The shaped they never showed us

“You’re gonna be just like me, you will have this stomach too”

I’m not sure if my mom actually said it, or if I concluded that I will be like her - have a big belly.

However, my mom was not the one who made me dislike my belly. Looking back now, I think my mom was and still is body neutral - while she is aware that her body is not ideal shape she doesn’t have too many thoughts about it - it is just a body, and she always, like all the Balkan women, to be clean and presentable - look as nice as she for that situation.

And while I inherited her body type, I did not inherit that mindset. Nope, I focused on not having a big stomach, and I joke now (it’s really not a joke) that focusing on what you don’t want invites it, because the human mind doesn’t compute negatives.

The truth is, none of this was my idea, and I might have really turned body neutral too, but I was swimming in the different waters of time then my mother, and I was shaped by it.

As it might be the case for you too, it is not just one thing that flips the switch from living in a body to being dissatisfied, dare I say hate your body, and for us who are old enough to remember the 90’s, we know that there were plenty of things that could flip the switch.

I say it’s Brittney and Christina’s fault, but it is not just them - every female in the public eye was thin, and they all showed off their flat, flat bellies. Just seeing that on a daily is enough, but that is not all that we saw. The fashion industry of that time is famous for a heroin chic look - you know, you look like you only take drugs! Clothing that was made, marketed and sold was all for a thin woman with a flat stomach.

I always tell this story because I remember it so well - I am not sure if it was 1st time but it was not the last time for sure, but us girls, during our 15 minutes break would create a makeshift circle and talk about which celebrity was attractive, what is meant to be attractive, who was fat, how to lose weight. It was the obsession and preoccupation of 5th and 6th grade. I think it was those circles that really got to me. I was a bit of a tomboy and usually didn’t care for this stuff so I sat there and absorbed everything, making my own interpretations about my own body. Some of the conclusions I made then I was still believing 20 years later. We all do that - another feature of the brain - make a conclusion once and don’t ever examine it because that would require additional energy and brains are all about preserving energy.

The 90s was not a good time for anyone and I don’t know many women who have escaped untouched by this period in history, but we apple shaped women really got the thick end of the stick.

I don’t know how it was for you, but other than my mom, and some other “older” women, I really didn’t know anyone else who carried their fat on their belly. There definitely was nobody in the media who looked like me for a really long time. Instead, the tiniest amount of abdominal fat was criticised very harshly and very publicly. It was like getting slapped and being told “do not look like her”.

Looking back now, I can see that our generation was not really satisfied with anything, not just the belly. I would say, we are the kids of the war, but while Balkan did have war, most of the world didn’t. I feel like we really lost that separation between fantasy and reality, us and them. We wanted to, and did our darndest, to look like them - the women in the lime light - not realising that we were simply being sold an image that was unachievable for a woman who’s job was not to achieve it.

But we tried our darndest to get them, because how could we ever allow ourselves to look so wrong?