THIS week, I had three Christmas parties in a row. Each involved copious amounts of food, alcohol and good company. It’s a time of year I look forward to as I’m at my most convivial. But it’s also the time of year I have my annual food-panic. For as long as I can remember, food has been my favourite thing about the holidays, and for almost as long the thing I fear most. I’ve yet to think about festive food without thinking of the diet, gym membership or renewed health kick that’s supposed to follow.

Cooking, eating and sharing a meal with people you love are all some of the simplest and most nourishing pleasures a human can enjoy. Eating together elevates food to something beyond just fuel into something cultural, communal and even political. When we eat together, we bond as friends, family, colleagues and lovers. We break bread together when we’re happy, when we’re sad, when we celebrate and when we mourn. We feast in honour and fast as a means of turning inwards or to protest. Eating for more than just nourishment is central to the human experience. It’s the reason I love December – there are ample excuses to do what is inexplicably harder to arrange throughout the year.

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Alas, in our culture, holiday eating is inextricably linked to weight, which is connected to moral value. Women are expected to look a certain way, which means being constantly vigilant against the foods we’ve collectively demonised. From an early age, we’re fed a narrative of sinful eating alongside our festive treats. Diet culture robs us of the simple happy mouthful of a warm mince pie. It always comes with a side of psychological discomfort.

I think this is true for most women, regardless of their relationship with food. We’re saturated by messages about health and wellness, about beauty, about size, about weight as a marker of status. That means each festive season comes with baggage. I bet there weren’t many of my male colleagues who worried about what they’d fit into by the time party season came around.

Of course, this is ridiculous. Believe me, I would like not to waste my time on such temporal frivolities as the inches across my hips – but it’s hard to escape in a female body. You can’t exactly opt out of a culture that judges what it sees.

At this time of year, good food is everywhere all the time. We delight in it. Though I know that there are countless others, often women, limiting themselves, denying themselves, performing some kind of asceticism instead of fully immersing themselves in a small moment of pleasure. There are countless articles every year offering “strategies” to avoid getting fat over the holidays. These include gems like eating only the veggie options on the menu, booking a gym class for the day after a meal and pre-eating porridge to line the stomach before any social eating. All these articles contribute to mass neurosis about festive dining and ruin what should be an experience of pure joy.

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For many, every meal morsel is weighed up, considered and judged before it makes it from plate to lips. This gets old very quickly and does a pretty good job of putting me in the “why bother” mindset, meaning I’ll forgo the mince pie to avoid the shame attack that comes after. According to the diet books, this is known as “positive punishment”, when the thoughts you have decrease the behaviour that follows. It’s a concept that repulses me from a feminist perspective, but one that’s etched so deeply into my brain I’m not sure how to temper it.

Earlier this month I made it through eight days of Chanukah celebrations with only a single doughnut and two latkes. This is a holiday when you’re supposed to eat fried foods as a reminder of a miracle and as a means of expressing enduring hope. It’s not supposed to come with diet panic. This is beautiful in principle, but difficult when faced with a lifetime of crappy messages about food and virtue. Instead of being a sensuous, joyful, ritualistic thing, food becomes a challenge. It’s like a game of chicken. Everything delicious is there for the taking, prepared by friends and family with love and the desire to feed and delight. How can I be around it and not go crazy?

This year, despite all of my better judgment, I decided to go on a diet before December. I see those words written down and I can give you a hundred reasons why it’s a terrible idea, politically, socially, emotionally and so on. Thanks to a knee injury curtailing my running for eight weeks, there were a few outfits that were snugger than I’d have liked. “It’s fine,” I thought. “I just need to drop 7lbs."

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Need. What a distortion. I don’t need to do anything. But this is the language women inherit about their bodies, about their weight, as if somehow the volume of space they occupy is a measure of their worth. I know this. I can wax lyrical about the insidiousness of diet culture – and yet I still bought the app. These days you can shame yourself thin without having to leave the house. I figured that I’d done a lot of work on building a healthier relationship to food over the last three years, so I could handle eight weeks of a programme before deleting it forever. Even though I know how these things never lead to the place I imagine: the mythical land of the happy, thin and sated woman. Even though I know the choices are hungry and miserable, or full and ashamed. Objectively I hate diets, and yet I still find the idea of being any bigger than I am uncomfortable. Thank you, patriarchy.

Spoiler alert: the diet app is horrible. Every day I’m offered #PsychTricks to “overcome my elephant”. I’m a fog eater, it turns out, shovelling things into my face when I’m tired or around people enjoying themselves with food. I’m expected to weigh-in first thing every morning. I have to meticulously log everything I eat and get a reminder if I forget. I have to categorise my food into red, yellow and greens. Watch my portions. Learn about navigating environmental, social and emotional triggers. I have to use smaller plates to “trick” my brain into thinking I’m full. I have to check in with a group of people (all of them women) to share my “daily wins”. It means well, but it makes me furious. It’s just an ever more sophisticated means of self-flagellation. This is not what I want to waste my life thinking about. I want to bite into a hot churro topped with a flurry of powdered sugar. I want golden crumpets soaked in hot butter. I want seconds. I don’t want to wear a hair-shirt every time I think about eating.

Let me save you the money and the trouble if you’re thinking about the January diet: life is too short. Just eat up.