Only now that I am pregnant do I realise how much – and how routinely - women are discouraged to eat!

[SkaterGrrrrl]

I am pregnant and for the first time in my life - or rather, for the first time since I was about 10, I am being encouraged to eat. Relatives press a second helping on me: ?Go on ? have some more?. Female friends/ acquaintances encourage me to order cake rather than a salad or sandwich when we meet in a cafe: ?You?re allowed to! You?re eating for two!? and colleagues offer me the biscuit tin ?Make the most of it while you can!?

It has really hit me how throughout my adult life, I have never been encouraged to eat dessert or take seconds. It?s as if , by being pregnant, a temporary loophole has opened up on the lifelong strict cultural expectation on women to eat very little. (The terrible pressure on women and girls to diet is detailed better than this in The Beauty Myth and Fat is a Feminist Issue).

I am also beginning to realise why some women put on a lot of weight during pregnancy ? a friend of mine put on 55 lbs. Because for the first time ever we are allowed to eat, guilt free, ask for seconds and not be censured.

I think being forced to eat is just as common as being discouraged from eating. It seems that it's ok to voice an opinion about the way a woman looks and what you think she should be eating, regardless of whether you think she should be eating more or less. It's not ok to do the same to a man.

I don't eat lunch. I'm at uni 9-3 and I'm busy, I eat when I get home. Almost every day someone comments on my eating habits, says I need fattening up (I'm not skinny), offers me food and refuses to accept a polite refusal. These are not always people I know particularly well. Sometimes I have to be quite rude to get them to stop trying to feed me!

Oh god I cringe when my workmates tell me I'm being naughty (which they do regularly because I don't do faddy shite, I eat real food).

And that bloody club which incorporates Syns into its diet plans -it's not weightwatchers, it's another one, I don't know which - Syns FGS. They even use the language of morality. (Syns, for those of you blissfully untroubled by the knowledge of diet clubs, are high calorie treats which you are allowed to eat on your low fat/ low calorie/ low taste/ low joy diet to "reward" you for being "virtuous" for the rest of the week when you do one of these diets.

Kim - that 90% figure is after 5 years or something I think, can't remember exactly. Lots of people get really good results on Fat Fighter type clubs or whatever, and lose lots of weight initially. Then when they stop going to the club and eat normally again, they gradually (or in some cases suddenly) put back on all the weight they lost. So they then have to join up again.

It's a win win situation for the dieting clubs. I could rant about them for hours, they're a real bug bear of mine because I think they are horribly exploitative of women and encourage them to obsess about food. (This may also have something to do with the fact that I have a friend who goes who makes their special low fat recipes which she then serves when you go round for dinner and it's generally horrible and you have to pretend it's nice.)

It's no wonder that women are hardwired to see high-calorie food (or ), cough cough) as the answer to all life's problems is it?

Basil I admire your self-control in not twatting these people.

Ah, x-posted with Basil. I was referring to twatting your work colleagues. I feel your pain about the low-fat meals - every time we go to stay with my parents we get the cottage cheese, macaroni and sweetcorn frittata at least once. She sees it as one of her culinary triumphs (weeps).

What also gets my goat is women (especially older ones it seems) talking about how "good" they've been to stick to their diet or how "naughty" it would be to have a pudding. It's not a moral issue FFS! It sounds very infantile.

Urgh, I know, that's ridiculous language.

Can't say I've ever had people telling me to eat less, quite the contrary. For some reason people have always seemed to think I needed "fattening up" as though I was the Christmas turkey.

I think there may have been a thread on here at some point in which this thing of eating treats, over eating etc., was discussed. Or I may be imagining it, maybe it was a discussion somewhere else.

But anyway the gist of it, was that alcoholism, drug addiction, other self-destructive addictions, damage all the people around the person engaging in that behaviour. And they require some extra time and money to pursue.

Obsessive over eating, only damages the person who does it and costs no more than healthy eating (if you live in a food desert, it costs less). So you can carry on functioning as a good mother, wife, daughter, worker, if you binge eat. Sooner or later with most other addictions, you can't. Which may be one of the reasons, women choose the over-eating route to self-medication, rather than some of the other routes.

Makes you wonder what their plans are for you Samandi.

I hate this whole language of morality around women's eating, as well. You never get men's eating talked about so judgementally - the man who wants to 'get fit' isn't told he's been 'naughty'.

There's also the undercurrent that a woman who makes her own choices WRT food is being selfish ie she is considering her self rather than others, whether it's that she should control her eating so that her appearance is attractive to others, or that she should eat less so more food is available to other people, it's all part of the same thing: that women should never consider their own needs or wishes.

Yes, there is a great bit in Caitlin Moran's How To Be a Woman where she points out that carers who have issues tend to go for overeating rather than destructive addictions for the reason Basil mentions.

I actually despair at how the vocabulary of sin/bad behaviour has become recast around eating sweet things rather than genuine bad behaviour, eg cheating, dishonesty and nastiness. Even the concept of 'cheating' seems to have been recast in dieting terms - 'I'm supposed to be on a diet but I cheated on Monday by buying a Twix bar'. How on earth is that cheating?? Cheating implies dishonesty in a wider context, e.g. copying exam answers from the person next to you or fiddling your expenses. Aargh!

I think getting pregnant often changes women's attitudes to their bodies. It isn't really as much an issue of overeating attitudes being the opposite of undereating attitudes. Both come in part from social attitudes to women's bodies which can a woman feel rather at odds with her own body.

Pregnancy can lead many women to stop feeling that way, and the benefits of that continue afterwards.

" I do a bit of structural feminist analysis. So the 'who' is 'people who live in our patriarchal society'. It's culture. It's society. I don't buy into the neoliberal bullshit that we are all individuals in a vacuum and therefore locate issues with the individual."

Well said!

"Fortunately I'm able to ignore society "

Herein lies the ignorance and arrogance of privilege. Its easy to 'ignore society' if it hasn't punched you in the face repeatedly all your life and there were always a pair of supportive arms to run into. The smugness of privilege is absolutely nauseating.

Boarding school suggests a degree of privilege.

Well you've clearly had a very different experience to most young women and teenage girls kim147. I was groped and grabbed as a primary school child (this was in France, not that I imagine it would have been different in the UK) by boys who commented on my 'development' and then at an all girl school there was a lot of commentary on people's size/weight/shape and eating habits. Like I said, whichever way you were you couldn't win.

Oh, is Kim a man then?

Well no wonder you have a healthy relationship with food then! And there was me congratulating you. It's no big deal if you're a man tbh, of course you're not influenced by societal messages telling you that you have no right to eat and take up space, those messages aren't directed at you. That's why you don't feel any pressure from them!

Similarly, I've never felt any pressure whatsoever, to pretend I know about cars when I know nothing whatsoever about them. I have never felt the need to casually throw the word "gasket" into any conversation I'm having. I've also never felt the need to go to the gym and bulk up my muscle mass to compensate for having a small willy/ being bald/ having a minor disability/ being short.

But if men tell me they have, I'm not going to jeer at them for being weak-minded because they're influenced by the messages that are aimed at them, or deny that those messages exist just because no-one targets me with them.

I can see issues with some of the language used around food. On the other hand, on average (and with a relatively low 2nd moment or variance) men do need more food than women by virtue of being bigger and heavier, and a higher percentage of muscle. That does change a little in pregnancy and a lot more during breastfeeding.

It is well known by nutritionists that one reason a lot of women put on weight when they start living with a man is that they do tend to eat equally and it is clearly too much for the woman.

And a lot of the body issue/naughty food language that used to be the preserve of women is now becoming much more prevalent in men. "Naughty" foods, anorexia, exercise addiction etc. Not sure whether that is progress....

According to something I read recently pregnant women should not eat for two, they only need an extra 200 calories a day in the final three months of pregnancy and nothing extra in the other months.

I think that 'healthy eating' education in primary schools is contributing to eating disorders. Because what they actually mean by healthy eating is blanket advice that fat is bad, ignoring the fact that most children are not overweight and some of them are underweight.

No women don't need extra food for most of the pregnancy.

The reason many women over eat in pregnancy, is because it's the one life stage where they are allowed to without people being judgemental about it.

Although now, as SGB says, they've found loads of other things to be judgemental about - soft cheese, shellfish, wine, peanuts - pick somethign random and someone somewhere will have shown that if you eat it, the chances of you miscarrying are about a million times lower than if you get in a car, but someone will tell you not to eat it anyway (they haven't yet started telling pregnant women not to get in cars).

Eating for two is a complete myth but people still use it. Probably because it's the only time they can manage not to feel guilty.