Image is a picture of page 42 from The Sunday Times in the UK (undated). The page is called Style Voice, and the segment is called Dear Dolly, subtitled: “your love, life and friendship dilemmas answered by Dolly Alderton.” At the bottom of the page, there is a note that says “To get your life dilemma answered by Dolly, email or send a voice note to deardolly@sundaytimes.co.uk or DM @theststyle.
Text of the segment reads:
I was already a little overweight, but things spiralled during lockdown. As a home-schooling, working-from-home single parent to two children, there was little time for contemplative yoga or solo mini-marathons around the park. After contracting the virus (it dragged on and on) and then not being able to leave our tiny flat much due to the lockdown, the only excitement of the day seemed to be a gin and tonic at 6pm, rounds of Netflix and peanut butter on toast.
I eat when I’m stressed and when I’m bored, and I was very stressed and very bored. And now the buttons are popping off my jeans. My clothes don’t fit, I don’t want to spend a fortune buying pretty new things in “L” when I have to get back to “M.” And how will I ever feel glamorous and attractive again after piling on the pounds and covering my face with a mask? Please help. I don’t want to be single for ever.
As I read your letter, the first thing I thought was what a challenging time you’ve been through in the past six months. You’ve had to educate, entertain and care for not one but two young children, all day, every day, without the help of a partner, while being mostly confined indoors in a tiny living space. You contracted an illness that was largely unknown and potentially debilitating. All this happened during a time when you couldn’t see friends or extended family, or go to the pub, or go away, or go anywhere for that matter. I want you to read that back and acknowledge what a difficult set of circumstances you’ve been living through recently.
With that in mind, I’m going to present you with a possibility: you haven’t overindulged at all. You haven’t eaten too much, you haven’t messed up a routine. You have been giving yourself exactly what you’ve needed in a time of immense stress – you have been in complete communion with your mind and body. You’ve allowed yourself the gentle anesthesia of a cold gin and tonic after a long day with kids, and restful nights with a comforting and familiar food as you prepare for the following morning. You’ve used your few spare hours to recuperate, instead of flinging yourself around your small flat in front of a YouTube exercise video or making complicated kale salads. All of this makes complete sense. You have not made any mistakes.
A clever thing the diet industry did to the collective consciousness is attach morals to eating: certain foods are bad (peanut butter on toast), certain ways of eating are bad (in front of Netflix). And if we are to believe the fallacy of “you are what you eat,” every time we put food in our mouths, we give ourselves permission to rate our morality. But our chosen meals aren’t proof of our goodness or badness. Deprivation or hyper-control doesn’t equate to health and virtue, appetite isn’t something feral and dangerous to be disciplined. Food is an inanimate object that we can use as we like – to nourish, energize or comfort. How we eat will always be in flux depending on our circumstances, whether that be emotional or physical.
I think the best thing you can do is acquaint yourself with the idea of intuitive eating. It’s a seemingly simple concept that many of us have to relearn at some point in our lives. Intuitive eating is about tuning in to your body, listening to what it wants and responding compassionately. It’s about quietening the chatter you’ve been absorbing your whole life – all the contradictory rules and convoluted calorie counting – and instead focusing on the requirements of your appetite and tastes. We are all born with an innate ability to do this (you never see a toddler leaving 20 per cent of its meal on a plate because it read an article saying this is what French women do), but tragically it is a skill that is stolen from so many of us.
Because another clever thing the diet industry did was make us believe that our instincts are wrong, that if we ate what we want when we wanted it, we’d live off a mountain of éclairs, a river of Baileys and nothing else. That’s just not true. If you can find a way to eat intuitively, without any cycles of restriction and reward, your body will find its way to the weight where it is naturally most comfortable.
And if all that fails, try this: every time you go to feed yourself, imagine that you are feeding one of your children. Every time you finish a meal and you want to berate yourself for the decisions you made: imagine you are speaking to one of your children. If they came to you – tired, anxious or ill – would you give them a calorie-counted meal, or would you give them what they were craving? If they ate something that brought them joy, would you remind them afterwards that they could have eaten something that was less pleasurable but lower in fat? Would you tell them to take notice of the letter on the label in their clothes and attach a sense of self-worth to it? Would you let them believe that the letter on that label was an indicator of whether someone will fall in love with them?
The sad truth is women are conditioned to feel like physical failures if they don’t conform to an impossible specification, so the language of self-hatred is easily accessible to us. I don’t want to pretend that this propaganda isn’t incredibly powerful, and I don’t want you to feel even more self-hatred for taking it on and believing it. So, for now, try a trick instead: imagine you are your own child and care for yourself accordingly. That might be the only way you’ll allow yourself the logic and kindness you deserve.
