It seems fairly reasonable to me that following days of celebrating with family and friends over the holidays, most people think about changes to food and exercise when considering their New Year’s Resolutions. Truly, I am no different. My own relationship with food has been a complex one. As I have written in one of my earlier blog posts, I was a fat child. I am okay with using the derogatory term to describe my childhood body type as opposed to terms like mesomorphic, big-boned, heavy, or chubby. Reclaiming the use of the term fat for me helps to further understand the persistent inner-child perspectives about food, femininity, pleasure, and body size. For me, like many other women, there is an emotional entanglement between my female gender and food, especially in light of being regarded generally as a fat girl in my early childhood. It is true that I have always loved food. My Italian mother was a great cook and dinners were a sacred event in our family. Similar to other newcomer families in the sixties and seventies, we all had to gather each evening to eat dinner together – and we did.
My mother always served our dad’s meal first, and then each of her six children in birth order. As the youngest of six children, I was always served last. Of course, my mom’s serving practice had deep and lasting impacts on me and my relationship with food and eating. As a child, I learned that food, especially delicious wholesome food was worth waiting for! I would eat it wholeheartedly and with gusto and sadly, I would often over-eat indulging in second helpings. It was a wonderfully pleasurable experience for me. I loved food and never learned to feel ashamed about my food choices. All food was delicious and nothing was really forbidden in our home. In fact, my mom would give each of us a bedtime snack-pack full of chips, chocolates, and sweets depending on our preferences. Again, in her view, as long as you had eaten a healthy meal, it was okay to indulge in the not-so-healthy stuff. Other than spoiled or rotten food, nothing was off-limits.
As a young child, I was not attuned to the subtle sensation of feeling full, and so I only stopped eating when I was quite full. I ate hurriedly and ravenously, as though the next meal was never a guarantee. In truth, I would stuff myself with the delicious food at home, and my mom always seemed happy to have a daughter with such a healthy appetite. At that time, fat babies were viewed as healthy babies and baby-fat was something that people eventually outgrew. Any shame I learned about over-eating unfolded as a fat girl with five older normatively-sized siblings, and with friends, mostly thinner than me at school and in my community. It really did seem at the time that I was physically larger than most of my female friends. By ten years old, I weighed 140 pounds. Seven years post-menopausal, my weight continues to hover around the same.
At home, I was fortunate to learn that food rewards were not associated with merit. My mom did not change how she served food based on how we behaved. She also never withheld food as punishment. This may have been influenced by her cultural heritage or her own hunger-trauma experiences during the war. My mom simply stuck with her hierarchical practice of serving food based on age. Many cultures practice this way, where no one at the table begins to eat until the eldest is served and begins to eat first. She was also very particular about extending food and hospitality to our neighbours. We had the best birthday parties and holiday celebrations. She was intuitively inclusive and we often had neighbours and friends over to share in good food and company. So, I learned early that food is always to be shared. It was a very hard lesson for me to learn that some children at school were “not allowed” to share their food with their friends. Sharing food with others was joyful and celebratory. Even at this later stage in my life, I find it difficult to eat or drink anything in front of someone else without offering some of it to them. Not surprisingly, I have cultivated friendships with other women who are equally hospitable and celebratory with food opening their homes to host dinner parties or pot-lucks.
As a young child, it did not really matter that my siblings and school mates bullied me for being fat, because all of the wonderful tastes of food outweighed (no pun intended) any harm caused by hurtful and mean words. Again, I am now more aware of the impact of this meanspirited bullying on my sense of self today, but in those early years, I ate unreservedly. As I grew into my own womanhood, my relationship with food evolved. I continued to perceive myself as larger (and I was) than most of my peers until puberty, when my feminine attributes became more obvious somewhat bypassing an adolescent stage. Where many of my female friends were still girlish before the age of twenty, I had long felt physically like a grown woman. Many of my friends of European and Mediterranean descent experienced the same. My eating habits during my adolescence and young adulthood were more scientifically informed. I ate for health and did begin to restrict some of the less healthy foods and to move more. Of course, I continued to eat for pleasure as well. I had already established a real enjoyment of eating, and so I did enjoy eating from the Canadian Food Guide as well.
As a psychotherapist, I prefer to frame a woman’s relationship with food developmentally and longitudinally. Neuropsychiatrist, Louann Brizendine describes the female hormonal trajectory in her book, The Upgrade as occurring in three main phases over the course of a lifetime. She provides the scientific support to show the connection between female hormones and health. Brizendine argues that a woman’s transformation of sex hormones occurs over several years and impacts all areas of the body and mind. In the first phase during Adolescence, the hormonal storming brings about so many changes that help to understand emotional and behavioural changes described in Mary Pipher’s important 1994 publication, Reviving Ophelia, which chronicles the increased pressures on adolescent females to restrict themselves in all areas of life. In Pipher’s view, this restriction too often leads to a girl’s total loss of voice, character, and vitality seen in her earlier years. Author, Sarah Ockwell-Smith recreates space for girls to be compliant, helpful, gentle, and loving. She has created a series of gentle parenting resources based on sound attachment-based theories that debunk otherwise pathologized views of the good girl syndrome beginning in early childhood. In her view, behavioural compliance results from attachment-parenting where household routines are predictable, structured, safe, nurturing, loving, and clear.
The argument that a good girl or perfect girl syndrome is created in response to social pressures is a real one for many women. Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 publication, The Second Sex introduced the idea that female-disadvantage was for the most part caused by biological differences, especially as they related to females being smaller and physically weaker than males. In her simple yet original version of feminism, de Beauvoir explained that a woman’s power in her time emerged from the possibility of saying “no” to the advancements of males who could overpower women with ease. This notion of the good or perfect girl always-already agreeable and yes-oriented characterized as vulnerable to men may in fact have its origins in the earliest forms of feminism. A good and perfect girl would not have the power to say “no”, and as such, it is important that she be parented to resist and defy. As times have changed and men have grown increasingly educated, sensitive, dignified, and sensible to the rights of women, this characterization of vulnerable good or perfect girls feels outdated to me. In the face of choice today, does a good or perfect girl have the power to say yes or no as she sees fit, and will her decision be respected by the men in her life?
Although the embodiment of the perfect female is traditionally thin in North America, most women report feeling at their best when they carry around less body fat. When my youngest son was six years old, I decided that the extra forty-five pounds that I had been carrying around was no longer related to my pregnancy with him. It was easy to deceive myself in believing that I weighed 165 pounds, when in fact I was closer to 190 pounds. At this point, I was in my late thirties, and looking back, I felt physically very strong and needed to be as a working-mom. Yet, my inner fat girl did not appreciate the reality of being close to 70 pounds over the then standard weight for women my own age.
So, I decided to follow in my good mother’s footsteps, and I joined Weight Watchers. Unlike my mom however, I decided that my weight loss program would be an opportunity to learn more about myself and my emotions. I made the conscious decision to be gentle with myself and to learn more about my relationship with food. I focused on when I eat, how I eat, what I eat, with whom I eat, and how I feel during and after I eat. I learned to discern feelings that had nothing to do with my meal or the food I was eating, but that had been connected to my experience of eating. I learned to enjoy food without over-indulgement or restriction. As I released my emotional baggage with food, my tormented relationship with it also ended. It took me close to a year to slowly lose fifty pounds. My inner fat child is content with my new normal. I no longer feel any guilt or shame with food. I eat everything and no longer feel the need to stuff myself. I can recognize even the subtlest full feeling.
My post-menopausal body does seem to react, sometimes painfully when I eat something that disagrees with me. There are several new sensitivities to foods that I did not experience as a younger woman. Many of my female clients in their forties and fifties also report changes in their ability to digest food with ease. It seems that more and more women experience extreme bloating and pain as the first and second phases of hormonal changes happen to the aging female body. Brizendine argues that the gradual loss of estrogen and progesterone impacts all bodily systems in females until it finally stabilizes, which she argues is the third and final stage of menopause in later life.
So, my New Year’s resolutions in 2025 are much like my previous ones. I will purchase my first ever TO-All Access Pass that will allow me to participate in drop-in fitness classes with friends or on my own that suit me best. I will keep my LA Fitness membership as they offer court play. I hope to learn Tai Chi and to brush up on my long neglected guitar. I will continue to explore food reactions on my body and do my best to choose foods that make me feel healthy and well. I will support the people in my life who are ill and whose bodies are fighting for survival. I will continue to practice gratitude for all the goodness living in such a privileged city and country yields. Finally, I will continue to provide my best clinical-self to my amazing high achieving clients from various professional fields whose commitment to self-care and mental wellness in the workplace incentivizes me to continue as well.
Best wishes for a Happy & Healthy New Year in 2025 as you continue to realize your dreams.
Lisa Romano-Dwyer MSW, PhD, RSW
