‘I feel guilty but I hate my body’: a feminist confesses
She’s a campaigner. She counts calories 24/7. Thinking about food takes up more energy than her career. Does Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett have an eating disorder?Here’s a fact I’m uncomfortable admitting: I could tell you, in order, every single food item that I have ingested in the last 72 hours. I could also, with a fair amount of accuracy, tell you how many calories each of those meals contained, and how I felt while eating them. (The Cheesy Wotsits I had on the way to a party the day before yesterday? Guilt. One hundred calories but, hey, I needed something to line my stomach. The lentil and Quorn sausage stew last night? Fine, but I made sure I didn’t have too many bits of sausage. The Marmite on toast
She’s a campaigner. She counts calories 24/7. Thinking about food takes up more energy than her career. Does Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett have an eating disorder?
Here’s a fact I’m uncomfortable admitting: I could tell you, in order, every single food item that I have ingested in the last 72 hours. I could also, with a fair amount of accuracy, tell you how many calories each of those meals contained, and how I felt while eating them. (The Cheesy Wotsits I had on the way to a party the day before yesterday? Guilt. One hundred calories but, hey, I needed something to line my stomach. The lentil and Quorn sausage stew last night? Fine, but I made sure I didn’t have too many bits of sausage. The Marmite on toast I had at midnight because my stomach wouldn’t stop rumbling? Awful.)
There are things I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you how many times I looked in the mirror, for instance, or indeed in any reflective surface (the dry cleaner’s window, the door of the bus as it passed me at the traffic lights), in the hope that the body looking back at me would be somehow different from the reality. I couldn’t tell you how many times I pinched the fat on my thighs and thought “crap”. I couldn’t tell you how many times I thought about my weight, or my waist measurement, or just about my body generally, which seems to have ceased to be a vessel that carts me around through life and has become, to borrow a phrase, a battleground. It is too many.
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SOURCE: Eating disorders | The Guardian – Read entire story here.
