Ditching the Quest for Size Zero

I realise I'm 40 now.

I realise that this makes me a dinosaur in fashion terms and that worse still, I've been a size 16-18 over the past 10 years which also renders me irrelevant (whatever my age) to the fashion police. 

It wasn't always this way. At 26 i was a size 6-8, totally size obsessed and lauded for my wonderful (albeit unhealthy) appearance.

Did it bother me that when i rolled over in bed that i would get horrendous bruises from my hip bones being so close to the surface to bruise me from the inside out? No, not really.

Did I worry about the dangers of not eating for 3 days at a time? Err, no. I was routinely congratulated for the effects - my size UK 6-8 body was to be celebrated, and no-one really worried about what it took to get to that size or to keep it that way.

Did I think I was thin enough? No of course not. I thought I was huge, even though I couldn't find clothes small enough to fit me anymore. 

This is what I call The Quest for Size Zero

Nonetheless, whatever my motivation, I realise, of course, that I was wrong to feel this way. PLAIN WRONG.

The "current me", equipped with all my research, studies, experiments and understanding of the wider effects of starvation, and the stress that this causes on the body, knows that the "quest for size zero" was one of the major factors in causing my illness and the last 15 years of symptoms which I have suffered. If we can, by some means, save others from this, it has to be a goal worth pursuing. 

Was I conditioned to feel this way by media, images around me, by entire industries created to sell me an "ideal" of myself? Possibly. There is definitely an unrealistic expectation, foisted upon girls from a young age, that says "thinner is better".

The quest for size zero is silly, narcissistic, dangerous. It makes a mockery of every advance in science and education towards better health for the population and sets back by decades the ability for women to fulfill their potential as fully engaged beings in the world, able to occupy the board room, make a full intellectual contribution, run the country, manage their families, to just BE their best. 

The lady on the left is undoubtedly very pretty, but she'd look amazing if she wasn't so totally emaciated, and yet, she was, in this picture, being lauded for her appearance on an international catwalk. 

There is no justification in any rational sense to trying to take a healthy body and, by design (rather than by reasons of food scarcity or over-exertion), to cause it to be weak, fragile, undernourished. 

And yet: this is what (as a society) we do to women everyday. 

Worse, this is what women like me do to themselves everyday. 

How can we justify it? How can we rationally argue that any of this is good? 
It can't be done. It is totally unjustifiable. 

The quest for size zero is wrong. No more, no less. It is misguided and leads our female population to problems of infertility, PCOS, impaired mental function (how do you think straight if you are starving?) anxiety, depression. 

It presents women with an impossible ideal and then punishes them for not being able to live up to it.

Furthermore, the ideal isn't one of true womanhood - it's a pale imitation of childhood - no body fat, therefore no boobs, no bum and, crucially no ability to reproduce the population. Surely no-one wants that. It is not natural, healthy or indeed desirable to render the female population so under-nourished that they are unable to conceive.

What are the reasons for this? Fashion? Conceit? a wider conspiracy? When you think about it rationally, there are no really good reasons which could justify any of this. 

Naomi Wolf cites the reasons in her book The Beauty Myth as being the design of a patriarchal society trying to keep women down. It's a compelling read, even today, 25 years after its initial publication, and its arguments are no less relevant today as they were in 1990.

It would be far more healthy for us as a society, for humankind in general and for individual women specifically to promote the kind of body which embraces the female form, which women can be happy to live in and which is strong, confident, able to participate and to play a full role in life, unconstrained by body issues. 

Whether you believe that society's obsession is down to narcissism, a conspiracy or something deeper doesn't really matter. What we need to do is ditch the ideal and start celebrating women for who they really are: large, medium or small and to celebrate their intellect and achievements far more than any outside appearance.