You eat a piece of cake. A moment on the lips, forever on the hips.

How poetic. How utterly violent.

The phrase sounds like something your grandmother might’ve said while scooping half a spoon of rice onto your plate, lovingly laced with shame. It rolls off the tongue with a sing-song cruelty, a reminder that joy is fleeting and punishment permanent. That desire is dangerous. That your body, especially if it dares to take up space, must be controlled, trimmed, and always in debt (or in calorie deficit).

The Math of Misery

One slice of pizza? That’s 285 calories.
Ten minutes of eating?
Now run for 30 to undo it.
Now hate yourself for wanting it.
Now weigh yourself.
Now cry.

As a math major, I thought numbers were my thing—pure, logical, reliable. But calorie math? That’s dark magic. It’s arithmetic laced with self-loathing. It’s algebra where X always equals guilt.

And unlike Brighton’s defense on a good day, the numbers never let anything slip through. Every bite becomes a statistic. Every craving becomes a calculation.

We’ve turned food into math and math into morality. You’re not just full, you’re bad. You’re not bloated, you’re lazy. You don’t need a rest day, you need discipline. And God forbid your jeans feel tight; the apocalypse is nigh.

“Forever on the hips” isn’t just a joke. It’s a life sentence.

Why Is It Always the Hips?

The hips are symbolic. They’re feminine. They’re sexualized. They’re scrutinized.
If fat lands anywhere, it better not land there, lest it corrupt your eligibility for love, desirability, and that elusive word: “confidence.”

You learn early that your hips are public domain. Aunts grab them. Friends compare them. Ads attack them. You’re taught to monitor them like a criminal record, one wrong move and you’re guilty of indulgence.

But here’s the worst part: hips aren’t even the point. The phrase just needed somewhere soft to target.

Language as a Weapon

“Forever on the hips” makes hunger a villain and restraint a virtue. It wraps self-hate in humor and slips it under your skin before you can protest. It is the perfect propaganda: shame disguised as sass.

And we swallowed it whole.

We whisper it to ourselves when we reach for a cookie. We post it as captions like it’s cute. We live by it. And in doing so, we kill the moment before it even reaches the lips.

What It Actually Does

It makes you eat with fear.
It makes you move out of guilt.
It makes you hate photos of yourself.
It makes you call celery “dinner.”
It makes you forget what hunger feels like and remember what it means.
Punishment.

The Worst Part?

It stays with you. It becomes muscle memory. A reflex. You do the math before you even know you’re doing it. You decline the dessert before you even taste it. You shrink your portions, your body, your presence.

Moments pass. But shame lingers.

Not forever on the hips.
Forever in the mind.

The Reclamation

Let’s retire the phrase. Burn it. Unlearn it.

Let hips be hips—bones, curves, flesh, power. Let cake be cake—sugar, joy, childhood. Let food exist without penance. Let movement be celebration, not atonement.

Because the only thing that should be “forever” is the memory of laughing too hard, dancing too wildly, and eating too joyfully to care.

And if that joy settles on your hips?

Let it stay.

It earned the right.