7 Things I Wish Someone Told My Younger Self About Eating, Body Image, And Health

Hey beautiful,

No, don’t look away, and please don’t glare at me either. I know that you cannot tolerate compliments about yourself, because a select few people spent a good chunk of time training you to be afraid of any comment on your appearance, but bear with me now. This is important.

You are about to embark on a wonderful new stage in your life. A stage of hard work and relative self-sufficiency, a stage where you will slowly take responsibility for your own nutrition and health. And while you will make some excellent choices, you will also be under a great deal of stress, and you will be tempted to take it out on your body.

I’m here to tell you not to.

1. Do you need to restrict food groups? I mean, do you NEED to be restricting?

There are people out there who do need to cut out food items, even entire food groups. Diabetics. People with Celiacs. People who will go into anaphylactic shock if they consume a particular allergen. If you have none of these things, what is your motivation to restrict food? If it’s your health, has this been confirmed by an actual doctor, and then double-checked with an actual dietitian? Yes, GPs are fallible and have a million patients to see every day. Yes, dietitians are as divergent as there are stars in the sky. It’s still better than self-diagnosis or taking medical advice off the Internet.

2. If someone is promising you a miracle cure without even having met you, they are a quack.

Even if you have the exact same disease and your lives are so similar you could be twins, one person cannot give universal advice. In science, any science, we always look at sample size and characteristics and only dare to generalize findings if there is sufficient evidence to suggest they can be applied outside of a study group. A sample size of one isn’t generalizable; it’s barely enough for a case study. I’m not saying that this person is lying to you when they say something worked for them. I’m saying that if they try to say everyone should do it, and it will cure the world’s ills, they’re selling you snake oil, and they won’t give you your money back.

3. Beauty is not an objective category.

Beauty, at best, is socially constructed, and society is flawed in its own ways. Go to any museum and look at what artists chose to draw. Not just across ages, individual painters had their own preferred body types, faces, styles. Stop spending money on expensive face creams, stop squeezing your pimples, and ask yourself why it’s so important to you to be able to squeeze into size 6 jeans. Is it really about being happy? Or do you think your life will automatically get better when your skin clears?

4. People who are impressed by your dress size more than you are not people worth trying to impress.

Yes, even this guy you really fancy. If it were up to you, you’d diet and work out until there’s nothing left of you but bones, and believe it or not, he’s actually not interested in your bones. He’s not interested in being the ultimate authority on your value as a human being. He wants you to love yourself because that means you’ll love him, and whatever flaws he’s deathly afraid of. And if somebody does get off on you constantly looking up at them, stand up from that floor, walk out the door and don’t look back. Such people have no interest in ever giving you validation.

5. Still don’t believe me? What were the sorts of people who made you feel down in the first place?

No, they were not your “friends.” You hated spending time with them, even in kindergarten, but you still chose to be a singing, dancing, 24/7 show for those royals than actually hang out with the rest of the clowns and staging a coup. When you had fun, it was with people who were as flawed and weird as you were. And it was awesome. Why was it awesome? Because no-one expected anything from you, other than show up, and that used to be so doable.

6. Food used to help you connect.

It can still do that. The first time you met your roommates, and the person who would be your best friend for the next four years, it was over breakfast. When the Christian union came to preach, you made them tea and brought out the nice biscuits. Whenever you managed to connect with another person, it was over a meal. What happens when you start restricting is that you close in on yourself. You avoid restaurants. You order the least appetizing thing on the menu, hoping it will make you look good, but it only makes everyone else feel guilty. People didn’t want to eat your sugar-free cakes, and to be honest, neither did you. You are constantly hungry for food, and for validation, and it’s exhausting to be around. Just sit with a new friend and have coffee. Have a damn cake if you want it so much. Eat a sit-down meal, and order the thing on the menu that you want, and then talk about how it turned out. You need energy to connect with people. So go get it.

7. The quacks you look up to live on social media.

Social media, where every experience is through a medium. We choose what to post, regardless if it takes us no time at all or a month of careful planning. We try to make our photos look more flattering. We choose what to put in the frame, what filter to use, what caption. We choose what to omit. We don’t mention when stuff is difficult, and when we do, we always put a veneer of heroism over it: “Look at how brave I am, being real on social media,” when in reality, it’s called living in the real world. It’s not that special, yet moralizing it makes it harder for you to go about your day without panicking.

There are so many things I wish people had told me when I was 19-23. I wish I got validation more. I wish someone acknowledged that I was being bullied and that it wasn’t right. I wish someone had taken a moment to tell me I was beautiful. Maybe then I wouldn’t have been so exhausted all the time. Maybe I wouldn’t have wrecked my health in the pursuit of “beauty.” I wish I cooked food for my friends without being afraid that using white sugar in a cake is hurting them. I wish I didn’t put so much effort into to getting the wrong people to like me.

I didn’t have to. Neither do you.

Love always,

The future