OPINION:Focusing on looking good rather than on feeling good is a recipe for unending distress, writes CRISTINA GALVIN
‘IRISH PEOPLE have feel good factor but do they have look good factor?” That was the caption of a recent press release announcing the publication of the Kelloggs Health Lifestyle Survey which aimed to examine the links between diet and exercise and the impact on how we feel about ourselves.
Nine out of 10 Irish people say they think it’s more important to feel good than look good, according to the study, which seems, on the face of it at least, a heartening finding. While 56 per cent of those surveyed said they looked after their bodies by eating healthily and exercising regularly, the authors stressed that four times more men than women admitted adopting no particular regimen to “keep them looking good”. The survey’s automatic equation of “looking good” with bodyweight and its admonitory tones concerning diet and exercise are an example, however, of an insidious commercial agenda.
Like so much of “healthy living” instruction doled out endlessly, what the survey says in effect is: never trust how you feel; trust us – we’ll tell you how to look good. But one cannot expect a cereal company to put health concerns above the logic of profit.
We live in a culture that demands we see fault with our bodies, that insists we view them as objects to be honed, toned, whipped into shape.
As psychotherapist Susie Orbach points out in her recent book, Bodies, obesity is just one
of the more visible consequences of the high level of eating difficulties which beset people in the West.
Focusing on looking good rather than on feeling what it’s like to truly experience our bodies and our lives just the way they are at any given moment is recipe for unending distress. There is an inextricable link between the cultural imperative to be fit and youthful and the desperate measures many take to make their bodies measure up to some preordained notion of perfection. The equation of feeling good with excessive weight gain, and the corollary assumption, looking good with health and thinness, is invidious.
The moralistic implication merely reinforces the much-revered commandment propagated by the diet, food, cosmetic surgery, pharmaceutical and media industries that represent bodies as being about “performance, fabrication and display” and that assume our bodies are sites for continuous upgrading. A culture which disowns bodies that stumble, hurt, decay and ultimately die provides ripe setting for the development of disordered body relationships and patterns of behaviour.
Open the pages of any newspaper or magazine and be ready for the cacophony of self-proclaimed experts touting the latest fitness fad, weight-loss programme, nutritional plan or fashion makeover. The problem here is the moral judgements surrounding weight and shape, ideas of fat and thin. There can be no peace, Orbach says, in the midst of such confusion: endeavours to transform personal biology and impose external “fixes” lead nowhere.
Rather the challenge lies in tuning into our own internal cues of hunger and satiety. Only then can we hope to regain trust in our bodies and hence, ourselves. So let’s shut our ears to the insistence that appearance dictate how we feel. Let’s ditch the spurious directives aimed at making us feel inadequate, telling us looking good is all.
It’s time to look within and be in our bodies, rather than mindlessly march to external commands.
Cristina Galvin is a freelance writer and social policy researcher