The turtle cheesecake in front of me is evil. Eviiil. It has two devil horns and a menacing smirk, taunting my salivary glands with its sumptuous calorie overload. I step away from the inanimate creature that now breathes life on its own, but out of sight is not out of mind — if anything the temptation has gained force. You see, unlike its two ancestors, World War III doesn’t include an army of soldiers or a grand master plan to commit genocide. It starts one ordinary night a few decades ago, when some magazine decided to put a skinny girl on its cover. Since then, girls of every age from all over the world have been battling an endless war: weight obsession — along with its top general, food.
I have a love-hate relationship with food. It has always been there for me, like a childhood friend reminding me of the good old days. It has kept me awake through overworked nights and comforted me through gloomy days. But since I hit puberty, when the pressure to discard those baby fats began, food suddenly wasn’t an ally anymore. It jumped ship and joined the opposition, so we had to draw enemy lines. It was then that we started to realize an uncompromising truth: thin was in. No? Then why the hint of disappointment whenever a friend you haven’t seen in awhile tells you, “Ay, parang tumaba ka.” Then the feelings of self-consciousness and guilt that immediately follow, accompanied by a determined plan to skip dinner tonight.
I look at 17th-century paintings, those voluptuous pear-shaped women depicted as goddesses. Art tells us how the definition of beauty has changed. I wonder what it would be like if I’d been born during that time, at least in terms of food. Did they get to eat whatever they wanted? Surely it’s more than the scraps women allow themselves to binge on today. How ironic that as the feminist movement has theoretically pushed forward, we’ve become more focused on starving ourselves. We fight for power in the workplace, yet physically we aspire to the rail-thin bodies of teenaged boys rather than the natural curvy shapes of women.
There are millions of eating disorders out there. It’s not a new thought that weight obsession has been caused by a multitude of media paraphernalia, including magazines showing girls with ribs sticking out. I’m not going to delve into that; that’s an entirely different term paper altogether. I just think it needs to be explained how it is every day for an ordinary girl, how food is always at the back of our minds simply because we know we shouldn’t have too much of it.
I’m surprised it’s not talked about more often. Maybe we’re embarrassed, because it’s such a minute problem in the larger scheme of things: worrying about eating too much when so many others don’t have enough to eat. That’s precisely why we often fail to see it as self-destructive. I’ve seen my friends go through eating disorders and that’s always how the downward spiral begins: they think they’re alone. They think they’re being shallow, that nobody else is quietly debating the consequences of an ice cream cone. When it’s just between you and an unresponsive plate of pasta, you forget that the girl beside you is fighting the same urge.
From a big picture point of view, it’s an incredibly superficial topic. But this is something I don’t need to tell you: every girl, woman and especially the ones in between: we all want to be beautiful, and many wouldn’t mind going great lengths to be so. There is a very thin (pun intended) line between feeling utterly confident to suddenly growing insecure — and unfortunately, weight often has a lot to do with it. Perhaps thinness embodies a virtue: the discipline to eat healthily. But that has become truly ironic, since the obsession to stay thin has meant the complete opposite of health: insufficient vitamins from infrequent eating to the point of physical breakdown.
Men think we don’t like food. Food is supposed to be their thing — cuploads of rice and thick slabs of steak. We can’t blame them for the misconception; how many times at dinner did all the girls refuse to order a cup of rice? Oh, but you guys are being deceived: we love food, too — maybe even more than you do. I grew up in a household of boys and I could eat plates of everything, too. I just try not to, because it goes directly to my belly and drastically affects how my clothes look on me. I don’t believe in the pop culture concept of “frenemies”; I can’t pretend to like someone I truly do not. Food is my only frenemy, but it’s the other way around: pretending to not like something I actually do.
There are some lucky women who never have to worry about gaining weight, at least not until a certain age. It’s the rare, enviable gift of quick metabolism. For the rest of us less lucky ones, exercise is said to be the only key. But that’s exactly how you start to count the calories. Will this chocolate bar be worth the hours on the treadmill I must pay later on? Every bite becomes a cost-benefit analysis: Is the marginal pleasure of this bite worth the guilt afterwards? It gets worse the more you know about finance. The better you are at math, the less you can deceive yourself that you’re eating fewer calories than you actually are. Sounds sick, right? Well, I envy the few girls who don’t face this perpetual battle with food every time they want something to eat.
I desperately wish it weren’t so. I wish I could eat whatever I want, as much as I want to. I have a long list of foods I would eat if there weren’t drastic calorie consequences. Who wouldn’t want to gobble down meaty sausages and cream desserts? But there are consequences, thus certain foods are considered indulgences — much like diamonds, except the price is not monetary.
That line from Coldplay says it all: “Your skin and bones… turn into something beautiful.” I’m fairly certain that’s not what this legendary music group meant, but it’s the first thing I think of when I hear the song. Skin and bones are beautiful. I want to celebrate curves. I want to say weight doesn’t matter, that the world finds us beautiful no matter what we look like. But that’s not really true, is it? The criteria for gorgeousness are pretty darn strict, and there isn’t much room for choosing to be different.
I’ve read those feel-good arguments saying we’re beautiful just as we are, but somehow it doesn’t take away the guilt from eating an Oreo-caramel sundae. And this consciousness develops earlier and earlier in girls. I saw this television show where three young girls were interviewed about Hannah Montana: “She’s so fat,” they said. For those of you living under a rock, Hannah Montana is a pre-teen superstar who is by no means overweight (she is reportedly 5’6” and weighs 110 pounds). Imagine the eating disorders that are just waiting to happen.
I don’t think writing about it will make the battle go away, but we do not really write to resolve world crises — if you do, you’re in for a huge disappointment. What’s the point of writing about it, then? Because it helps to know we’re not isolated soldiers in a minefield threatening to sabotage our self-image and confidence. Maybe one day this food fight will change its course. Maybe we’ll change our definition of beauty, or maybe someone will find a way to metabolize food quicker than our current human capacity.
Until then, when you deliberate over eating that Krispy Kreme doughnut, remember that it’s just as hard for the girl sitting beside you. I wish I had warm reassurances of how the world is actually kinder and less judgmental than we think — but for now, this is all I am able to give: that while it remains the way it is, you will never really be alone.
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E-mail me at drum.please@gmail.com.