on a train to wimbledon

written in 2016

At 11:30am, I notice an elderly woman opposite to me in the train carriage, as I speed towards Kings Cross. Irritably, she orders a train-sized bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and a kit-kat.

What may seem like an ordinary situation strikes me as more meaningful. I consider whether, in a similar situation, on a similar train journey, I would do something entirely for the pleasure of the moment — and entirely for me. Such behaviour could be considered old-fashioned, even romantic. So at this moment in time, and as someone who romanticises the past, why do I feel such a block at the thought of doing as she does?

Now at university, I like to think that I’m much better at living for the moment than I ever was at school. I am willing to do and experience a lot of things. When surrounded by friends, I encourage and make an example of spontaneity and unlike many of the, I have no shame in that. Am I able to live in the moment, hypocritically, only through the means of external affirmation? Can I only do as such if others tell me it’s okay? If so, I don’t think that this is uncommon in an age of polarised messages telling us to keep trim, drink less and push ourselves, but also to live our lives to the limit before we get too old. Self-control is a construct given boundaries by the judgements and actions of others, who are themselves influenced by us.

Or is it generational?  I can easily imagine my grandmother acting similarly to the woman next to me. Our generation has been programmed to believe that only through working ourselves to exhaustion can we succeed and prove ourselves to be of any value. We are a generation of clean eating; obsession with condemning excess, fat shaming. This is self-perpetuating, because the more we see how conscious those around us are about what we consume, the more we feel ourselves judged and the more conscious of our actions and guilty about anything non-beneficial we become. If we cannot gain from an action, we feel guilty. People of an older generation, like the woman beside me, frown upon excess too. But their lives have been lived at a slower pace and pleasure was not only accepted, but integral to sophisticated society. 

So is that age of conscious restraint is the ideal? This is the subtle desire to be a certain type of person, to live with a certain standard; a demurity to which moments of pleasure was essential. Being able to enjoy pleasures with control and pleasure for the sake of it was not viewed as a character flaw to be excused and shamed, but as a sign of sophistication. The next generation up, that of my parents’, was different altogether. My mother may order a bottle of train-sized wine too, but only if her journey is undertaken for pleasure. She definitely wouldn’t have eaten the Kit Kat. She’s part of this generation’s mindset, in that way; a successful business woman, young and active at heart. But the current mindset feeds into her approach to health and life. She’s quite happy to embrace pleasure, and has been my biggest advocate for self-love through some of the most difficult times in my adolescence. Embracing, without guilt, is where we differ. But she’ll only eat dark chocolate, she’s conscious of carbs, obsessed with avocado and she doesn’t snack. I am definitely not saying that being health conscious is a negative approach to life; in the West, we obviously have an obesity epidemic which affects the whole healthcare system and has so many other environmental and social implications, and we need to tackle this from its origin in social mindsets and shame. 

What angers me the most, however, is the public bias towards this issue. There is an underlying acknowledgement that the message the models who still idealise size zero bodies in most advertising, has a negative effect on society’s view of the ‘normal’ human body, especially for the younger generation and especially for women. There is understanding, but what has arisen in the place of direct protest is the attempt to unite what I view as the negative associations of both ‘fat-shaming’ and size zero culture. Chef bloggers such as Deliciously Ella are inspiring, in theory and I have no doubt that in themselves, they have a brilliant and enlightening relationship with food. Society would become a lot more healthy as a whole, if we all had a diet based on what they advise us to make and eat. But what is happening is that the promotion of ‘superfoods’ and their corresponding associations with beautiful, young, successful and satisfied young women such as Ella, combined with increasingly harsh pressures and impossible standards set in schools, higher education and the workplace amongst the high-aspiring, has correlated ‘clean-eating’ with success. And this mindset becomes dangerous if it is taken up as an approach to everything.

As a result of the clean-eating phenomenon that has taken over Instagram over the past few years, the hashtag orthorexia now has almost 70,000 posts, with people exchanging cleaning eating ideas and habits under the banner of a new form of an eating disorder that, as of yet, isn’t officially recognised by the American Psychiatric Association. It isn’t a coincidence that, as of January 2016, four case reports and more than 40 other articles on the subject have been published internationally. Its basis in social media makes the negative impact it can have on the vulnerable and insecure, an international issue. There is a fine line between ‘eating clean’ and a food obsession that is based on a need to be in control. For that is the territory of an eating disorder. I am sure that a lot of the most well-known health bloggers understand this line; many of them use their blogging as a means of recovery from eating disorders they have personally experienced. But if combined with factors such as academic, social and sexual pressures, the line is likely to become blurred for their viewers and these factors will become be subsumed into the disorder. Food is easy to control, and that is the basis of the illness. I was recently told by a university friend of mine who struggled with anorexia, that it all started with an obsession with eating ‘clean’.  It is a slippery slope that is becoming more and more common. If ‘clean eating’ is supposed to promote healthy lifestyle, then something is going terribly wrong, for more often than not obsession with eating healthily comes out of an obsession with working hard and pushing ourselves to the limit. 

I wonder if anyone considers that the mindset of my parents — that which condemns and allows certain types of pleasure, is one stage of this slippery slope. That eventually, all non-beneficial pleasure will be extracted from the day to day lives of my generation. Perfect control requires self-monitoring, obsession naturally follows; obsession with anything that will increase productivity. Supposed ‘clean-eating’ will succeed as the only positive approach to food and ‘treating’ oneself will become a setback. 

Or maybe this danger is only certain for a particular kind of person. As some who spent six months in hospital for anorexia at the age of fifteen, the next four years in outpatient services and the years following still struggling, I’m well aware that deep-rooted and controlling attitudes towards foods are the product of a certain combination of chemicals in my brain. When I was 16-18 and completing my A Levels, I was terrified that if I didn’t work from the moment I got home from school, or get up earlier and go to bed later than everyone in my family, everyone would think I was lazy – most of all myself. I genuinely believed that I wouldn’t do as well as I could have done in my A Levels unless I did this. I had no life and no friends, and my obsession with eating was tied up with this way of living, feeding into every aspect of my conscious and unconscious brain. I did very well, but since coming to university, I have realised that in living solely by what I thought would advance me, rather than just living, I stilted a major part of my personal development. I wouldn’t go for coffee, drink alcohol, take part in days out with my family, or even bond with my dog. Everything was a distraction. I wouldn’t watch television; I moved into my new house at the beginning of sixth form and by the end of the two years, I had genuinely entered the living room a maximum of ten times. I lost out on those trivial aspects of adolescence that not only maintain happiness levels, but expand the mind’s capability to think, to be spontaneous and to memorise. I was blind, thinking that it was the only way of maximising my potential. And that is the crux of the disorder; there is a confidence there in your own ability, but the trust in it was never enough. At Cambridge I listen to people talking about their favourite TV shows; music; politics; random trivia. All of this I don’t have and I will probably spend the next 10 years of my life playing catch-up. What is seen as pointless and mind-numbing on the surface, is part of what builds us into humans. These people are all at Cambridge with me; they achieved the same grades. But in having a life, they are subsequently more rounded than I. The same goes for that cake you have mid-afternoon with your friend; the bar of chocolate when you need a sugar rush. The little treats that teach us not only how to be happy, but how to love and respect ourselves and thus become people in our own right, non-reliant on the affirmation of others. Teaching ourselves to lose control is what changes and develops our view of the world around us. No one is judging me for the fun I have or the food I eat now, or if they are, our values are too different and I have experienced too much to care. 

I think the line is prevalent, to a greater or lesser extent, in most young people of my generation. My younger sister has the same attitude towards her A Levels as I did. But in an age in which ‘disordered eating’ is the norm amongst young girls, I wonder if, even if not as all-consuming as it is for those with serious psychological issues towards food and indeed pleasure, it is an issue for the majority of health-conscious, aspirational people. That everyone is programmed to have a psychological block towards food, as an extension of pleasure and excess. When I was recovering from my eating disorder, I would avoid the people who would excuse what they’d just eaten as a way of excusing it to themselves. “I didn’t eat breakfast” was a justification for having the side of fries or bread. Even now, I avoid conversations in which my friends tell me how ‘much’ or ‘little’ they’ve eaten that day, or that they’ve lost weight. It’s so instilled and so degrading, and those mindsets simply spread, even to those who don’t really think about what they are saying. To be ‘health-concious’ is to associate a certain food type with guilt. I wonder what we are missing in comparison to the demure and fun-loving youth of the early 20th century. I am of course looking back to this generation with complete romanticism, but I do believe that pleasure was accepted without consequence in a way it simply isn’t today. Of course, that was spurned from their own generational issues and life-approaches. Pleasure for young men would have been excusable in that they were the breadwinners and for women, because all they were accepted as being fit for was the family sphere and an ideal of beauty. With the gender gap closing, the paradox was that as women began to work as hard as men, pleasure became less excusable. Men in offices could smoke their cigarettes, drink their whiskey and visit their mistresses all before lunch, but if a woman were to be taken seriously as a professional, their ‘moral’ character would have to be impeccable.

Or maybe it’s something that the young have always been particularly conscious of; the self-consciousness and instability of growing into a fully-formed person, perpetuated by the image conscious, ‘clean-eating’ drive and impossibly high standards and competitiveness of this era. Yet it is important to remember that although we are social beings, we are people in our own right — strong and individual enough to disregard any mindset that we are indoctrinated in at no matter what age. And so, maybe when I get to 30 I’ll feel able to order myself a bottle of wine when alone on a train. And maybe by the time I get to 70, I’ll be able to order a kit-kat alongside it. Or maybe I’ll be substituting it for a dark chocolate-coated quinoa and avocado health bar. It’s up to me.