Revised A Woman’s Relationship with Food

Society expects women to uphold impossible standards, especially in regards to our bodies. Although our expectations are currently shifting away from the idea that women need to be impossibly thin, women still feel pressure to be just thin enough while also being curvy in the right places. This causes women to have a love-hate relationship with food: many women love to eat, like me, but the pressure to obtain this perfect body that resembles a model generates loads of stress about what to eat, what not to eat, and how much to eat. This causes any woman, ranging from girls in their tween years to adults, to try crazy diet trends, to do crazy workout trends, and to create unhealthy eating habits that could cause permanent harm, physically and mentally.

Being a gymnast for nine years, I never really thought about what I ate since I worked out for four hours a day. Even though my friends would fret about what they consumed, I never concerned myself with the idea for too long since I knew I would be back in the gym soon. However, this changed once I quit after ninth grade. After I quit, I regularly heard the saying that gymnasts are the athletes that always gain the most weight after they finish their careers from trainers at my school, ex-gymnasts, and my ex-coaches. Not only did my mom constantly remind me to be careful what I ate, but also I suddenly became aware of how much my friends would eat during lunch at school or when we would go out to for dinner or dessert. This sudden shift in my life finally made my cognizant of what the rest of the non-gymnast women population thinks and feels in regards to food. I finally understood the hate part of a woman’s love-hate relationship with food.  

Original Posts: http://bcalkins2020.blogspot.com/2016/09/a-womans-relationship-with-food.html  and http://bcalkins2020.blogspot.com/2016/10/revised-blog-post-on-womans.html