It’s New Year’s, and there are ever more diet ads on the teevee, radio, the underground, on giant fucking billboards which spread out across the city… This isn’t a phenomenon specific to the New Year, however. Every day of every year, we are encouraged to loathe our bodies. We’re not thin enough. We’re not curvy enough. We’re not the way we should be. Are we healthy? Are we not even trying to be healthy? Deity help us, you could at least try to be healthy.
Well, in keeping with the theme of yesterday’s post: Fuck that shit.
We don’t owe it to anybody to be a certain shape. We don’t owe it to anybody to be healthy. These bodies are our bodies, and we get to choose what to do with them.
And to help us all along with putting these ridiculous and harmful messages out of our brain, Sui Solitaire (of everything I’ve ever loved ever…I don’t think Sui’s courses and ebooks have been out of my inbox since she started ‘em) has released The Thing about Thin
The Thing about Thin book cover
I’ll give you the short version and say; It’s brilliant. It burns with a raw honesty. It inspires with a burning passion. It is, to quote the author fucking liberating. And it is about more than eating disorders.
Here’s the long version: In a way, it’s not about eating disorders at all. The same way that eating disorders are rarely about food, The Thing about Thin takes this idea one step furthers and tells us that we are being prevented, by our fear of being the wrong shape, from realising our true potential. The questions posed ask us: Why. Why do we crave ‘thinness’? What we will achieve from ‘being thin’? Is it happiness? Is it loving others? Can we do that…now? And Sui answers herself; We can do that now. But we need to free up our time. Instead of spending every spare (and not-so-spare) moment worrying about what we eat, what sizes we are, how our bodies are wrong, we can use this time to dream. We can use this time to do all the things that we’re putting off, because we’re not the right shape to do them yet.
Sui comes from a background of disordered eating, and she tells her tale of relapse and recovery over and over in this book. Parts of it were so perfectly spot-on for me, it felt as though she had read my mind (I haven’t ruled this out) and written out how I felt in ways I couldn’t express yet. I moved from restriction, from the ages of 16 to 22, to binging, around the age of…now. I’m not recovered, I don’t know if I ever will be. But with Sui’s words, I think I’m on the road to recovery. This book makes heavy the point that it is a journey, and one which we learn through. Parts of the journey we repeat, and that’s okay.
If you’re still reading this review, that’s okay too, but I find it difficult to believe that you haven’t skipped on over there and laid down some cold hard e-cash for this amazing book. It’s $23 (£15, give or take), but you can get $5 (£3.26) off using the code BULLPUCKY which is valid up until the end of January, which makes it $18 (£11.74)!
