What Changed for Me About Summer Holidays

Written by Vania Phitidis
Peaceful Eating Coach
Last updated on 3 July 2026

For years my calendar was marked by periods of bingeing and restricting. We had Christmas, then the months after Christmas were spent repairing the “damage” of Christmas bingeing and unattuned eating, which really just meant getting the number on the scale back down to where I could tolerate it. Then Easter, and the Easter eggs I’d secretly start eating the moment they hit the shop floor and wouldn’t stop until the day itself was over. Then the months after Easter spent repairing that damage too, except this repair had a deadline attached, because our summer holiday was coming and I knew exactly what was waiting for me when I got there.

We went to Greece most years, to my grandmother’s house. She had a way of greeting me that I can still picture in detail. Before she’d even said hello, her eyes would go over my body, head to toe, and then came the verdict. “You look beautiful, my darling,” if I’d passed. “Awww, you picked up weight, my darling,” if I hadn’t. That greeting carried more weight for me than almost anything else that happened on those holidays, and I spent the months leading up to it organising my entire eating around avoiding the second version.

My dieting was strict. One year I dieted hard enough that I lost my period and was cold all the time. When we got to Greece that summer my cousin, who’s a doctor, looked at me and said I didn’t look well at all, he was properly concerned. And the truth is I didn’t care. I was the thinnest I’d been as an adult, and that was the only thing registering.

The turning point, when it eventually came, wasn’t really about the holidays or my grandmother at all. It was realising there was nothing wrong with my willpower. My weight swung across four clothing sizes in a single year, and for a long time I took that as proof I lacked some kind of strength of character other people had. Once I saw it clearly for what it actually was, physiology, biology and my survival instinct doing exactly what it’s built to do under restriction, I stopped dieting.

That part was almost the easy part, though. What actually took the work afterward was becoming okay with sitting at a size I wasn’t emotionally comfortable with, in a body that had stopped swinging violently and had gone steady instead. I had to become okay with whatever my grandmother said, or didn’t say, and not let it steer what I did between Easter and summer. I had to get okay with wearing the middle of my clothing range all year round, not just the smallest end of it in the few weeks that I cared about the most.

What made it easier, in the end, wasn’t gritting my teeth through it. It was noticing what I got back. I stopped thinking about food day and night. I stopped planning the next diet or researching the next health kick or putting that particular kind of pressure on myself every single day. The food noise just went quiet. That quiet was worth more to me than the thinner body had ever been, and somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like a price I was paying and started feeling like something I was investing in.

I still wore bikinis. I still went to the beach. I still swam with my children in the sea, in a body bigger than the one my grandmother approved of. I didn’t do these things because I’d earned them by being a particular size. The sky didn’t fall in. Nobody seemed to notice, or comment, or care, which after years of bracing for exactly that reaction was almost disorienting.

Somewhere in there I also started wearing whatever actually suited the weather and what was comfortable instead of what I thought my body had earned the right to wear. For example, sleeveless things, even though my arms were jigglier than I used to think was allowed. Nobody hands you a rulebook that says a bigger body isn’t permitted to bare its arms, but plenty of us carry one anyway, and I still hear it from clients now, the idea that certain clothes are off limits until you’re a certain size. Says who? I never found the person who made that rule. I just decided I wasn’t following it anymore.

There was another marker further into this that I think about often. I started questioning bikini waxes. Why was I pouring hot wax onto a sensitive part of my body and ripping the hair out by the root, and calling it self-care? Deciding not to do that for one summer was, honestly, harder for me than going on holiday in a bigger body than I’d ever let myself be seen in before. It felt pivotal in a way I hadn’t expected, something about doing it, or not doing it, entirely on my own terms.

I’ve since come to think it was pivotal because it wasn’t really about my grandmother, or anyone else in my life who might look at me and judge. It was about other women. There’s a term in body liberation circles, “good fatty,” for someone in a bigger body who’s visibly still dieting, still trying, still not okay with the size she is. A good fatty gets a bit of grace because the effort is showing. She hasn’t accepted her body, she’s just failed to shrink it yet, and everyone can see her working on it. That’s one rung up from being a bad fatty, who’s just existing in her body, no apology, no visible project underway.

Refusing to diet took me off that ladder entirely. I wasn’t a good fatty anymore, working on it, and I wasn’t going to spend energy being a bad fatty either, ashamed and hiding. I was just a person in a body. And giving up the bikini wax was the same refusal again, in a different place. Grooming is its own kind of labour women do to stay acceptable to other women, not really to men, in my experience. I remember a conversation with a woman on the beach, who’s immaculately groomed, telling me there was no way she’d ever not be plucked and waxed, said like it wasn’t even a choice. That’s how normal the labour is. Stopping wasn’t really about the hair. It was refusing to keep doing the work that proves you’re still trying to qualify.

I’m not saying everyone should give up hair removal. I’m saying it’s worth being honest with yourself about which parts of it are actually care and which parts are something else wearing care’s clothing.

I’m in my late fifties now, dealing with postmenopausal chin hair, and I haven’t crossed that particular rubicon yet. So I’ll leave that one there, unresolved, because it is. There’s no right or wrong answer to any of this, perhaps more poignantly, what brings you the greatest peace and ease over all? What do you want to invest in?