And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
Genesis 3:13
‘I was controlling how many calories I ate each day, and I remember on one occasion I ate two cream cakes and just felt so dreadful that I took some sleeping pills to make sure I didn’t eat anything else that day. It must have been the afternoon, and I must have assumed that my children would be all right.’
Anonymous interviewee ‘E’
In the developed world, we exist within a cult of thinness, and that cult is focused on women’s bodies.
We are continually surrounded by messages, some subliminal and some less so, that being thin is a good thing – it equates with an almost moral goodness. We are told that being fat is bad for you, personally as an individual, but we are also all encouraged to believe that fatness, and especially female fatness, is an affront to others. Thus women are what they eat: they are personally responsible for the body shape they inflict upon others’ gaze. Being anything other than thin is seen variously as unhealthy, lazy, sluggish, lower class, dirty, inadequate. It is considered to represent a weakness of moral character, an inability to manage one’s lusts, a pathological failure to accept one’s social responsibility to be slim and non-burdensome.
Men can, and do, find ways to escape this cult, but women often face a harsher choice – either live within its rules, or be cast into the outer darkness of un-thinness. As a result, some women effortlessly match the thin ideal, but many others are ensnared in a tangle of shape, food, weight, guilt and comfort-seeking, and that tangle is the focus of this chapter. Of course women can do things to change their body shape and size – they can diet or exercise, use drugs or have surgery – but all too often they still do not get the body they want, or the body others seem to expect of them. You can give up almost all the enjoyable things in your life, but you cannot give up food, and women need fat if they are to have a feminine shape, so what are they supposed to do? Why do so many women diet, why do those diets so often fail, and why is this failure perceived as those women’s own, personal fault? Why does food frequently make women feel guilty? Why, in short, are shape, food and mood so intertwined?
Many have bemoaned the cult of thinness, and in a later chapter I will investigate when it developed. However, rather than just complaining, I believe that if we wish to challenge it, we must find out why it has proved so powerful. After all, there are good reasons why food, mood and shape are interlinked, and those reasons stem from the way women lived during the vast majority of human history. Sometimes times were good, but sometimes times were hard. Often there was not enough food, and often women and their children died because of it. Yet those women and children who perished were not our ancestors – our forebears were the ones who gorged when food was plentiful, survived thriftily through the famines and lived to gorge another day.
And, paradoxically, that urge to eat – that pressure to fix food, hunger, appetite and eating deep inside our instinctive drives – is where the cult of thinness came from.
That prehistoric fixation on food persists today, and explains why body shape and weight are so inextricably connected to contentment and discontent. Studies suggest that perhaps 87 per cent of women have dieted at some time. More than 70 per cent of teenage girls want to be thinner even though most of them are not overweight. In contrast, less than 10 per cent want to be larger, and many of these girls are, in fact, underweight according to clinical measures (indeed, my youngest ‘anonymous interviewee’ actually laughed out loud when I suggested that some women wanted to gain weight).
Studies in developed countries show that teenage girls and young women believe that being thinner will make them happier, healthier and prettier, while research across the world shows that heavier girls and women are less satisfied and have lower self-esteem. In approximately one-third of women – a huge proportion – the urge for thinness drives them to attempt more extreme weight-loss strategies, such as crash dieting, fasting, purging or laxatives. And these trends continue throughout life, although older women are more likely to rationalise their weight loss attempts as being part of a programme of general health improvement. Being complimented for slimness usually carries more emotional potency than being complemented for facial beauty, intelligence or success.
Much of this urge for thinness, for smallness, has its roots in the ideas I discussed in the last chapter. Each of us inhabits a body which takes up space and intrudes on the world outside. We also each acquire a personal space around us, within which we stride, gesticulate and comport our bodily affairs, and from which we prefer to exclude most other people. Yet women’s bodies usually take up less space than men’s, and from an early age they learn that this smallness is desirable and should be emphasised. Boys learn to take long, bold strides, to lope and sway as they move, to swing their arms and sprawl luxuriously on chairs, beds and, presumably, girls. They are, in other words, trained to take up as much space as they damn well want, because that is what men ‘do’.
In contrast, girls learn what I would call ‘spatial timidity’ – they are trained that to be feminine they must take short steps, and tuck themselves into compact little poses which minimise their physical occupancy of the outside world. They realise that small is good, and smaller is better. In some cultures, women also learn to bow, hunch their shoulders and speak quietly to enhance this effect. One of the most elaborate examples of spatial timidity is the way women often practise tricks to appear small on camera – that they should stand slightly side on, with one (flexed) leg hiding the other (straight) leg from the lens – and it is not only actresses on the red carpet who do this. I suspect that spatial timidity is largely learnt – and I know for a fact that some of my female university admissions interviewees are instructed by their schools to cross their ankles and hold their arms to their sides in the belief that such physical compactness will convince me of their aptitude in organic chemistry or literary criticism.
Becoming anything other than thin means, of course, intruding further into the outside world than is deemed acceptable. To make life more complicated, any move away from thinness usually involves the acquisition of fat, and female fat, as we have seen, holds an ambiguous place in our thoughts. It is of course an essential and desired component of the distinctive human female form, yet it is usually viewed negatively when in excess – even though there is no clear definition of what ‘excess’ is and this can change according to fashion. This double-edged nature of fatness is thrown into stark relief by the fact that, in contrast, such negative connotations are not associated with the other way in which women expand to inhabit more space: by becoming pregnant.
So becoming larger by acquiring fat is a complex psychological process for women. If a man gets fatter, then he is probably seen as slightly less attractive, but if a woman acquires fat, then some people may think she looks more attractive – men, for example, or friends and relatives more concerned about her health and wellbeing than whether she conforms to the thin ideal. And of course this validation and encouragement of female fat gain can be immensely confusing – as it conflicts with her prior indoctrination to be as small as possible. Also, unlike men, women have a variety of different locations in which they can store additional fat – thighs, buttocks, bellies, breasts, arms and so on – and people respond differently to fat acquired in those different places. Indeed, many of those fat depots have become the focus of sexual fetishes, in a way that simply does not occur with men’s pot bellies.
Other than spatial timidity and attitudes to fat, the third influence which feeds into this tangle is our beliefs about eating – and here again, a simple, innocuous difference between the sexes has contorted into a tangle of assumptions, interpretations and value judgements. Because women are smaller than men, they need less food, so they usually eat less. We are used to seeing men eat more than women, so we have come to believe that eating little, or eating slowly, is feminine. In the media, men are presented as having hearty, healthy appetites for food, whereas women are seen as cautious, picky and restrained in their eating habits. I am reminded of the scene in a US television comedy show in which four males compete to eat enormous steaks, and the loser is told to look for his money in his handbag, next to his tampons.
Physically, women certainly do eat more slowly than men, taking disproportionately smaller bites and sips – smaller than can be explained by the fact that their mouths and stomachs are less capacious. Also, unlike men, women do not eat more when presented with larger food items – when offered an unlimited supply of sandwiches, men will eat a greater total mass of food simply because each individual sandwich is larger. There are obviously some complex brain processes going on here, yet studies consistently show that restrained eating is seen by both sexes to be a feminine trait. Also, women clearly understand the social importance of how much they are seen to eat: they eat less when they are in a large group than when they are alone, and they also eat less when they are dining with a desirable man than when they are dining with a less desirable man or, heaven forbid, another woman.
So beliefs about size, fat and appetite have powerful effects on women’s attitudes to their shape, but there are also deeply ingrained biological imperatives which mean that food itself has a profound and direct influence on mood.
For any creature to survive it is essential that its motivations and behaviour are controlled by food, hunger, and the opposite of hunger, satiety. Of course all animals are driven to eat when hungry and to cease when sated, but it is more complicated than that. Most animals are also hard-wired to over-eat, because this allows them not only to store excess nutrients to see them through times of want, but also frees up time in the future when they need not eat – so they can do other important things, such as breeding. Of course, this tendency to over-eat must be counterbalanced by the instinct to stop eating when necessary, so it too is built into our brains – people rarely feel hungry when having sex, for example. And we assume that most of this appetite pre-programming comes to us in our genes, and indeed, studies with identical twins suggest that appetite is a strongly inherited trait in humans.
Appetite is such a life-or-death phenomenon that it comes as no surprise that it is probably the most complex interaction that exists between the body and the brain. For example, pioneering animal experiments conducted over a century ago showed that hunger is partially relieved by mastication and swallowing of food, even if that food does not reach the stomach. Conversely, distension of the stomach in the absence of chewing and swallowing was shown to reduce hunger, although not as much as one might expect. More recently, physiologists have shown how these simple stimuli activate particular brain centres involved in hunger and satiety, as well as other regions associated with heat, cold, sleep and aggression. These other links explain why we eat more when the weather is cold than when it is hot, why a big meal makes us sleepy, and why hunger makes us snappy.
There is also a wide variety of internal chemical cues by which the brain calculates the body’s hungriness for calories and other nutrients. For example, in the short term the brain monitors the level of glucose in the blood, as well as the amounts of insulin released by the pancreas. Also, in Chapter 2 I mentioned leptin – the hormone released by adipose tissue which gives the brain a medium-term measure of the amount of fat in the body. In humans, low leptin levels are a sign that energy stores are depleted and that appetite must be increased, yet high levels of leptin do not consistently suppress appetite – suggesting that for most of human evolution our preoccupation was with insufficient rather than abundant food. Unlike many of our relatives humans seem to be a ‘famine species’, with a physiology adapted to cope with scarcity, and unprepared for plenty.
As more research is done, the ways in which digestion and metabolism control the brain have been shown to be ever more numerous and intricate. Ghrelin, for example is a hormone made by the stomach as well as other organs, which has a direct effect on the brain to increase appetite. In fact, some researchers now believe that there are over one hundred chemicals which may attune eating behaviour to the body’s nutrient reserves, the gut’s contents, and what the mouth believes it has just gulped down. Many of these chemicals act on the brain to alter our behaviour in ways more unexpected and subtle than we can currently understand. An indication of the profound effects which these chemicals may have on the mind is the rather psychedelic names some of them have been given: endogenous opioids, cocaine-and-amphetamine-regulated transcript, and endocannabinoids.
One way in which eating may exert an almost drug-like effect on mood is by the eating of ‘comfort foods’. Most people comfort eat to some extent, effectively self-medicating with foods which they either psychologically associate with calm, secure times in their lives, or which carry the correct cocktail of nutrients to give them the desired ‘warm’ feeling. Men tend to select hot, meal-like foods as comfort foods, such as meats and stews, whereas women are more likely to select cold or even chilled, snack-type foods, including sweets and ice cream – perhaps they do not wish their dietary indiscretions to look too much like a full-blown meal.
The comfort foods favoured by women are often high in carbohydrate, especially simple sugars, and this seems to be the key to how they work. High-carbohydrate meals reduce cognitive performance and induce sleepiness, but the effects they have on mood depend on people’s habitual diets. In people used to meals high in carbohydrate and sugar, they can reduce depression and anxiety, whereas in people not used to them, they can have the opposite effect. There is also evidence that people’s personalities have a strong influence over the mood-altering effects of comfort foods. One study showed that in people prone to psychological stress, high-carbohydrate meals reduced the mental and physical effects of experimentally induced stress – anxiety, increased pulse, elevated stress hormones, and reduced cognitive abilities. In contrast, carbohydrates did not exert the same stress-relieving effects on people not usually prone to stress. It has even been suggested that some people use carbohydrate to alter the levels of serotonin in their brains – a similar effect to that achieved by many antidepressant drugs.
Another emotional effect of food is guilt, and here our ambivalent attitude to food and fat becomes very clear – especially for women. Guilt is often associated with particular foods, and indeed advertisers often imply that their food products are guilt-inducing as a badge of just how appetising they are. Studies show that women are much more prone to food-guilt than men – probably because they worry more about how food will affect their body shape. One study in the Netherlands suggested that almost all young women experience food-guilt of some sort, and that this guilt is induced far more effectively by snacking between meals than by the eating of large or calorific main meals. Of course, we have just seen that snacking on ‘non-meals’ is precisely the way in which women use food for comfort, suggesting that guilt and comfort are an uneasy duo central to women’s habitual eating behaviour.
Guilt is a more complex emotion than comfort, however, and it probably involves not just low-level hunger and satiety centres in the brain, but also higher cognitive processes. Because of this, food-guilt is probably partly learnt – built into women by the society in which they live. Traditionally, women are seen as having a greater role in food preparation than men – they are told that it is their role to prepare food for men and children. However, at the same time, societal pressures also tell them that they must not eat too much or put on weight – that they must deprive themselves of the enjoyment of the food they prepare for others. Women’s magazines focus mainly on the holy trinity of beauty, sex and food, yet the last of these is presented as an essentially transgressive thing for many women, with the implication that it will destroy their chances of attaining the first two. Food is compulsory, yet prohibited.
If food can affect mood, then just as surely, mood controls what women eat. The mechanisms which underlie this control are probably mainly located in the outer layers of the brain responsible for ‘higher’ cognitive process, the cerebral cortex, and some claim to have further narrowed their location to an area known as the orbitofrontal cortex. The involvement of these higher regions means that mood can control appetite in complex ways, inducing subtle preferences for particular foods or even portion sizes, and that appetite can change in response to labyrinthine social and cultural mores of eating and food sharing.
This higher cognitive input also means that links between mood and eating can be learnt. In fact, many animals use their early eating experiences to inform their later food choices – from fish to mammals, a primary function of memory and motivation seems to have been to encourage animals to seek out foods that have sustained them in the past. Because eating habits are often learnt, people come to associate foods with particular situations, crunching a salad in the open air on a sunny day, or indulging in junk food after an alcohol-suffused night out. Just like an ex-addict avoiding their former haunts, women can change what they want to eat merely by changing where they go.
One of the most mood-laden learning environments is the childhood home, so it is hardly surprising that girls learn many of their eating habits there. However, studies using hidden cameras suggest that parents often ‘mis-train’ their young daughters. For example, parents frequently use food to pacify children, especially young children, and to alleviate distress or placate anger which is not itself related to food – a lesson easily remembered into adulthood. Also, although parents may keep ‘unhealthy’ foods in the house, they deliberately restrict children’s access to them to encourage them to eat other, more ‘healthy’ foods. But this often leads to the forbidden foods seeming even more tempting, and subsequently causes these children to furtively eat more of them when their parents are not present. In fact it seems that children, and girls in particular, learn their eating habits by example, so having parents who eat a varied diet free from guilt and psychological manipulation is probably best.
Many women believe that psychological stress affects what they eat, and that as a result, stress, eating and weight gain constitute a vicious circle conspiring to make them fat and unhappy. However, although stress has very real effects on food intake, those effects are complicated, and sometimes paradoxical. Some data suggest that stress and anger at a particular phase of life correlate with weight gain over the following years (as many as thirteen years in some studies). Long-term stress induces secretion of the hormone cortisol from the adrenal glands, while short-term stress may induce ghrelin production, and both of these may increase appetite. Meal size may not increase, but snacking and ‘covert’ eating often account for any weight gained – and a woman can acquire considerable weight within a few years by eating only a few extra calories each day.
Yet the science of stress and eating is not simple, and in some studies stress clearly induced profound and consistent reductions in appetite – so maybe the female brain reacts differently to different types of stress. For example, there is evidence that boredom, anxiety, excitement, happiness and sadness exert subtly different effects. One interview-based study suggested that women are likely to eat less after sad events in their lives and to eat more after happy events – and that they tend to self-medicate with sugary snacks, perhaps to alter their brain serotonin levels. A different study, of women who experience frequent food cravings, suggested that cravings are specifically induced by boredom and anxiety, rather than stress or lack of food.
The ups and downs of romantic relationships also induce mood-related changes in appetite and body shape, although these changes are difficult to study. We all know people who have gained weight once they were in a settled romantic relationship, and others who have lost weight after a relationship ends, and there are several reasons why this may happen. Contentment itself, lack of stress, and – dare I say it – complacency about one’s personal appearance could all increase food intake in happy couples, as could the simple fact that eating together is often one of their main bonding activities. From the evolutionary point of view too, it makes good sense for newly entwined couples to pile on the pounds, as this provides both of them with a calorie-rich adipose buffer against the impending demands of pregnancy, breastfeeding and childcare. Smug-couple chubbiness is the adipose equivalent of a healthy joint bank account.
Across human societies, the socially recognised start of romantic and sexual unions is usually marked ceremonially, by marriage. This may seem an archaic custom, but it is remarkable just how much women’s self-esteem, body-dissatisfaction and food-guilt are brought into focus as a wedding approaches. Surveys show that more than half of women want to be slimmer by the time of their wedding, more than half intend to go on a diet, and more than half intend to exercise more. At least one woman in ten is told by others that she should lose weight. Many women deliberately buy a wedding dress which is too small for them, in order to force them to lose weight before their wedding. However, despite the antiquity of marriage, women’s most commonly cited reason for wanting to be slimmer on their wedding day seems surprisingly modern – it is not to appear more attractive to fellow-revellers, but rather to look good in the wedding photos.
For many women, the most obvious way in which mood affects their food preferences is during the premenstrual phase of their cycle, when many experience urges to eat high-calorie foods, especially chocolate. Chocolate is a complex food with a pleasant taste and texture, is high in fat and sugar, and contains a wide variety of biologically active substances, including the xanthine chemicals caffeine and theobromine, both of which may be responsible for its almost addictive qualities. One US study estimated that 45 per cent of women experience chocolate cravings, and many say that chocolate makes them happy, although the scientific data for this are conflicting, with some studies suggesting that chocolate improves mood, in the short term at least, and others indicating that long-term chocolate eating correlates with depression. Of course, this could be because chocolate is the ultimate guilt-inducing food, or it could indicate that depressed women are more likely to self-medicate with chocolate.
Apart from its psychoactive constituents, chocolate also contains simpler nutrients well known for making food desirable – for example, the body is attuned to liking sugar and fat because they provide large quantities of valuable energy. Indeed, it may be the high calories in chocolate which make women desire it at particular phases of their cycle. Unlike the metabolism of men, the metabolic physiology of women with regular menstrual cycles is in a state of constant upheaval, as levels of metabolically-active hormones soar and plummet. Oestrogens are known to suppress appetite in many animals, and indeed, women eat least around the time of ovulation when their oestrogen levels are at their peak. Oestrogen fluctuations also change the flows of fluid in and out of body tissues so that breasts and bellies feel different at different phases of the cycle. Thus women’s food intake varies throughout the cycle partly because of direct hormonal effects, and partly because they want to reduce the fluctuations in how fat their body feels. In addition, there is evidence that oestrogens alter the effects of endocannabinoids on appetite, and that levels of serotonin, a brain chemical linked to mood, show regular changes across the menstrual cycle. Thus premenstrual cravings for chocolate could reflect a simple desire for one of the most calorific foods ever created, or a deliberate attempt to manipulate the brain’s internal mood-chemistry.
So body shape affects mood, food affects mood, mood affects food, and obviously food eventually affects body shape. Women have inherited complex and powerful control systems to regulate these interrelated phenomena, naturally selected over millions of years to optimise their chances of survival. These control systems did not evolve to make women’s lives difficult: they evolved because they were beneficial. However, when women decide to change the body shape their food-mood-shape control system has made them, they discover just how stubborn and unyielding that control system can be.
Dieting is the most common strategy used by women who want to change their body shape or size. In today’s ‘obesogenic’ world many of us simply assume that it is natural, responsible even, to control one’s weight by consciously managing one’s food intake. Yet until the last few decades humans rarely needed to exert conscious restraint on their eating, simply because there was no excess food. In contrast, there now exists a persuasive and highly lucrative dieting industry which promotes the idea of conscious control, especially to women. Particularly concerning is that this industry also promotes an ‘ideal’ body shape which is probably too small. And as we will see, encouraging moderate-weight women to diet can be harmful.
Women usually diet to lose weight, yet we saw in the last chapter how women’s assessment of their supposed excess weight is rarely objective. Unsurprisingly, women who diet frequently usually report a larger discrepancy between their perceived body shape and their ‘ideal’ body shape. However, picking apart these findings shows that the tendency to diet may have little to do with actually being overweight, or even with having an unreasonably small ‘ideal’ body shape. Instead, the impetus for dieting is more likely to be a distorted view of one’s own body shape and size. Dieting also seems to be linked to mood, and in women more than men there is a correlation between depression and dieting, and extreme methods of weight loss in particular.
One notorious feature of women’s attempts to lose weight by dieting is that they are surprisingly unsuccessful. Research suggests that only one-third of female dieters stop their diet because it has brought them to the body weight or shape they desired. Diets have a remarkable failure rate, and women often blame this failure on themselves. In fact, studies have shown that women on a diet often consume just as many calories as they did before, and that a significant number actually consume more. In other words, when women take conscious control of their food intake, the weakness of that conscious control in the face of millions of years of natural selection becomes obvious.
First of all, humans seem to have a natural inbuilt tendency to underestimate how much food they eat – not just a devious penchant for lying about their greed, but rather a basic cognitive inability to audit incoming calories. And, of course, we evolved that inability because for most of human history a tendency to underestimate food intake was no disadvantage to us. The second cause of ‘diet failure’ is that people may assess portion sizes on the basis of volume rather than calorie content – so eating less calorie-dense foods rather than lower food volumes may be a better way to lose weight. The third factor is that once women start to consciously think about food, well, they start to really think about it. They think about eating and they think about how much they like eating, and this seems to make it almost impossible to eat less. And fourthly, over the course of a dieting day, eating less at some times means that women become much hungrier before the next meal, making them more likely to ‘rebel’ against their diet or ‘give in’ to hunger by snacking – and we have already seen how effectively women can cognitively separate the idea of snacking from the concept of ingesting calories.
It is for these reasons that ‘voluntary’ dieters who plan their own diet are usually less successful than those who sign up to commercial, ‘imposed’ dieting regimes (as long as those imposed-dieters stick rigidly to their regime). However, imposed dieting brings its own psychological implications too – for example, women can interpret their success as depressing evidence that they are themselves incapable of controlling their own body size and shape and a fear that they will revert to their old eating habits once left to their own devices. Imposed dieting puts them at the mercy of the very industry that helped them feel so body-dissatisfied in the first place. In addition, the body’s food-mood-shape control system is still able to thwart even the most savagely restrained dieter – as a woman’s body loses fat, her physiology responds by reducing its metabolic rate and heat production to conserve calories and stymie weight loss.
Even for the minority of women who consistently and successfully lose weight by dieting, the bodily control system still has one more dirty trick up its sleeve. It is a well-recognised phenomenon that periods of dietary restraint are usually followed by compensatory periods of over-eating. This ‘post-starvation hyperphagia’ is the body’s attempt to make good the energy deficit it has incurred, but it is not a perfectly attuned response. Compensatory over-eating is probably caused by the body’s control mechanisms detecting that depots of fat and lean tissue have shrunk, and attempting to rectify the situation. However, the period of hyperphagia continues longer than it needs to – longer than the body requires to replenish its reserves – so that many women end up weighing more and having more fat than they did before they dieted.
This ‘rebound’ fat gain can lead to depression and a sense of helplessness, which may in turn increase appetite, cause weight gain, and precipitate repeated self-defeating cycles of dieting, hyperphagia and body dissatisfaction. What is particularly intriguing is that the risk of weighing more after post-starvation hyperphagia is higher in women who were not clinically overweight in the first place. So controlled diets may be a good idea for women who need to lose weight for health reasons, but they may be entirely counterproductive for the majority of women who do not.
Dieting also has other, unintended effects on women’s health. Women on a diet tend to make more healthy food choices, and indeed, many do not clearly differentiate between dieting and healthy eating – and this may explain why women usually eat more fruit, vegetables and fibre than men. This could of course be seen as a good thing, but as we will see in the next chapter, it is possible for women to use the disguise of ‘healthy eating’ to mask risky and even pathological weight-loss strategies. In addition, women may use smoking, or even cocaine, as an adjunct to dieting because these drugs reduce appetite. Indeed, in the US, smokers weigh an average of 3kg less than non-smokers.
Dieting also has profound adverse effects on the brain, increasing the incidence of depression and other mental disorders as diets becomes ever more protracted. Women on a diet show clear global impairment of their higher cognitive functioning, although whether this is due to the brain being starved of nutrients or simply being preoccupied by thoughts of food is not clear. Whatever the cause, dieting effectively makes women (temporarily) less intelligent.
Exercise is the second most common way women try to lose weight and its popularity seems to be on the rise.
Women are more likely than men to opt for exercise as a way to lose weight. Some believe it may lead to selective loss of fat from particular parts of the body. Failing that, exercise usually leads to increased muscle tone, something which can make women feel happier within their bodies, even though the shape and weight of that body may not have changed – a ‘felt’ improvement, rather than a ‘seen’ one. While exercise is usually a slower way to lose weight than dieting, it often enhances body-satisfaction faster, increasing women’s drive to persevere with their weight-loss programme. And exercise is increasingly considered to be a more socially acceptable and less faddish way of losing weight than dieting – women usually feel more confident openly discussing their own visible, virtuous efforts at the gym than recounting the details of a covert calorie-reduction plan.
However, the extent to which exercise reduces weight varies a great deal between individual women. Just as women vary in their shapes, metabolic strategies and responses to dieting, they also differ in their metabolic responses to exercise. The minority of women who assess their size by weighing themselves are often disappointed that their weight increases soon after embarking on an exercise programme, although they may attribute this to the fact that muscle weighs more than fat. But most of the variation in women’s responses to exercise is probably due to how exercise alters their appetite. Some women continue to eat the same amount when they start to exercise, and thus lose weight because of the increased drain on calories, but some women eat more. Exercise increases women’s drive to eat, so they can fuel all that exertion, but it also increases their satiety responses, so that they may feel full earlier on during meals. Whichever of those effects predominates – increased appetite or enhanced satiety – can determine whether a woman loses or gains weight when she exercises. Once again, appetite is the key.
Just like eating, exercise exerts a wide range of effects on the mind. Running, for example, stimulates secretion of brain endocannabinoids which alter appetite, and which may also cause the ‘highs’ experienced by many runners. In fact, this endocannabinoid response appears to be particularly well developed in animals which evolved to spend a great deal of their time running, such as humans and dogs, and is less developed in other species. Thus humans may be preconfigured to find exercise mood-enhancing. However, despite the fact that women who exercise are often thinner, healthier and more toned, they also tend to have higher rates of eating disorders. This could be because exercising often introduces women to a new cohort of unusually toned and slim women with whom they may subsequently compare themselves, or physical exertion may involve women in activities which place great importance on thinness or prettiness. It is probably for this reason that ballet dancers have lower body-satisfaction than other dancers, and women who take part in ‘aesthetic sports’ such as figure skating or synchronised swimming are more body-dissatisfied than women in other sports.
Indeed, there is some controversy about how benign the lure of the sporting physique actually is. After the 2012 London Olympics, for example, there was a British media frenzy focused on the physical attractiveness of certain female athletes, with the implication that with their lean, sinewy bodies, they were more healthy role models than the fragile waifs which had preceded them. But many argued that this trend was simply replacing one fatless ideal body type with another, no less unattainable for most women, while further reinforcing the idea that adiposity and curvaceousness are signs of laziness and lack of control.
Of course taking exercise is usually a good thing, but it does have its downside too. It can be used to compensate for ‘failures of willpower’ during a diet – a ‘cheat’ which, if repeated, can eventually lead to disordered patterns of eating. Also, exercise is time-consuming, and it can have an addictive dimension too – the desire to keep getting that ‘exerciser’s high’. Although the beguiling nature of exercise may encourage women to persist with their weight-loss regimen, for some women exercise can become the dominant force in their lives. As we will see in the next chapter, compulsive exercise can be a route to psychological withdrawal from the rest of the world, into an activity which is easier than dieting to justify to concerned friends, relatives and partners.
Women did not evolve to live the developed twenty-first century life. Their body shape, size, appetite, self-image and happiness are locked together in a way that worked well twenty thousand years ago, but seems ill-suited to modern life. Women are expected to eat yet not eat, experience food-hedonism and food-guilt, be curvy as well as thin, and to exercise but not exercise too much. Suddenly, having shape, food and mood all bound together inside our heads does not seem like such a good idea.
Yet still the continual messages bombard us that slenderness represents control, and that women’s reward for that control is preferential treatment by others. Studies show that slimmer women are more likely to be admitted to university, and more likely to be accepted for a rental tenancy. We even know that women’s minds work differently if they think their slimness is being judged – one study showed that women asked to try on swimsuits were subsequently more likely to experience body-shame, tended to eat less, and performed less well at maths tests than women who were asked to try on knitwear.
Women are now dislocated from their shapely, curvy bodies. No longer are those bodies comfortable spaces from which to enjoy the outside world: instead they have been compulsorily commandeered as personal advertisements to that world. Women are trained to adopt others’ opinions about how their bodies look and how they should look, and they are told that if they want to be happy, then those bodies must be small, trim and without appetite.