Wellbeing Thread - who's in?

[AnonWasAWoman]

This is a sort of ?gap in the market? thread really, forgive the rotten title. I was thinking about women and wellbeing and a possible feminist slant on what I feel the beauty industry has colonised.

If I try to find a threads, or a magazine articles, about women?s wellbeing and health I can guarantee half of them will be written in what comes across to me as doublethink: ?you need to feel good about your body, so first you must wage war upon it for a woman?s body is naturally hideously ugly!?. This just makes me sad. So do diluted versions ? the kind of discussions or groups where participants begin with a focus on health, but gradually shift to ?what can you do to look good?, which ? well, just makes me feel ugly if I don?t do those things (And, ah, angry that some people think women should have to!).

It really worries me how, as women, health and beauty are constantly conflated, and there?s an ever-increasing list of treatments that begin as luxurious pampering, then quickly come to be essential ?maintenance? or even basic ?hygiene?. It?s taken that a sign of healthy self-confidence and body confidence is to buy into these ideas about what to do with our time and money and bodies. I?m sure there?s a spectrum of views among feminists as to what we feel is right for us and what?s not, and I don?t want to get into that because I think it?s the least interesting bit of the debate. So I?m not trying to start yet another ?do you wax your fanjo fur? thread ? interesting as they are ?!

I am sure there is a way to resist gendered body care/products without in any way denigrating or ignoring the female body. I bet some of you are brilliant at this and the Resisting Femininity threads were great for showing me the way. But I also want to replace the things I?m resisting, not just get rid of all focus on my body. My mum can as close as can be to this ? everything ?gendered? for women?s bodies, from women?s anti-perspirant, to shaving equipment, to perfume and cosmetics, came under the same heading of ?disgusting things?. In retrospect I find this quite disturbing and not remotely feminist. I am sure I would have been a happier and better-adjusted teenager if I?d not had to sneak off to buy deodorant and nick my dad?s used disposables (I didn?t know any better). If as an adult woman I want to do without any of this stuff, that?s fine ? but I certainly don?t want to feel it?s the only option, or that being a feminist has to mean focusing on the mind and forgetting about the body.

So what I would like to do is to try to hammer out a sense of what you do (if anything) to replace or contrast with what we?re offered by society in terms of caring for your body. So I thought maybe it?d be nice to have a sort of wellbeing thread on here, where we can do all the healthy stuff you hope for on a ?diet? thread (and don?t IME get), and we can do all the ?taking time for myself? stuff that the beauty industry has colonised and distorted, but we can also maybe chat about how to feel better about our bodies, instead of how to make them look better.

So, here?s my list (some, obviously, drawn from a certain S&B thread!). They?re what I?ll hope to do, not what I promise to do!

• I?m going to try to go for a walk at least twice a week, even if it?s just half an hour. And I?m going to take my camera so I don?t end up thinking about work the whole time!
• I?m going to try to eat two different kinds of fruit/veg (I get stuck on apples galore)
• I?ll try to cut my coffee intake
• I?ll try to take 15 minutes before I go to bed to think about something that is not work, or chatting on MN (!), or planning food shopping or whatever
• I?m going to try to make proper breakfast every day
• Go to bed early one night per week
• Ration my (awful) snickers habit! I have eaten three snickers ice-cream bars this morning and it is Not good.
• (You can laugh here) I?m going to do some pelvic floor exercises every week ? I always forget and I imagine I?ll be glad of them later on!

Please add in suggestions if you have them or say if you think I ought to change my mind about any of these.

Honey?! Doesn't sugar suck moisture?

I'll try anything though.

I'm so sorry your DD is not sleeping ... I'll send sleepy thoughts your way. As for your DH ... nudge the noisy sod!

Hope you get some sleep soon.

i need some wellbeing. i'm on the third day of a non stop headache. most annoying.

could it be because i'm losing weight finally at the minute? or did i dream a link?

I don't know re honey :o it's just something I read yonks ago and I was hoping to use you as my test subject

Saf that's rubbish :( neck out? Have a hot bath, lots of water and a big alcoholic drink.

Looks like the move is on to shanghai. I've only seen really rubbish housing or stuff that is wildly out of budget. Rather dispiriting. Saw somewhere with an amazing garden to day That is probably ideal But still two more days of house hunting to go.

I was just wondering how everyone was getting on!

Saf, are you drinking enough? Or is it caffeine withdrawing? Those two just spring to mind. If you are headachy and losing weight it could be that you need to eat something you're missing I guess. Or going off sugar - apparently - can make you headachy though I've never had it myself.

I hope it feels better soon anyhow.

I have to admit that aside from doing RTN at the weekend, which was brilliant and got me feeling great, I have been being a bit rubbish lately. I'd been getting out for lots of walks, and eating lots of fruit and veg, and so on. And yesterday for reasons I cannot fathom I absent-mindedly ate my way through about 5 snicker icecreams and a slice of cake, then wondered why I was feeling peculiar.

The one good thing it did was convince me that too much sugar really does make me feel shit, it's not just the voices of my anti-feminist demons trying to win me back to policing what I eat.

I am still walking more than I ever would in November if I weren't on here, and it is great. I have flat shoes for walking in but I think, if DH gets a Christmas bonus, something on my list will be a pair of nice flat shoes for smart - this will be a new thing for me as I'm so dependent on my heels that my mates don't actually realize I'm 5'5 and think I'm tall. Not so.

I am quite chuffed about that one because it's one of the things I've always felt a bit conflicted about, liking heels and feminism, and I think it might the problem is just neatly resolving itself in my mind. Either that or I'm just growing up.

I was wondering how the more spiritual/emotional stuff people were doing is going? I think we had:

• learning a language
• going and chatting to other people a the school gate
• reading books by women (from SGM's thread)
• browsing quilt patterns to wind down at the end of the day
• aaaand I've forgotten the ones I resolved to do because I have failed utterly to do them! Except I have managed to not plan essays/meals while I'm out walking and that counts.

Oh wow ... a garden in Shanghai.

It sounds very exciting comrade (I've just realized your initials are CJ, which gives me an entirely different, West Wing persona for you ...)

Best of luck with the house hunting.

i'm doing well on school gate stuff actually - though it wasn't one of my goals. chatting to people and feeling more ok about being me and not much like the rest of the demographic there. and actually realising the differences aren't that great. it's mainly just being single and still sort of.... i don't know, experimenting with life rather than being comfy in my rut. but you know everyone is a bit quirky aren't they? no matter how normal they appear on the surface and i like penetrating the surfaces of these seemingly very straight people and finding their kinks. that sound bizarre i know i want to subvert the schoolgate mums

good luck househunting jing.

i perhaps am having less caffeine and less sugar actually! could be that. but i'm drinking coffee as we speak so you'd think if it was that it would resolve. maybe a bit stressed about an accumulation of minor things all coming at once - as in nothing that serious but all on top of each other is maybe making me a bit stressy/tense. that can give you a headache i guess.

last night at the school gates sheltered under teh one bit of shelter in the rain i was chatting to a couple of married women and asking them whether they'd recommend a husband and we were joking away about how it would be nice to have one that went in a little box at the end of the bed so we could take them out when we wanted them, then extending the magic box plan to small children and animals you needed a break from etc.

was nice to get under the all very proper and a good mummy honest masks.

Yes, I love how when you get chatting to people you realize there's not so much difference really. I used to feel very shy and did that old thing of trying to go talk to the most awkward, shy-looking other person in the room, and it makes you realize we're all pretty similar. Everyone has something they reckon makes them different and makes them struggle to make friends or be understood, but it's all quite little things really.

I ought to be better at chatting to people in my local area but at the moment feeling less inclined ... I got a call from the landlady going on about did we want to come round for a drink and a nice chat? By which she means, no, fat chance of a rent reduction for the month without hot water and by the way, can I remind you I live in a really posh house and you live in a tiny flat round the corner? Grrr.

The thing is you see, I can't have a moan to my neighbours as they're her neighbours too!

Btw, I did love it when I first came on here, and instead of all the 'good mummy mask' it was all 'oh, shite, I'm a terrible mum I just dropped the baby' - 'oh, first child is it? We've all done that!'.

yep. it's very good for that i'd imagine. would have been nice to have been on here when ds was a baby. or not. unsure on that one

bugger to a month without hot water

I just spluttered my coffee at that ... I initially read hot water as a euphemism for summat else.

But, ahem, yes. It was irritating.

oh gosh - you're on your month off didn't see the overlap when i wrote that.

LRD:Sasha Baron Cohen. I have been grrrring for days. oh that genius is extreme male brain stuff is such fantasy. Yes XY chromosomes means a greater likelihood of mutation than women with duplicate XX chromosomes but (1) mutation is the cause of more genetic illnesses in men than women. Does SBC think genetic illness is the main extreme male quality, because it is more prevalent than genius? (2) the rare mutations which may relate to genius are not relevant to the vast majority of the male population who don?t have them, like most women.

Also latest neurological research says that intelligence and other characteristics are much less fixed than previously thought. The link I posted earlier was about this topic. The whole concept of "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man" is not correct. Brains have greater lifelong plasticity than previously thought.

I think the historical view of you are born with certain talents is about hierarchy, control and writing people off so society does not feel bound to assist. It is great that science says there is always potential in all of us.

Really enjoyed reading all the posts but a client is calling in 1 mins?. Then going to pilates....

Well being activities for this week:

1 cycle ride in my lounge watching tv
1 run
1 xmas shopping visit by bike. i can thoroughly recommend it - it helps to avoid the crowds & made the commercial fest easier to comply with
1 pilates class

drinking much less than i normally do in the run up to xmas (but not fri or sat night ). in the past when having a fitness campaign, i have focussed on needing to lose weight, get fit for appearance reasons, which does not work because i don?t actually care enough about those things.

But when feminism reminds me that that not caring about those things is GOOD, i CAN look after my actual well being, because I am doing it for sensible reasons: to feel healthy in mind and body.

oh i think i have found a source of statues for the feminist spa: the only thing is we have to break into the RA's Degas exhibition and liberate the statues of ballet dancers from 200 years ago who had far more normal, healthy looking bodies than today?s ballet dancers or unrealistic idealised female forms. they were 'allowed' to have stomachs and strong thighs and arms and body fat.

i suspect Degas treatment of the women was horrible so relocation of their statues to the fem spa would be fitting.

dammit are we not allowed arms now? i missed that announcement - must be because i never read magazines

sounds like reasonable goals thereal. good luck with it.

hmm goals....

1. dog walk every morning after school drop off (or every weekday morning bar 1 more realistically)
2. try and arrange a date with someone else so i don't get too fixated on fitboy who i suspect is being a bit playerish about things ( iknow this doesn't sound to feministy or wellbeing but it is and i'm re-establishing that i am a woman as well as a parent and it's ok if i want to have a sex life or at least to entertain the idea of such and i don't have to be my best clothes size/hairstyle etc to do it confidently - date i mean)
3. meditate and do self compassion exercises that i've been neglecting even though i know that it helps me
4. tell someone in real life who sees me regularly that i am having to go through a meds change over which could be pretty rocky so that they can keep an eye out for me. hate doing the get help thing but will force myself to open up to someone and just give them the skeleton facts and a clue of what to watch out for

Tilly - thanks for the info on Baron-Cohen. The more I hear the more I think 'idiot'!

You know, I had not thought of Degas and the ballerinas but now you say it, I can see you're right. And there was an article in the paper by a ballet danger saying she needed to speak out even if it damaged her career, because so many of her colleagues were anorexic or bulemic and some had actually put their bodies through so much they couldn't have children. It was awful. Putting that together with what you said about the ideal shape changing is interesting because I suspect most people (me, certainly) would have assumed ballet dancers were always thin. Though it's like so many other things - FFS, if the art has always been this way, why should it not change now?!

SaF - but it is feministy!

I'm thinking of you with the meds change - what a pain, I hope it works well after the rocky patch.

Sigh.

I went to the anti-porn conference on Saturday and was all fired up about it, had a brilliant day learning loads and chatting to people. But it really hit me over the last day or so. It was pretty graphic and hard-hitting and just, well, sad. I'm feeling a bit down about it now. It just feels as if there's so much hatred of women, so deeply ingrained into the power structure and the economy, and even when you go to a conference where everyone has come together to work out how to survive under all of this and how to come back from it ... there's still at least one person in the audience saying 'but the problem is feminists being too aggressive'.

Sorry, not a very hopeful post but I hope it's ok to make it here ... it's just getting to me and it's one of those things about getting into feminism, sometimes it does make you feel rotten because of thte things you can't un-see, doesn't it?

Any thoughts/solutions?

Just posting to say hi. I'm still reading but rl is getting in the way at the moment. All is well, just busy. :)

I hope it is busy but happy, then.

yep lrd.

hope it's productive comrade.

Right, baby is asleep so a quick post to let you know what's going on and to ask for your thoughts.

DH is being moved to Shanghai by the new Asia CEO. Nothing to be done about it, we're going. Our lease is up on March 20th here, I go to the UK on Thursday, back on the 4th then 8 days later go to Aus until Feb 20th. So I'll have one month once I'm back to say goodbye to Beijing and get ready to move.

Spent the last week in Shanghai house hunting and have found something absolutely perfect apart from the fact that it is bloody miles out of town. It's the London equivalent of living in, I don't know, Sevenoaks but working in Parliament. So it will take 40 minutes in the car in good traffic to get in to town. (LRD we'll be about 15 minutes west of Hong Qiao airport) We will have a driver so no problems there. There are some things around the area like coffee shops etc but not anything I could walk to as it's all huge gated communities.

The problem is that I'm really worried about going out there and being the only young mum and that I'll be written off (as happened when I first got to Beijing) as not worth knowing because of my age. My friends who live in Shanghai live in the city proper. The thing is we can't get a house for our budget in the city and I just can't face going back to apartment living. Not with a dog and baby.

I know this is a trivial issue to a degree but I'm concerned about my mental health going out there. I don't do well if I'm bored and lonely.

DH says we should go for a year and then move in to the city if we hate it. I'm ok with that and we've put an offer on the lovely house but... well, I'm worried.

Anyway, can't believe I'm coming back to the UK on Thurs with DD. Going to see my Dad and step mother first then my mum & step dad. Worried about seeing my dad and stepmother too as it's only just now that I'm rebuilding my relationship with my dad after my parents divorce and marriage to step mother. Step mother was an evil cow and Dad took her side in everything. I'm also working through my feelings over my dad since I found out that he was physically abusive to my mother in their last two years of marriage. Really don't know how to deal with this. On the one hand he's my dad and I want a relationship with him. On the other I just don't feel I should condone what he did.

Mum also had a breakdown about 3 years ago and she is just not the person she was. My feisty mum has been swapped with this unsure, worried person and it's very difficult.

So a fair bit on my mind at the moment plus we're keeping DD up until 10pm and then letter her sleep in until 10 to get her ready for the 8 hour time difference. It's been great actually because she has been able to play and hang out with DH in the evenings.

:o What happened to "this will just be a quick post"?

If that all sounds too doom and gloom, I'm honestly ok, just a lot bubbling about in my mind :)

Wow, now wonder you've got a lot on your mind!

I hate moving at the best of times, it's meant to be up there as one of the most stressful things you do.

You're about my age, aren't you? 20s? I will be sending you supportive thoughts on that front - it is much easier for the partner who's working outside the home because you have that ready-made group of people to talk to. I don't think it is trivial TBH. But I don't know enough (read: anything!) about the culture so I don't know what suggestions to make ... besides which I bet you will have already thought of them. would your DH be up for a budget for lots of trips into the middle of Shanghai for the first few weeks so you don't have to worry about being isolated just then and can plan some time with your friends in the few weeks after the move so you know you have something fixed you will do? I don't know if that works but for me, when I'm getting isolated I always need to remind myself to get out there, and the trips might be worth it for the sake of your mental health?

I wish we could just be there and pop round to see you - not that that helps!

Best of luck with your mum and dad. One thing is, you know, you're not 'condoning' what he did at all - you weren't before, when you didn't know it had happened, and you're not now. There's no reason why you have to change your behaviour to show him his was wrong (if that makes sense). But that sounds really tough - especially with your mum. I bet she will be so happy to see your baby and hear all about her though.

I am thinking of you and I hope everything goes ok.

ok. honest question - which is worse:

1. being in an apartment with a child and dog but being close to friends and things to do and happy with your location
2. being in a nice house but feeling really isolated, bored and potentially depressed?

worst comes to worst you pay a dog walker to take the dog out twice a day and you find a lovely park nearby for your garden substitute.

i know which i'd go for i think but what about you? what puts you off of the apartment?

the most beautiful house in the world can end up a cage btw if it isolates you from all the things and people that bring that daily stream of pleasure and connection into your life.