calorie-counting, 'waif girl', and tesco as a battleground
on eating disorders
Trigger warning for extensive discussion of eating disorders, calories, body image, and mental health relapse.
The last time I tried to access eating disorder support services, they told me I wasn’t sick enough.
It wasn’t that simple, of course, because it’s never that simple with NHS Mental Health services. My GP told me she’d make a referral, and then nothing happened, and then I followed up months later, and they weighed me, and took me for an ECG, and I tried again. I don’t remember the words the doctor used, but the message was clear — I wasn’t sick enough. I wasn’t thin enough. I hadn’t stopped eating, so I wasn’t about to keel over and end up in a hospital bed, but there were people who were, and the waiting list was so long that there was no point even adding me to it.
So I went home without the referral and that was that.
It’s an irony, really. Just as an eating disorder forces you to value yourself solely by your body, rather than by your personhood, brain, soul, heart, whatever, your ability to access care is often based on your physical condition. In my case, unlike when I was a teenager, my weight wasn’t dangerously low. But all I could think about was food. What am I having for dinner. How am I going to manage this meal out, given the government’s new policy, where large businesses are required to display calorie information on menus and food labels. What are the sat fats in this ready meal. I should cut out sugar. Can I get a snack with my coffee if I’m having dessert later. Why does this pub have calories on drinks. I should cut out dairy. Will I ever eat my favourite half-baked cookie dough again, now I know what’s in it.
Eating disorders, perhaps more than any other mental illness, are both mental and physical. And like any other mental illness, recovery is not a one way street. When I walked into the GP surgery and asked for a referral, I’d been doing well, on a two year recovery streak since the first lockdown forced me to be still, eat well, and recharge, even gaining my menstruation back after years of amenorrhea. But since the government’s new policy of calorie-counting, I’d been slipping backwards, finding myself stymied with fear in restaurants, panicking at red and orange labels in supermarkets, and assessing every detail of what I was eating once again.
Against the new calorie-counting policy, eating disorder charity BEAT UK put out a statement of concern, stating that ‘Requiring calorie counts on menus risks causing great distress for people suffering from or vulnerable to eating disorders, since evidence shows that calorie labelling exacerbates eating disorders of all kinds’. In the weeks surrounding the new policy, I saw a lot of arguments against it, and a lot of advice on how to cope — BEAT’s own guide is particularly useful. But I also saw people defending it, and arguing that, if they were so concerned, people with eating disorders or disordered eating problems should simply stay at home, and avoid eating out at chains. First of all, why should those who are struggling and vulnerable be forced to isolate further, to avoid all things good in life, and to engage in avoidant behaviours which can exacerbate illness? Besides, eating disorders don’t work like that. They’re like ear-worms, crawling into your brain and ringing over and over again in your ears, even when you’re not directly exposed to triggers like calories on menus. After the new government policy, I wasn’t just panicking in Franco Manca or Byron, I was panicking in Tesco, and in small artisan cafes where everything is vegan and gluten free anyway, and at home.
Tesco is an embarrassing battleground, when no one knows you’re fighting. You stand before the vegetarian ready meals for twenty minutes, assessing the minutiae of each label. You gingerly leaf through energy bars, consider how processed each and every veggie sausage may be. You think about how the pasta will feel as it dissolves in your mouth, mushy. You charge the crisps aisle head on, before swerving to a packet of puffed quinoa, and try to remember last time you ate a Sensation. You phone your boyfriend three times, and end up leaving with some tofu, some strawberries, and two pints of almond milk. And a red hot pulse in your forehead. Later, your mum talks you into ordering takeaway, and you wait for it in bed, shaking, feverish with hunger but unable to let yourself eat until it comes, like a reward, for how sick you’ve made yourself. After you’ve eaten, you don’t feel good. You just feel embarrassed. A meal becomes a pyrrhic victory.
I keep thinking about that scene in Normal People — Marianne, alone and abroad, sitting in a cafe with her coffee and her pastry, picking it apart, morsel by morsel. It’s a symbol, the inner A-Level English student I’ve never quite killed says, sagely. She’s ripping herself apart too. I swill my own coffee around the cup. It would be so much more sexy if I could make myself eat a pastry right now. Just one. And symbolically.
Normal People, or at least Sally Rooney and her army of knockoffs, came under fire recently, in a hotly debated Independent article on the ‘Waif Girl’ phenomenon. Citing Marianne, and Rooney’s other protagonists, as well as the much-parodied Bella of Twilight and the tortured heroines of Victorian classics like Wuthering Heights, the article labels ‘Waif Girl’ as ‘a tormented young woman who can’t help but question why anyone bothers with anything at all’. The writer, Roisin O’Connor, criticises the trope for its contradictions and dangerously idealised aspects: Waif Girl ‘is “painfully skinny” but still attractive; she insists she is boring but still succeeds in fascinating those around her; she is normal but extraordinary (for no clear reason); smart without trying (but never a geek, as much as she might claim to be); socially awkward but the centre of attention; drab but hot; sexless but sexy; virginal but seductive.’
I’m troubled by the discourse over Waif Girl. She’s turned up everywhere in my life recently, from the ‘unhinged women’ section at Blackwells Bookshop to the slightly nauseating yet worryingly relatable posts tagged #coquette and #dollette popping up on my Instagram feed because I dare to quite like Brandy Melville’s expensive pointelle camis (fuck! I’m basic as well as annoying! 2015 me can’t bear 2022 me one bit!). I’m scared that our culture, particularly online, is romanticising her, a new rise of 2014 Tumblrcore plus 90s heroin chic plus Whisper memes transposed on pictures of Lily Rose Depp, and I’m particularly sick of the way her literary depiction is always wealthy, white, cis, and (ambiguously?) straight. There are plenty of valid criticisms of this kind of aesthetic, but I do think Waif Girl has more to her than O’Connor’s article allows. I don’t think she’s ‘ludicrous’, or her suffering just ‘gratuitous’. I think that she speaks to a real wave of young women who are terrified of the future, who are exhausted of surviving in a system which doesn’t care very much about the sufferings of young women (unless they look the right way), and who didn’t choose to have eating disorders because they were ‘pretty’ or ‘cool’, but because they were transposed upon them by a culture of body hatred, food fear, and a disgust at anything imperfect or unhealthy which manifests in everything from literature to government policy.
I’ve been her, I think, hiding in the downstairs room of my sixth form where the girls with eating disorders went to eat lunch. No one ever said this, of course, but it was obvious, not least because I was nowhere near the sickest. It was like that meme, three Spidermen pointing at each other in shock, or awe, or recognition. Except this time the Spidermen are miserable young women with shaky hands and salads.
I’ve told this story several times, to several people, and no one seems to find it quite as funny as I do. But it’s like the meme! I’ll say. And anyway, it’s not like any of us are dead.
Maybe I’m still Waif Girl, although, as my GP unintentionally pointed out, I’m not quite skinny enough anymore. And I couldn’t pull off the bangs. My eating disorder brain has been grappling with this a lot recently (the weight issue, not the bangs). I’m desperate to recover, but I want to be sick again. I want care, but I want to languish. I want to be healthy, but I want to be skinny. My boyfriend tells me over and over again that I’m beautiful, but I can’t stop looking at photos of Kate Moss topless, her ribs pressing against her skin, yearning for air. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels — how many people have been fucked over by that quote, Kate, hey? Then again, how many people have blamed her, the girl in the photo, for what her body says in our society. Is Waif Girl more than just a symbol? Certainly in this case; in 2018 Moss admitted she regretted her famous remark, just as she’d previously criticised the fashion industry for encouraging her restrictive weight — not that you’d guess that from a quick scroll through Pinterest.
It takes a lot of strength to look someone — a medical professional, say — in the eye and say I am struggling. Help me, please. To be turned away because you are not sick enough is agonising, especially when you can see yourself, like I could, on the road to relapse. It’s a special kind of medical gaslighting, especially in the case of eating disorders, which often already scream that you should be smaller, thinner, sicker. In 2021, experts warned that the policy of basing treatment on BMI put patients in a ‘life-threatening position’ to lose more weight. Eating disorders don’t just affect ‘waifish’ women, as much of the discussion of their literary and media depiction seems to suggest — those being denied care are those who don’t look like they’re sick, who don’t look like restrictors. In 2016, the BBC found that some trusts will not provide treatment for those with a BMI over 14, a number low enough to exclude many exhibiting both mental and physical symptoms of eating disorders. This assessment, based entirely on how people look, and what they weigh by an almost entirely arbitrary measure, can be a death sentence. Denying people treatment until they are ‘sick enough’ fuels their illness and creates a damaging precedent for mental healthcare, and for the way we see and understand people’s diverse struggles with disordered eating.
One of O’Connor’s criticisms of Waif Girl is that ‘she is normal but extraordinary (for no clear reason)’. There’s a sense of disdain here that I can’t bear — that a woman might be extraordinary, might have value, for reasons imperceptible to the discerning literary critic. But isn’t that what people are like? Much like the listless heroines of Rooney’s novels, real people — especially young women, who have been so systematically undermined and devalued, and who are the most susceptible group to disordered eating behaviours — do not have to commit great acts and achievements in order to be extraordinary. Sometimes it is extraordinary just to survive.
Indeed, it’s not just literary tropes which are full of contradictions. I think this is my real issue with O’Connor's criticism of Waif Girl, and older treatments of her predecessor, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. We’re all contradictory; we all construct ourselves, both mentally and physically, to be seen a certain way. Sometimes our self-image breaks down. Sometimes we break it down ourselves. Sometimes our image is coopted — Kate Moss remains an icon of ‘thinspo’ despite her acknowledgement of past mistakes, whilst books rich in social criticism like Normal People or My Year of Rest and Relaxation become emblems of an apolitical aesthetics of conventional beauty joined to pleasantly filtered suffering. Something can be both one thing and another, especially when it comes to body image and eating disorders; as any therapist will tell you, mental illnesses are not rational, they are not telling you the truth. A ready meal is not a landmine. 2000 calories a day is not always enough. You do not have to hate or love your body.
There were lots of contradictory girls at my school, where the most beautiful girl I remember was bullied for being curvy, and teenagers swapped out coffee for green tea because it was ‘good for your appetite’. There are more at university, where people conveniently, and proudly, ‘forget to eat’ due to the workload. I don’t think I’m the only girl who cries in Tesco, behind my mask and sunglasses, on the phone to my boyfriend who doesn’t understand why I don’t think I’m beautiful, and why I physically can’t pick up a snack over 100kcal. I don’t think ‘Waif Girl’ is alone in her suffering, I think her problem is she thinks she is. I think her problem isn’t that it’s not beautiful and tortured enough to get help, it’s that she doesn’t know where to look for it. It’s that when she does look for it, it isn’t accessible. It tells her — get better, or get more sick. We don’t want you if you don’t know what you are. Make up your mind. Pay the price.
In the cafe bathroom, the day after my relapse in the supermarket, I feel like I’m pissing in a dream. Like I’m going to wake up a child again, having wet the bed. Sally Rooney would make this sound really edgy, but I’m just concerned about staying upright. Afterwards, I’ll go buy some soup, some fruit juice, determined not to go another day on one-and-a-half meals and a coffee, like a bad tweet. This time, I don’t panic in Tesco. This time, I’m okay.
As I leave the cafe, a woman tells me she likes my trousers. I’m hyperaware of my stomach, my bared midriff, my arse. The shape a body makes when it is taking up space. But she’s not looking at me, really, not at the body within the construction. She just likes my jeans.
Thanks, I say. I love them too.
If you’re affected by the government’s new calorie-counting policy, or think you may be suffering from an eating disorder, I can’t recommend BEAT and their advice page enough: https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk
https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/news/beats-response-government-plan-calorie-count/
https://www.bustle.com/entertainment/waif-girl-explainer-sally-rooney
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-36956849
https://www.glamour.com/story/original-waif-kate-moss-admits
I wrote about medical gaslighting regarding menstrual health for the Oxford Blue in February 2022.
I agree with this! If I think about all the girls I knew before 19, they were all suffering in tandem. Teenage girls and women in their early twenties (women in general honestly) have literally not been allowed to have complex feelings for centuries, which is why I kind of love when the 2014 tumblr girl is poked fun at in a self aware way. We're aware of the dramatics but we're not making fun of the girls for having these emotions considering the societal pressure.
I can see why people would be upset though, even if there's no explicit romanticisation, there is an innate feeling that comes with popular literary books where the characters become an unerasable part of culture
I think the literary girl phenomenon resurfacing through books like Sally Rooney's and her sad girl comrades have most definitely shaped the image of it, so even though these writers are making observations, their observations have crowned waifish women as the impetus for beauty (again) even though that might not be the point.
This is probably also an issue with the whole media literally thing and the fact that we simply cannot see, dissect and criticise a piece of media without screaming and crying about other people's opinions, so really everyones the problem 😭