Why is thinness the ultimate female ambition?

It has taken Hannah Betts over a year to revert to her normal body shape after a bout of illness left her skinny, vulnerable and 'unsexed’. Now she asks why her healthy attitude to food is so at odds with the views and desires of other women

The normal curve: Hannah restored to health

A year or so ago, I was poisoned, my appendix exploded, and I almost died. Although, for the purposes of this article, the above sentence should read: “A year or so ago, I lost more than a stone in four days, when I was poisoned, my appendix exploded, and I almost died.” Because my sudden and dramatic weight loss was the only part of my situation that people – by which I mean other women – appeared able to notice.

Nothing I have achieved in my life has been as publicly celebrated as this inadvertent weight loss: not my Oxford first, nor lecturing there, nor becoming a leader writer on a national newspaper. Even my much-loved doctor congratulated me on it. When I emerged after several weeks’ isolation – shaky, uncertain, still visibly malnourished – the female response was universal: “You lucky bitch.”

My stoical doctor father told me that he wanted to weep when he saw me, so slight and hollow-cheeked did I appear. Male colleagues were appalled: “Don’t tie your hair back, you look like a skeleton,” “Betts, where are your breasts?” While, from the women, I heard: “You look fantastic,” “What’s your boot camp?” and “You’ve got to keep this up.” When I encountered my sister two months after managing not to kick the bucket, she had but one observation: “You look thin.”

I hadn’t previously been fat, merely “normal”. I am tallish and my frame is substantial, big-shouldered and long-limbed – I had size seven feet at the age of seven. So I merely dropped from a size 10-12 to an 8-10; from the middle range of my BMI to the flimsiest. Only “normal” doesn’t cut it in 21st-century culture: the goal we are obliged to strive for is “thin”. Thinness, in a way that Wallis Simpson would surely have approved of, is the great cultural obsession. I may have known this already on a subconscious level, but it was shocking to experience the reality.

Personally, I loathed being thin. I felt weak, absent and terrified; vulnerable, knock-downable, unsexed; childlike, yet painfully elderly. My unpadded bottom hurt when I sat; my jutting hip bones caught on doorframes and furniture. Merely lying down was painful. My appetite vanished and with it my appetite for life.

And so I rebuilt myself – slowly, sensibly – with good fats, slow-releasing carbs and mountains of protein. I counted calories for the first time in my life – to put weight on – and started my days with 700-calorie Mr Strong breakfasts. The occasions when I could finally manage a whole pizza or a plate of fragrant curry were red-letter days, celebrated with male allies. It took work, and time; but every pound felt like a victory.

Fifteen months on, I am doubtless a little overweight, rounded by festive carousing. However, I regard such changes with objective interest: rear a little plumper, thighs more Amazonian, face entering its late Elvis mode. I am genuinely happier being in ostensibly “worse” shape. I prefer my body contoured. I relish being strong, powerful, able to carry suitcases for tourists and lift prams up steps. I like filling my clothes, not having them hang limply off me. I feel adult, nourished, myself.

I have absolutely no desire to resemble a stick-thin supermodel, or emaciated Angelina Jolie. I want to look healthy, à la Sophie Dahl when she was neither teen-plump nor model-scrawny; ravishingly curvaceous, even, like Monica Bellucci or Christina Hendricks; and be Kate Winslet-like in my ability to hoist Richard Branson’s (reluctant) mother over my shoulder and rescue her from the flames.

No other woman I have talked to about this could begin to understand this welcoming of weight. “What do you mean you want to put it back on?” they asked in horror. “You’ve got what we all long for.” A brilliant friend confided that her guiltiest secret was feeling joy after she was in a car crash because she had “never been more thin”.

Candida Crewe’s 2007 memoir, Eating Myself, argued that the author’s “normal abnormality” regarding food – read (barely) functional anorexia – is the “everywoman disease”. I attacked it in print at the time for perpetuating the stereotype that thinness is all women care about. Now, I feel forced to concede that, never having dieted, not knowing my current weight and harbouring no sexual feelings about chocolate, it is I who am the (healthy) freak.

Anorexia seemed still happily rare in the prelapsarian Eighties in which I grew up, although my psychiatrist father was treating cases. There was one girl in my state school sixth form with an eating disorder she had picked up at boarding school, who managed to inflict her “eating’s cheating” mantra upon one other.

Apostle of thinness: Wallis Simpson (REX)

Only at Oxford did I begin to appreciate the scale of the problem, learning that freighted term “body image”. I remember sitting in the obligatory group therapy circle, feeling as if I was struggling with a foreign language as so many bright, beautiful girls confessed to hating their bodies. I felt astounded, incredulous, giddied.

Later, one member arranged an experiment in which we were to eat biscuits in front of a mirror for half an hour, and write down how we felt. I did it, didn’t get it, felt a tad bored. Later, one of the other participants had to be hurried away by ambulance, spurred into a meltdown that required psychiatric help. Again, I was shocked. No one else seemed surprised. It was regrettable, but we had clearly been playing with fire.

Some 90 per cent of adult women are said to experience body image anxiety, from negative thoughts to full-blown self-loathing. A few years ago, I was asked to comment on research that suggested millions of women suffer from such negative self-image that they may feel too inhibited to attend work, or leave the house. The survey by YouGov for Tesco, suggested that as many as 8.3 million (more than one in three) women have cancelled social engagements on account of appearance anxiety, with employers estimated to lose £114.4  million a year to self-disgusted absenteeism.

A third of women questioned could not bear to purchase clothing in the correct size; almost two-thirds avoided their own reflections. Over a third had rejected sex due to body horror, while just under half avoid exercise in public believing this inappropriate for a woman over a size 14 (the UK average being a 16). We were, it appeared, in the grip of a self-consciousness epidemic transforming British womanhood into a collection of work-shy agoraphobics. If this self-hatred is a negative influence on adult women, then it is even more terrifying among girls. Thinness rather than good grades would appear to be the universal pre-pubescent goal, “fat” the ultimate playground insult. Girls as young as five now routinely worry about their weight, said a parliamentary report last year, while half of 14-year-old girls have been on a diet to change their body shape.

The number of pre-teen children treated in hospital for eating disorders has tripled in four years, according to NHS figures. There were more than 6,500 children and teenagers treated in hospital in 2010‑11 for conditions such as anorexia, compared with 1,718 in 2007-08. The figures include 443 who received treatment before the age of 13 – a more than threefold rise. Among them were 79 children less than 10 when starting treatment, 56 aged five or under – anorexic behaviour picked up as toddlers.

For all our education, and opportunities that would make our grandmothers green with envy, thinness would appear to be the ultimate female ambition. Somehow, women and weight issues have become equated: not only is fat a feminist issue – as psychologist and campaigner Susie Orbach taught us in her seminal 1978 study – it is a more fundamentally female one. This leaves me – what? – insufficiently female? It is an accusation that has been levelled.

An ex-lover’s woman friends professed to hate me because I don’t much like pudding, something they took to be a mark of smug superiority (it isn’t – I will eat any amount of cheese). I once wrote an article revealing that I do not like chocolate – cue an avalanche of hate mail telling me I had “betrayed the sisterhood” and “obviously detest women”. Recently, I admitted to a friend that I had hit someone over the head with a loaf of bread: “You eat bread?” she goggled.

In this context, the ultimate taboo is – like me – to admit zero angst about consumption. Women who eat too much, women who eat too little, women who eat only during months in which an “r” appears – all this is considered par for the course. It is me – the woman who eats for nourishment and pleasure – who is considered the pervert .

In the wake of January, none of us is a stranger to the current crop of whacko regimes – 5:2, 4:3, new Atkins, old Atkins, Dukan, raw food, green juicing, no sugar, paleo, blood group, or my current favourite, the werewolf diet, in which acolytes eat according to lunar cycles. Meanwhile, the “bikini bridge”, that little indentation beside the sacrum, has replaced the “thigh gap” as index of approved skinniness, despite having started as a BuzzFeed parody of a cultural fixation.

Celebrity magazines sell on the back of who has put on weight and who has shed it (typically, the very same “slebs” figure in both categories on a complex alternating schedule); starlet and paparazzi careers are born and made on the fat-thin cycle and its oscillation between “good” and “bad”. If the pressure is there for E-listers, for A-listers it is off the scale. As Tina Fey joked at the recent Golden Globes ceremony: “Matthew McConaughey did amazing work this year. For his role in Dallas Buyers Club, he lost 45lb, or what actresses call 'being in a movie’.” Lena Dunham, creator of hit US comedy Girls, is the exception to this skeletal sorority, and, by God, don’t we get to hear about it.

Add to this our (justifiable) anxiety regarding obesity, and our collective thinness infatuation reaches fever pitch. Still, as experts are beginning to reach consensus, the obesity crisis may be a product of our thinness mania, and the diet industry that creates and supplies its confused appetites. Diet foods and lunatic regimes ultimately make us gain more weight, as eating becomes disordered, swinging between binge and purge; dieting being self-defeating in a way that “normal” eating is not. By eating normally, I’m the same dress size as I was when I hit puberty – not thin, but not fat.

I would like to say that I see some hope, but I don’t, not without a collective decision to fight for it. To be sure, we have the various Dove campaigns and 2013’s exhortations to be “Fit Not Thin”. However, this very phrase conjures the winner of two Olympic gold medals Rebecca Adlington weeping over comparisons between her body and that of a model in last year’s I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! We were told the Olympics would inspire women to see their bodies differently, but even among its champions the goal is to belittle ourselves.

Patriarchy ghettoised women by defining them as being about the body only: hysterics whose sole modes of expression were to ingest and expel. At the moment when we are finally wrestling free of its stranglehold, women are being frogmarched straight back into the same impasse. Worse, we are doing this to ourselves, self-harming physically and psychologically.

It is time we stopped reducing ourselves. Time we remembered that a body is more than stomach, hips and thighs. It is heart, lungs, and brain. Personally, I will continue embodying rebellion. I shall put on weight when I overdo the food and drink, and I shall lose it again when life calms down. This is the normal, human way of things. And if this makes me less of a woman, then I’ll settle for “human being”.

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