From childhood, women are trained to restrict their appetite. And there’s a huge, hidden, cognitive price to pay for it

Photo by Constantine Manos/Magnum Photos

is a board-certified OB-GYN and Menopause Society certified practitioner, and the founder of Selfority menopause education platform. She lives in Arkansas, United States.

Edited byPam Weintraub

Here is something we have never quite said out loud: for a significant portion of the world’s women, hunger is not a temporary state. It is a cognitive condition. It flows beneath everything: the meeting, the conversation, the stream of thought that almost ran its course before something more insistent pulled it back. For many of us, the state of hunger was present since we were old enough to understand that our bodies were under review.

I was sitting beside a swimming pool that summer, the one before middle school started, trying to follow a conversation I kept losing. I had decided, with the particular certainty children sometimes develop about the rules of the world they are entering, that I would eat as little as possible before sixth grade. The plan involved a sleeve of SnackWell’s cookies per day: fat-free, engineered to taste like cardboard, manufactured specifically for women and girls who had been told that fat was the enemy and desire was something to be managed rather than answered. The SnackWell’s cookie was itself a cultural artefact, a product designed to help women comply with an instruction they had already internalised. It did not quiet the hunger, because hunger is not a preference. It is biology doing what biology does when a body is not fed, sending signals that push everything else aside.

The author (second from left) aged 11

During the day, we swam, lay on the concrete, and talked about the coming year. My attention kept sliding away from the conversation. A thought would begin and dissolve into the same insistent loop: how long until dinner, how little I could manage when it arrived, whether anyone had noticed what my body was doing without my permission. I remember listening to a teammate tell a long story and realising I had not heard most of it. Something louder had taken the space the story needed.

By the end of the week, my swimsuit hung loose at the shoulders. On the first day back at school, a friend’s mother stopped at the sight of me, looked me over the way you assess a renovation that has come out well, and said I had a ‘new figure’. She said it warmly, the way adults hand children gifts. An adult woman looked at my starved child’s body and offered approval as a kindness.

I took it, absorbing the rules of the game before I could even name them: something had been taken from me, and something had been returned. The week spent partially elsewhere, the conversations half-heard, were just the labour required to keep my body in line.

This was not limited to one childhood, or one decade. A male politician can change his tie and he is ready for the cameras. A female politician faces what has commonly been named the hair, husband and hemline problem: the documented pattern by which media coverage assesses a woman’s outfit, weight and hairstyle before arriving at her policy positions, if it arrives there at all. Across more than 750,000 media stories, researchers found that women in politics receive more appearance coverage than their male counterparts, and that any coverage of a woman’s appearance, even flattering coverage, diminishes voter perception of her competence. You can be praised for looking the part and penalised for it in the same news cycle. The system is working exactly as designed.

The following year, my science class came right after lunch. I would sit at my desk while my stomach made sounds I was certain carried across the room, and spend the period in private humiliation. Every growl felt like exposure, evidence that my body was announcing what I had worked to conceal, that I was not sufficiently disciplined to mute its signals. The lesson moved forward without me. What I experienced as personal failure was something more specific: a body doing exactly what underfed bodies do, sending urgent signals that evolution designed to override competing demands. The hunger did not interrupt my thinking because I was weak. It interrupted my thinking because that is what hunger is built to do. What I was learning, without anyone naming it for me, was how to carry an unresolved argument with my own body into every room I entered for the rest of my life. Eventually, the hum of it became part of the background, the way you stop hearing a refrigerator running in the next room, or a fluorescent light overhead, not because the sound has stopped, but because it has become ambient, and ambient becomes invisible, and invisible becomes what you mistake for yourself.

The researchers documented something subtler and more revealing: the slow colonisation of thought by hunger

In 2009, the model Kate Moss was asked in an interview if she had any mantras. ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,’ she said. Nearly a decade later, she called it a jingle, a thing her roommate used to say, taken out of context. Yet she’d finally said out loud what the culture had been saying for decades,........

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