Is 'fat maths' the new ‘girl maths’?
I'm tired of the mental justification for spending money or just, y'know, eating...
Did you hear about girl maths? If not - I don’t blame you. Every day there’s another pointless and infantilising trend going viral, so if you clocked out of this one, I get it. All you need to know is that it’s exactly as it sounds, a cutesy, ditzy way for women to justify their impulse buys with non-linear mathematical equations.
Girl maths is working out an ‘imaginary’ way for something to be worth its price so that “it’s basically free.” But who are we justifying this to exactly? Our best mate would probably tell us ‘hell yes - if you love the bag, buy it,’ (I would anyway - so I’m here for you if you want to be enabled) so who is actually reprimanding us like we’re little girls? Who is making us explain why we’ve bought something and forcing is to justify it? You guessed it, the big P (ahem, that’s patriarchy frens.)
When I was a kid my mum used to hide her shopping in the car boot occasionally when she’d really gone hard in Marks & Spencers. That always struck me as so odd because our household was quite untraditional in many ways; my parents - both doctors - shared the workload at home, my mum cooked, and my dad did all the housework (mostly because my mum and I are both chaotically messy.) But she earned enough, she just liked buying stuff - so who was she hiding her shopping from? My dad didn’t really care either, it was her money, after all. It always struck me that women often have a sense of shame around buying things they like, especially expensive things. It’s almost like men still dole out the money to their wives and girls at home, and we should be grateful for the handout. It’s an odd dynamic we seem to inherit as a relic from yore. But whatever the item in question is, we don’t need the ‘girl maths’ to justify it. All we need is a bank balance to cover it.
It really struck me just how much unnecessary arithmetic we’re constantly doing in our heads - and it extends way beyond our shopping habits. This weekend I went to a hot yoga class, then headed to meet pals for brunch. Not just any brunch you understand, this is the best fry up in London. Premises cafe on Hackney road has all the markers of a five star English Breakfast - quality ingredients, cheerful staff, adaptability (no grilled tomatoes, ever, thanks), hash browns as a standard (any English breakfast without hashies is BS in my opinion) and an excellent cup of tea. It’s dog friendly too!
But the best part of this feast is the option of a ‘fried slice’ (above). In case you’re uninitiated, this is a deep fried slice of white bread - and it’s delicious. A fried slice isn’t readily available in London, it’s quite a rarity and more of a northern delicacy I think. So when this turned up on a side plate, any sadness I’d ever suffered magically turned to pure deep fried joy.
I’ve been dreaming about this breakfast since last week. I’d planned a post-birthday party visit to this cafe for a hangover breakfast and party debrief, but ended up being so hungover that I couldn't leave my bed until 6pm when I’d actually stopped regurgitating tequila (sorry.) And so, a week later, this glorious plate of beige finally arrived in front of me. The fried egg was perfectly runny, flirting with the baked beans and threatening to flood, whilst two rotund sausages flanked a perfectly crispy hash brown. “Oh wow this is huge” everyone exclaimed as the waiter set it on the table. My immediate reaction, unguarded and unmasked around my mates was “Oh god, I just did yoga and this is going to undo all of that hard work,” - I was mega hungry, and knew I’d smash it all.
Thankfully, my friends caught what I’d said, and reminded me that this isn’t the point of exercise, and they’re right. I couldn’t believe I’d thought it, let alone said it out loud; I’ve overcome years of externalised and internalised fat phobia. I’ve written a book about the tyranny of beauty standards FFS, and here I was, mentally weighing up calories I’d not even eaten yet. But it struck me that there’s another kind of mental maths we’ve unknowingly performing, I’m calling it ‘fat maths.’
I could call it calorie maths, or food maths, but the root fear behind it, is fat - being fat, putting on fat and the internalised fat phobia we’re handed generationally, culturally, and historically - often led by capitalist industries like the diet industry (now called the wellness industry.) So many of us fall into the trap of ‘fat maths’ when it comes to fitness and food, working out the cals in and the cals out, how we’ll burn off indulgences and that never-ending feeling - like with ‘girl maths’ - of guilt and shame. It’s like a squatter we allow to live rent free in our minds, and could manifest as picking classes that promise a high calorie burn over the ones that that we actually enjoy. It could be justifying a sweet treat because you’d been to the gym earlier, or like me, panicking that you’d ruined your ‘virtuous’ sweaty yoga session and calorie deficit - and now the ‘fat maths’ was all wrong.
When we all finished brunch, I did what years of disordered eating and awful conditioning around food does to (mainly) women; I felt that guilt deeply. I’d smashed 90% of this giant plate (save a sausage reserved for my pals dog) and automatically scanned my friends’ plates to see their leftovers. I’d definitely eaten the most I calculated - and here again, fat maths was waiting to show me whether I was good or bad, depending on what percentage of my plate I’d eaten. We don’t need to be in a calorie deficit to enjoy something we’re eating or to feel like we deserve it; but my own comments were a reminder about the mind maths that I’m not verbalising but subconsciously labouring away at. Maybe you feel the same too.
Fat maths is such a normal part of fitness, food and wellness culture that we don’t always clock that we’re doing it, but we do notice and chip away at that mindset that says we need to earn our food or suffer for it - we don’t. We need to do that for ourselves to break this generational torture, but also, for future generations. When speaking to the brilliant psychologist Fiona Yassin - read her guest post here - she told me: “When a parent says, ‘we’ve eaten quite a lot today and haven’t done any exercise’, what the child hears is, ‘I am not worthy of eating without exercising’. In using this language, you may start to see calculator systems develop, rationing and feelings based on worth. If your child sees you eating a third of a portion of a meal, and then hitting the exercise bike to ‘burn it off’, your child will do the same.”
I’m not sure what ‘maths’ will come next, but whatever it is, food, shopping or beyond, there’s nobody we have to justify either of these things to. And there’s certainly no unpaid mental book keeping we need to do around it either.
Much love and fried slices…
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The term Girl Math (perhaps unintentionally) perpetuates an old stereotype that women are not good at mathematics or even basic arithmetic. This is a touchy subject with me, because I experienced a lot of hateful comments as a child for liking math and science.
I want every single woman in my family to read this. The way they had to fight to justify buying themselves a damn coffee pot was sickening.