Dieting has made me realise just how fucked up the media is
I have a BMI of 19. And I still feel too large
Ilook in the mirror and try to blink back tears. You can see my ribs and my pelvis edge, but I’m deeply unhappy with my stomach, thighs and arms. I punish myself harder and harder each day for not looking slim enough. When I weigh myself, if it goes up by a pound overnight, I have anxiety. The worst part? I know I’m unwell.

I’ll give you some figures just so you have a clue how stupid this is. I’m 5ft 6 (1.68cm), 8st 13 (125lb), and my measurements are 34,24,34 inches (86,61,86cm). My BMI is on the low end of normal. I wear a UK8 (US6). No doctor would tell me to eat less. No one looks at me and tells me I’m overweight. But the psychological drive to get smaller and smaller haunts every single action I take.
This isn’t easy to talk about because society tells us only ‘real’ anorexic women- women who are dangerously thin- have a right to talk about their anxiety around food. As a ‘healthy weight’ woman, the idea that I could be ill seems like I’m whinging. It’s also hard to admit because I know my friends and family get upset with me over this. There will also be people who will roll their eyes and tell me just to eat healthily and exercise. What they don’t get is that for me, food and weight are obsessions. I know how many calories are in a teaspoonful of marmite. I feel the most intense guilt at eating fat or even worse, carbohydrate. I know my metabolic rate, my BMR, and I have nightmares about eating pizza. It takes me months to get out of phases of deep starvation.
I went shopping with my sister recently. She is incredibly lucky to have the model body. I remember seeing myself next to her in a shop mirror and feeling complete and utter self loathing. See, this is what irritates me: my mood is dependent on how ‘fat’ I am feeling. Even seeing a lot of thin women in the street makes me anxious and self conscious. My body is something to persecute. In my head, I am bulbous, huge, a good foot wider than my friends in photographs. Last time I had an episode, I got so ill my father forced me to sit in front of him and finish a whole plate of food. It took me twenty minutes and a lot of tears.
So why do I have such a weird view of my body? I guess it is hard for me to accept I am not ‘fat’ but a different shape to Gigi Hadid, my sister and Kate Moss. Even my rib size is larger than theirs. I have broad shoulders. My pelvis sticks out further than their own shoulders. I am not 6ft 2. I will never, ever be able to sustain a 7st weight because I need more calories just to survive.
I suppose my childhood and teenhood didn’t help: I always had a slim family and as the child who loved food, I was regularly singled out as the fat kid. On days out I wouldn’t be allowed treats and my mother would regularly get extremely angry at me if she thought I’d gained weight. I remember sobbing at the swimming pool as a 13 year old because my mother had screamed at me in front of everyone about my stomach. You are fat, Madelaine, she would scream. You are making yourself ill. Do you want to die of diabetes? I’m going to call school and tell them not to give you dessert! Look at you! Disgusting! I’m ashamed! My very slim (two of my siblings have had some level of eating disorder) sisters would look on, eating chips as I would blink back tears in my large jumper, forced to watch in shame. The final straw was when my mother bought me an XXL sports kit for school to humiliate me and I had to tie my shorts up with hair ties (I was a medium). When I was sexually bullied at secondary school I just gave up eating lunch all together to avoid interaction with my abusers.
But that was years ago. I have a much better relationship with my mother and have since learnt that she also struggled with her weight. So what’s brought it back since I’ve been at university?
I see so many images of small hipped, thin and photoshopped women that it sometimes it distorts my entire body into a wobbling, grotesque mass. What kind of fucked up society thinks that an 8st 13 woman is too overweight to be sexy? What kind of world are we living in when I, and so many women, are driven into despair and self harm (through starvation) because they are not underweight? Some women are naturally thin and that’s great, good for them. But telling an average bodied woman she is un-ideal is kind of sick. Health should always be the maxim of the day. Our relationship with beauty is challenging to say the least. And I am saying that as a woman who struggles to eat 800cl a day without intense guilt.
We live in a world of clean eating (nutritional bullshit, largely), raw veganism (recipe for malnutrition if done badly), photoshopped health gurus, instagram falsity and fad extreme exercising. Newsflash: Humans are not designed to work out for 8 hours in a gym and then eat a bowl of kale and sesame seeds. If you have to do that, you aren’t an ideal healthy superwoman, you are driving yourself to a fast path of infertility, anorexia and angina (which is fucking horrible, trust me). I’m angry that we teach girls as young as 13 that fat and carbs are bad. No food is bad. Quantity is bad. You don’t need to go to the gym or be ripped to look beautiful. You don’t need to be muscular or toned. You don’t need to be beach body ready. None of these are as important as your health.
And let me tell you this- it’s all fake anyway. How do I know? Because I know the angles they use to look thinner, I know how to lose water weight before a shoot, I know how to pose with food you have no intention of eating and I know what it’s like to think you are going to die because you wake up feeling intense organ pain through a lack of vitamins and calories.
I have the same measurements as Greta Garbo.
And I’m still not ‘good’ enough for modern body standards.
Please girls: your health is more important than some fake photoshopped media standard. Don’t become as crazy as me.

