My mother was 17 when she started her first diet. Back then there wasn’t much awareness as to the dangers of excessive dieting, weight loss pills and addiction, but having the ‘perfect body’ was something many of her friends would compete for in school.
I can only imagine that the perfect body image was defined by the models on magazine covers and adverts, but I remember her saying that her mother would often tell her, ‘I don’t think you should be eating that, darling’ or ‘a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips,’ among other things.
As a swimmer she’d developed broad shoulders and that too had made her feel bigger than she was, or according to society back then, not ‘perfect’.