than being fat in our crazy world.
Orbach wrote: "Body fascism and the tyranny of the thin and the sense that we should all be one size is not only unrealistic, it is also unhealthy and unattainable." A healthy weight doesn't mean skinny. Yet that's what kids think. It's skinny or fat - nothing in between.
That in itself is enough to set up an unhealthy relationship with food. The food fascists have a lot to answer for.
