A time-lapse video of my body over lockdown would have seen the kinds of bloom and decay of a felled forest or demolished building. Not that I’m comparing it to any structure of architectural interest – let me be clear, my body is very much not “the Shard”, more “the second chicken shop you come to if you turn right out of the Shard and start walking towards Whitechapel”.
I began lockdown pregnant and thoughtful, easing myself gently into cushioned chairs, my moisturised face turned to the sun. Over the following months my body softened and ruined; my makeup-less skin confused by light, mottled, then wattled; my hair choosing its own adventure every morning. Sedentary and unsatisfied, I have aged eight years in the past three months alone. I look in the mirror and see a bag for life.
I, therefore, am a prime contender for the lockdown glow-up. This is the phrase that describes the current trend for those who are using their time at home to get fit, get hot and emerge from the pandemic like sexy butterflies squeezing from a cocoon. The at-home fitness industry is booming – kettlebells and weights sold out online weeks into the first lockdown – and Peloton (stationary bikes for online spinning classes) doubled its revenue and subscribers by the end of 2020. Every day an email from another scrabbling brand hawking leggings or bronzer reminds me it has never been more important to ride into this summer looking infinitely more pert than when you exited the last.
On TikTok the youth are documenting their transformations, splicing a video of themselves at the beginning of lockdown with another from today. At the start they pose or dance, filled with bewilderment and ice-cream; at the end they have abs, sharp cheekbones and skin like a sunrise. Though I watch them with a warm kind of wonder, the storytelling so spare and succinct you come to wonder why any film should ever be longer than eight seconds, I resent them totally.
Not their beauty, no, I respect beauty of all kinds, especially that which must be trowelled on and monitored vigorously, but I resent the concept itself. I resent that the concept of a lockdown glow-up exists, was ever uttered, has caused me pause. It could be argued that I am against self-improvement of any sort. At times, humans’ dogged scratching for betterness does seem to me a little, well, vulgar. Across the last year the ubiquitous messaging that urged us to use the time, to learn languages, bake bread, go running, has grated more than once. Surely I haven’t been the only person struggling simply to get through a day with my mind and lungs intact, with my hands no more dry than the week before, my relationships hanging together like cobwebs.
Am I the only person resigned, no, content, to sit in the cooling bathwater of the body I’ve been given? One I feed for pleasure as well as fuel, and intermittently admire for the miles it’s taken me and the wincing little traumas it has swallowed? I congratulate it with treats, like a cat.
Promoting a glow-up during a pandemic feels particularly rotten. This has been a year of loneliness and fear, with millions still struggling simply to survive. Any pressure to shed weight or layers of skin that (oh, here she goes) were only trying to protect us must be swiftly, universally condemned. “No!” I shout at Instagram fitness ads, as if telling a dog to drop a pigeon. “No!”
I understand the gentle attempts to romanticise our lockdown experiences – the baking, the candles, the desperate gazings at nature. They were efforts to remove ourselves from the bitterness of the moment, and sometimes they worked. As did, I will admit it, a brisk walk on a bright day. But considering Covid-19 has created an “epidemic of eating disorders”, along with anxiety and stress that has led to a new crisis in body image, the pressure to use these mandated exercise hours to transform ourselves is not just impractical but immoral. I have some time for the argument for getting fit as a way to shrug off a terrible year, to outrun it, but that time runs out when the argument comes with before and after images of bodies reduced and teeth straightened.
During lockdown we have been stuck inside not just our houses but our bodies. Rather than the idea we should be constantly working on them, as if buildings plagued by subsidence, we should be encouraging each other to appreciate the ways our bodies have kept us safe, and for some, worked harder than ever. They’re shelter. They’re home.
When will it end, this relentless pressure to try and thin our bodies while also attempting to “embrace our curves”, a full-time job requiring cognitive dissonance as well as sweat and abstinence? If not now, when parties and people are closed and quarantined, and many of us have been forced to contemplate serious illness for the first time, then when? If not now, when the concept of a healthy body has taken on new clarity, then when? Seriously, if you can’t eat biscuits and let your hair frizz even as a new pathogen devastates the country, then dear God when can you?
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman