As a teenager, my mother’s best friend looked down at her stomach and told her, in the frank way only Lithuanians can, that she needed to lose the “life ring” around her waist. When she was pregnant with my brother, she overheard two men discussing what a beautiful woman she would be if she wasn’t so fat. While pregnant with me, she was so scared to gain weight that she often fainted from not eating enough.
I’ve watched my mother struggle with her weight my whole life. It’s been years of religiously drinking apple cider vinegar, concocting potions made out of green tea, and swearing until she’s blue in the face that she hates pasta, pizza, and dumplings. When I was a child, I was a bony little thing with boundless energy. My mother would marvel at my tiny waist and how “perfect” I was. She’d relish the idea that I might be too thin. I remember her fascination with my small wrists, the way she loved how “doll-like” I was.
We moved from Lithuania to the UK when I was seven. Instead of running around with my friends all day, I was suddenly a foreigner in a big city and isolated from any sense of community. I stopped moving, started eating, and gained weight. I could feel my mother starting to panic as I got fatter and fatter. I had possessed this amazing quality that she so cherished, and it was slipping away. The first time I was put on a diet, I was only eight years old.
It wasn’t long before her feelings of losing control over the situation translated into her shopping habits. Our home became filled with strange fad foods. I probably spent at least half a decade drinking goat milk, and barely got a whiff of bread for years.
Culturally, Lithuanians are very direct, like most eastern Europeans you’ll meet. And patriarchal ideas about gender and looks were the norm to me growing up. Women are supposed to be thin and pretty, and men are supposed to be big and strong. I remember wondering why men were allowed to have big beer bellies while women had to try and shrink themselves into the smallest size possible. I was always told I was fat. I’m not sure it was even considered hurtful, but rather a matter of fact. After all, my own mother was greeted with a “You’re so fat! ” by her mother-in-law, my grandmother, every time she saw her.
“You’ve gained quite a lot of weight,” she told me. “Aren’t you worried that he’ll leave you?”
But the issue didn’t start or end with my background. Diet culture transcends most borders, and even generations. Growing up in the early 2000s in the UK meant I was entirely surrounded by diet culture. I wasn’t huge by any means. But kids would still bully me for being bigger, and I spent a large part of my teens looking at anorexia content online, hoping to feel some kind of inspiration to stop eating.
In my early twenties, I went through a period of channeling stress into exercise. I spent an hour at the gym each morning, and became obsessively distracted by a boy. Without even noticing, I lost weight. Crucially, I didn’t look different to myself in the mirror. I could fit into smaller clothes, but I still felt fat.
What did change is how people treated me. Men, even family friends, started acting creepy when talking to me. When my mother would complain about her weight and I’d scoff, she’d dismiss my opinion as irrelevant because I’d recently “become beautiful.” At university, an acquaintance came up to me to tell me I had “made it” because I had “lost weight and gained a boyfriend.”
Then, a couple of years later, I experienced a period of extremely rapid weight gain. I had decided to move abroad for a year, and because I was worried about having easy access to birth control pills, I got a contraceptive implant. Friends had waxed lyrical for years about the fact that they magically didn’t have to go through periods anymore, without any of the side effects of the pill.
Sometimes, you learn the hard way that there isn’t a one-size-fits all approach. I developed a hunger that, in retrospect, should have been more alarming. Apparently, an entire tub of hummus is not a normal daily snack. My body expanded so quickly that I got stretch marks around my stomach. On top of this, I felt incredibly anxious and depressed, and would often wake up in the middle of the night, unable to breathe as the beginnings of a panic attack would come out of nowhere. I was lucky because, by this point, the boy I had been obsessed with during my bout of weight loss was now my longterm partner, and was there to support me.
But when my mother came to visit, the disappointment was clear. History was repeating itself, and her perfect girl was expanding. And this time her daughter had more to lose, because she had a boyfriend who could reject her. Men are the ultimate prize, after all.
After one too many glasses of wine, my mother turned to me and said, “You know, don’t take this the wrong way, but aren’t you worried?” It wasn’t immediately clear to me what I should be worried about. She clarified: “You’ve gained quite a lot of weight. Aren’t you worried that he’ll leave you? There is a beauty standard; don’t you think you need to fit it?”
Because of the wine, and because we’d probably been talking around this conversation my whole life, the pain of what she said didn’t hit me until much later. I reassured her that I was confident he loved me regardless of my size. This was so entirely unfathomable to my mother that she told me that he must be a “feeder” and might be trying to “fatten me up.”
I think my mother’s intention has been to try and protect me from the pain and shame she has felt her whole life about the way she looks. It’s a burden that has been piled on to her by her peers, her family, and through the media she has consumed across two very different countries. She just wanted me to have an easier life.
For me, diet culture has become an intergenerational curse. My mother has been traumatized by living in fear of “not being the right size.” And I’ve grown up bearing the brunt of her trauma, alongside the pressure to develop my own. It’s a cycle we won’t break unless we actively acknowledge how much it has shaped us all.
