Unfortunately, this industry has not been left untouched by the nauseating consequences of diet culture and the diet industry. Just like athletes, actors and models we are constantly looked at and inevitably judged. We are constantly in the public eye and of course that makes us the perfect victims for body judgement and shaming. We can never be perfect, we’re always either too slim or too curvy. People often don’t care to ask themselves what might be going on in a person’s life, but somehow, they care about what their body looks like. Having healed from the diet culture oppression, I thought that this subject would no longer trigger me until I realised that this toxic diet culture inspired behaviour is all around me. Diet culture is so ingrained into our being and everyday life that it seems to have seamlessly and obnoxiously found its way into so many of our thoughts, comments and habits. Something that has triggered me so badly before has now transformed into concern for the wellbeing of our art and the brilliant people and artists in our industry. It turns out that most of us are consumed to different degrees by these thoughts and obsessions about our bodies and what we eat, whether secretly or openly. If before I would have drowned in all the constant diet and body obsessed comments, silently screaming for help, this time I felt called to not just speak up and raise awareness, but to protest against the perpetrator who is getting in the way of our art. 

Dear reader, I don’t know what your journey with food and your body image is, but if you are in some way angry at the diet industry and diet culture, I encourage you to read on, as this article is about restoring our relationship with our body and finding food freedom. Let me be your diet culture rebel best friend and allow me to hold a space for you as you read on, as this might be a triggering read but one which I hope with my whole heart, might ignite a revolution against diet culture and lead to unconditional self-love and body acceptance.

You might be wondering, why does she care so much about all this dieting stuff… I will tell you, because it takes one unhealed and unaware person to create irreparable damage to a person’s relationship with food and their body. This is a very vulnerable and personal subject and I care because I don’t want you to suffer the way I did with no one to talk to or find solace in. I want you to experience life to the full without constantly obsessing about your body and your weight. I know what it feels like to be trapped by diet culture and what it feels like to be free. The path looks narrow and long but I will be there by your side to remind you why you’re doing it and that by choosing freedom from diet culture, you choose happiness. By choosing happiness, you choose life and by choosing life you choose the creation of memories, emotions and experiences that you will then sing about. 

Let me remind you that when you will be eighty years old, you’re not going to say to yourself, “I wish I hadn’t eaten that stupid ice cream with the girls in the summer of 2020”, what you will say is “I wish I wasn’t so obsessed about the way I looked and about what I ate when I was younger. I missed out on so many precious moments with my friends and colleagues because I wasn’t present with them. It’s sad to see how unhappy I am in that photo where they’re all smiling and enjoying their ice creams and all I can see is calculations and fear in my eyes”. That is what you will remember. Is it worth the pain of regret of not having lived to the full because you were living in tunnel vision, obsessed with the way your body looked? I care about your happiness bestie because I understand you, because dieting has affected my voice, my hormones, my happiness, my relationships and turned my years at professional conservatoire into a dieting and over exercising spree. 

I cannot stress enough how important it is for us singers to have a healthy relationship with food and our body. Our body is literally our instrument, we can’t just grab a violin and let it sing for us. We are athletes. We need to nourish our bodies in order to perform this very physical activity in front of thousands of people. We lose so much energy from physical and mental exertion. Think of how much energy goes towards handling your nerves, trying to remember all your stage directions, not forget your entry and not mess up your words. In addition to that, if you’re trying to micromanage what you ate or how much you weigh, you’re going to end up depressed and constantly preoccupied with food instead of breathing and living music, the very thing you were sent to earth for. 

One of the best things I have ever done for myself and my career is healing my relationship with food and my body. Just the thought of knowing that I live with food freedom and can now focus on my singing and fuel my performances properly makes me really emotional. So much space has been freed up and so much joy has entered into my life with this freedom from obsession about the way I look, what I’m allowed to eat and how much. It makes me realise how trapped I was before and how far I have come. I am now free to create music and art without being held back by an incessant internal dialogue about my body. It also makes me realise that I cannot be the only one, that there must be so many of you struggling with the same thing but no one calls out for help because we think this is the norm. We think that everyone is on some sort of diet and that being unhealthily obsessed with some form of exercise is the obligatory road to looking fit. Just for your information, a smaller body doesn’t mean a healthier body. BMI is a load of shit (pardon my French) and counting calories, don’t even get me started. I know so many people need to hear this but we’re afraid to talk about such vulnerable things because it exposes our fears and insecurities. I have already rebelled against the diet culture and today I am taking you with me on my march towards freedom. 

Let me rewind right back to when it all began and you will see where I’m coming from and why I will desperately try to help singers build trust in their bodies and reject diet mentality.

I was about sixteen… My issues started even earlier but this is when they started affecting my voice, so I will begin the story from here. I had many lessons and masterclasses scheduled for a period of about a month and I had a very active and busy schedule. Because I was away from my parents, I knew this was a great opportunity to starve myself without being asked questions and forced to eat at dinner. So, whilst I was doing all these singing related activities, I challenged myself to eat the least calories I possibly could, which I remember (counting them meticulously) was about 500kcal. Of course, by the time the month ended, I had nothing left to give, my voice became empty, thin and I had absolutely no energy to sing. The teachers started wondering why I was singing so well at the beginning and then questionably at the end when it should have been the other way round. Perhaps some of them knew but didn’t feel it was their place to say anything… One of them force fed me a protein bar on one occasion so that we could be even slightly productive in our lesson. She knew, for she suffered from the same ordeal and with distress in her heart, she wanted to save me but didn’t know how… Unfortunately, I was too young to understand and make an educated decision on whether to continue starving myself or do what was best for my pre-conservatoire preparation. I knew I should eat but the desire to be extra skinny was stronger than my will to make the right choice. 

That’s when I realised that my eating disorder was going to be an issue for my career in the long run. It didn’t get much better during my years at conservatoire. I was going to the gym twice a day, being on a very low-calorie diet and counting my macros. Instead of focusing all my energy on my singing and enjoying my first year at college, I was busy making mathematical equations. The mathematical equations then turned into a cleverer way of hiding that I had issues by excluding as many food groups as I could from my diet and convincing myself it was for the greater good. I became vegetarian, then vegan and because I believed I was doing it for the animals, it was easy to stick to it for a good four years, which was enough to create many vitamin and mineral deficiencies and mess up my hormones even further. Then I met my now husband whose natural way of eating and regulating his body was so alien to me. I couldn’t understand how he could just eat whatever he wanted and stop whenever he was full and be in such great shape. He would refuse dessert if he was full and satisfied and he would never feel guilty about anything he ate. I was absolutely fascinated and intrigued by this “crazy” and “abnormal” person!

Before we go onto what made me get out of diet mentality, let me remind you that you never let yourself down. You were never a failure for not being able to follow a diet. Diet culture has let you down because it never wanted you to succeed. What if I told you that our body knows exactly what it needs and what weight it feels best at? It’s all about listening to our body but diet culture, very cleverly tunes us out of it so that the diet industry can dictate and control what you consume and what you believe about your body. It’s giving you rules that have been created by big diet companies to make you feel bad about yourself and make money off you. Don’t you think our precious body would know how to eat if we didn’t confuse it with all the unnecessary noise from the outside? Why do we think that someone outside of ourselves knows what’s better for us, why do we give them such immense power? We are scared of our own bodies, of our bodies losing control around food but it’s not our bodies we should fear, it’s the diet industry that made us believe that our bodies couldn’t be trusted. 

Our bodies manage billions of cells every second, do you really not think that it knows which nutrients it needs and is not capable of asking for them? We are scared that if we give up control, shit will hit the fan and we will never stop eating and then something terrible might happen… You need to give your body grace and patience to rebuild trust in you and you, need to trust your body that it will go back to its normal functioning once you give it time to heal and recover from what you have put it through. We are singers, we have to attune to our bodies and not just through singing. We need to attune through the gut. The more attuned I became to my body, the better I could sing. I stopped punishing it for not looking the way I wanted it to look and I started fuelling it the way it needed to be fuelled. We started trusting each other again and the most beautiful relationship began.