It's not your fault.
The 1980’s and 90’s were only the 2nd and 3rd decade when fitness was a thing in America. Since the U.S. is more of a business than a country, once fitness existed, it had to make money or it wouldn’t survive. We buy things to solve problems, so by the late 70’s, bodies had become problems to solve. If you were born in the 1970’s or after, this is what you were crawling in to. The pressure to “fix” your body did not always exist as we know it today.
Along with fitness striving to make money in order to stay afloat, Western life continued to get more demanding. Dolly complained for everyone about how stressful working from 9 to 5 was (can you imagine a workday that short?!), on top of women continuing to be responsible for the care of the household, the children, and family events, appointments, and gatherings. As a collective, physical stress responses on each woman’s body increased as societal and familial demands on the average woman increased.
Most women previously had time to make meals for the family, but in the 1970’s and 80’s many more women took on two full-time jobs (home and at work). With that, food had to be made faster and last longer. Manufacturers made food last longer on our shelves and easier to heat up by popping into microwaves. Unfortunately, this meant less of what is in our grocery stores is actual food because for food to keep, it must be preserved.
And as we know, our bodies naturally move much less than bodies moved in a given day in years past, thanks to technologies and conveniences.
Smaller bodies were much more common in decades past. Stress on the average person was lower, food had more nutrients and less preservatives, and daily activity was generally much higher for the average American. And with all of this, the number things available to buy to make our bodies look more like everyone else’s (whatever may be trendy for bodies to look like in a given period) has increased exponentially. It is easier to have a larger body than ever before. And there is more pressure to spend money to change your body than ever before.
Beyond our culture creating naturally larger bodies, there are individual reasons why a person seeks comfort in the specific things she does, some of which contribute to our body size. With stress being so high and people putting less priority on connecting with one another (without a screen), comfort is often sought in panicked, last-minute ways. We don’t have time for 3-week vacations like our European friends do, but we can scarf a handful of cookies at the mandatory office meeting.
Why is eating cookies comforting to some people and not others?
Have you met a person who, when offered a sweet treat, passes it up explaining “oh, no- I’m not really hungry” or “I just had one, I don’t feel like eating another.” Not a pushback due to guilt or shame or what they should or shouldn’t do. They genuinely didn’t feel like eating a cookie. Do you know this person?
For one, this person is probably not at war with her body. And, she probably also isn’t yearning to fill something beyond what a cookie could ever do.
I might ask a person whose parents had been neglectful to pause and honestly sense what that experience had been like. Can they feel the enormous hunger for attention that might have developed in those circumstances? How they might still need to feed themselves even when others are asking to be fed? In bringing a clear and comprehensive awareness to our situation, we begin to accept our wanting self with compassion. This frees us to move forward, to break out of old patterns.
~Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance
I went to a presentation once that talked about how some of us can have two different stomachs- one for actual food and one that feels so hungry even when we’d just eaten. Noticing which stomach we are trying to fill is an important element to improving how we treat ourselves.
