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I have memories of a happy and stable childhood, growing up in "the warm heart of Africa", Malawi. My days were full of sunshine and play. I had loving parents, a bright younger brother, and many friends. I was an all-rounder, had many extracurricular activities, and was academically inclined. At school I was popular with both the teachers and my peers.
As children we were raised on healthy food that included plenty of fresh fruit, green leafy vegetables and minimal "junk food". My brother and I occasionally ate dessert and sweets on special occasions or as a treat, but generally our parents were health-conscious. My mother and father were aware of the importance of good nutrition and the detrimental effects that a diet high in sugar and fat could have on our teeth and growing bodies.
Despite being brought up with a balanced approach to eating, during adolescence, as my body grew softer, rounder, and broader, I developed a love/hate relationship with food and I began to hate my body. Fourteen years later the development of a distorted mindset and body image still affects me from time to time.
The year I turned fourteen my family moved to South Africa. I endured the hormonal upheaval of puberty combined with the trauma of leaving behind my childhood friends and a secure home, school, and life I loved. I started halfway through a new high school in a strange country where I had no friends and knew nobody except my immediate family.
To compound the situation, I was moved up an academic year and placed in an older class, where scholarly competition was stiff. Before my first day at school in South Africa I had already had to make decisions about subject choices that would affect my future career opportunities. I also had to accept the fact that I would have to learn Afrikaans in three years to pass the language at matric level.
Most of my classmates had been together for the duration of junior school and had moved up to secondary school together. I found that I was surrounded by established cliques and groups of friends who were unwilling to let newcomers into their intimate circles.
My new school was all about image. I soon realised that a great deal of attention was paid to appearance and that the pupils made assumptions about one another's character, behaviour, and worthiness based on appearance. I came from a country where I had not been exposed to television and fashion magazines. My self-esteem was low and when I looked in the mirror I saw an outsider, a girl unlike the girls I saw in television advertisements and magazines.
My life was out of control. I was angry, miserable, and confused. I had no power to influence the many external factors affecting my life, so I began trying to control one of the things that I felt I did have power over - my appetite.
I became obsessed with my weight and attempts to reduce my size. I decided that if I lost weight I would become socially acceptable, no longer "the new girl" with the strange accent, no longer the outsider. I would be pretty and popular. I would make friends.
At the same time my mother was struggling to lose weight and for a while I joined her weekly at Weigh-Less meetings. I remember how it would enrage me that my father and brother could eat whatever they wanted and stay thin because they had a higher metabolic rate than my mother and me.
When I discovered that I wasn't losing weight fast enough on a healthy diet, out of desperation I began to incorporate destructive eating habits into my daily routine. I started to skip breakfast in the mornings. Often I would go to school feeling hungry and miserable, experiencing headaches and dizziness from low blood sugar. I felt crabby and depressed from lack of nutrition and had a constant gnawing in my stomach. I lacked energy and would spend my days dreaming about what I was going to eat at the next meal. I would try to assuage my hunger pangs with artificially sweetened diet products. I flooded my system with caffeine in the form of diet drinks and coffee. My energy levels dropped significantly and concentrating on homework became a battle. I was consumed with calorie-counting and weighing myself.
Owing to our differing schedules and my school activities it was relatively easy for me to skip meals and hide from my parents the fact that I hadn't eaten anything during the day. The only meal that my family ate together was dinner and usually by the time evening came around I was ravenous and highly irritable.
I learnt bad habits from the older sister of a friend and began taking laxatives in the hope that anything that I ate would immediately pass through my digestive system without having the opportunity to be absorbed. I also started taking appetite suppressants.
It became difficult for me to remember that I actually needed food to stay alive and that eating was a normal and expected part of life. I alternated between weeks of depriving myself of food and bingeing. Binge-eating became the tool I used to deaden a pervasive sense of loneliness, loss and failure. It was a means of avoiding other uncomfortable issues in my life.
I perceived food as my enemy and a threat to my femininity, yet I was held in its thrall, constantly experiencing the overwhelming urge to eat. I compiled mental lists of "good" food and "bad" food - food that I could eat and food that I couldn't eat. When I woke up in the morning I would immediately start thinking about what I could consume that day, together with calculating the calories that I would have to expend in order to burn it up.
I lost sight of all goals except to control my weight. I was driven. On days when I exhibited strong will-power and ate only one small meal I would feel pure, virtuous and acceptable. On other days, when I allowed my relentless hunger free reign, I would be filled with remorse and self-loathing. My self-disgust would eat away at me, making me bitter and bad-tempered. I felt guilty after eating anything, imagining the food going straight to my hips and thighs. I was either hungry and irritable or full and guilty.
When I received compliments about my appearance it would goad me to lose more weight. No matter how slim I was, when I looked in the mirror what I saw never altered. I never felt slim enough to win self-acceptance. It was as if somewhere along the line I had been brainwashed and had lost all sense of perspective and proportion.
The three years during which I completed high school in South Africa were probably the most difficult years for all the members of my family. We had so many pressures to contend with both as a family unit and as individuals. I think my parents realised and were concerned that as a teenager I was troubled with body image and self-esteem issues, but I don't think they grasped how far my self-hatred extended.
Throughout my late teens and early twenties I continued to go through sporadic phases of disastrous dieting, fasting, diet pills, laxatives, and excessive exercising. Frequently, intimate relationships suffered as a consequence of my preoccupation with weight and body image. I was inordinately sensitive about remarks relating to my appearance or size and felt insecure around attractive women, often feeling as though we were supposed to be in competition with one another.
Watching what I ate was an ingrained habit, but gradually, as my personal circumstances changed for the better, I became happier and more at ease with who I was. My obsession with bad body image ceased to crucify me to the extent that it once had.
Today, my relationship with food and my body has improved greatly, although it is not as accepting and healthy as I would like it to be. I have learnt that it is important to nourish my body with a balanced diet that includes a range of foods in order to perform physically, emotionally and intellectually. I have realised, too, that exercise is as important as good nutrition in maintaining a healthy body and positive outlook.
There are days when I am not as comfortable or confident about my appearance as I would like to be, despite making every effort to make myself look attractive. On really bad days I cannot bear to undress to get into the bath, or to look in the mirror, because I cannot face the voluptuous curves that make up my body shape. I am aware of the fact that my poor body image re-emerges during times when my stress levels are high and I am in a state of vulnerability. I have learnt that these days pass and I have committed myself to the slow process of redefining myself physically and working towards a stable and healthy body image.
The saddest thing about having a distorted body image is that you become so consumed with downplaying what you see as negative attributes that you forget to highlight and accentuate the attractive features that make you the wonderful and unique individual you are. Simone de Beauvoir once said, "To lose confidence in one's body is to lose confidence in one's self." She was right. So much time and energy are wasted hiding your light under a bushel instead of allowing yourself to shine like the beacon of light you are meant to be. The issue of thinness at all costs is one that has plagued many, many women over the past four decades. How many of us have contemplated and fully acknowledged the extent of disservice we do ourselves by letting our body image get the better of us?
There are multibillion rand corporate giants manipulating women through advertising and feeding off their suffering and deprivation. Deny, deny, deny yourself until you shed those unwanted kilos. Deny yourself in order to be found desirable. This is the message we women are receiving, loud and clear. The media have a large responsibility in terms of the direction and dictates of our culture and I believe media influence has a great deal to answer for in terms of unrealistic expectations and pressure that women put on themselves to conform to a largely impossible body standard.
How many women feel ugly, fat, and inferior after flipping through a fashion magazine? How many of us wonder why our lives are less than the perfect lives we see advertised on our television screens? We are constantly reinforcing and buying into a message of inadequacy that is being repeatedly drummed into us by the media and large corporations who stand to make enormous profits through our unquestioning complicity.
How do we expect our daughters to grow up well-adjusted, confident and fulfilled when we are constantly bombarding them with the message that their foremost priority as women is to be beautiful and thin? We need, instead, to encourage diversity and celebrate individuality. We need to assure our young women that weight and shape are not realistic measures of success and that there is more to becoming an accomplished human being than being a perfect size 10.
British writer John Berger said, "So much of contemporary life robs people of their self-respect." Until women empower themselves and start to challenge and speak out against society's preoccupation with the prevailing aesthetic standard we will continue to pay the price of low self-esteem and body hatred. If western society cannot realise a more reasonable and attainable ideal in terms of female shape and attractiveness, eating disorders will continue to ravage our families and communities, leaving emaciated, tormented, and raging friends, daughters, and sisters in their wake.
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Michelle McGrane
is no angel but she's learning how to fly. She has a gypsy
heart, believes in freedom and magic, and thinks it's a good
thing she wasn't around in the Sixties, because she probably
wouldn't be alive today. Despite the occasional lapse, she
tries not to take herself too seriously.
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