What do women mean when they say they feel fat? They say it so often, it can’t just be that they are feeling overweight.

Glenn, by email

First of all, let’s just clarify that not all women are unhappy with their bodies. This has become such a gender cliche that some people too easily assume it is universal. By “some people”, I mean me. I was neurotic about my body for years, as were most of the girls, and later women, who became my friends. We never ate pudding, and if it was a good or a bad day was determined by how tight our jeans felt that morning. While we loathed ourselves for falling for this shallow, self-obsessive nonsense, we loathed our bodies more. And, what is more, we assumed this was the norm. So when, in my mid-20s, I became friends with a group of young women who didn’t measure their worth through their capacity for self-denial, it felt like encountering life forms from another planet.

When I was in my late 20s, I watched in awestruck fascination as one of them blithely ploughed through a tube of Pringles by the pool while wearing a bikini. At that point in my life, eating fried carbohydrates and revealing my bare tummy to other people would have made my top five of personal greatest fears, and quite possibly my top three, only slightly pipped to the post by Armageddon.

Becoming friends with these women helped me finally slough off so many of my neuroses because they provided me with a guide to a destination I didn’t even know existed called “How To Be a Woman Who Isn’t Constantly Punishing Herself”. Unsurprisingly, my 30s have been a lot better than my 20s. So it is important to not just go along with this idea that all women hate themselves, because that normalises the problem and entrenches it. However, I of all people, wouldn’t deny that this stereotype does exist.

But you are wise, Glenn, to grasp that there is more to this issue than is being overtly stated, or even understood, by women. There is so much cultural, social and even moral baggage placed on a woman’s physical appearance that it’s not too surprising that so many of them realise that their body is their most effective means of communication – their loudest voice, really. After all, no one likes a woman with a loud voice, right? So shrill! Ugh! No one wants to hear that, but everyone wants to look at a woman’s body, so why not just talk through that? After all, ladies, as the old song goes, you say it best when you say nothing at all.

Thus, the woman’s body becomes her own personal – and portable – Rosetta stone, allowing her to communicate across all language barriers. And rather in the way that Inuits allegedly have 50 words for “snow”, women have a million meanings for the word “fat”. So, to help everyone, here is the definitive list of meanings when a woman says “God, I’m so fat”:

• “I’m unhappy.”

• “I’m anxious.”

• “I’m scared.”

• “I’m lonely.”

• “I hate so many things about myself but let’s just focus on the stomach, OK?”

• “I’m heartbroken.”

• “I’m bored.”

• “I’m growing up and this terrifies me so much I’m not going to think about it and will talk instead about my thighs and hips.”

• “I haven’t yet fulfilled my lifelong dream and this has made me doubt everything about myself.”

• “I dated someone who, instead of making me happy, made me feel terrible about myself.”

• “My life has changed so much recently and I feel like my body is the one thing I can control.”

• “I’m full and this feels weird because I usually deny myself food.”

• “This is the kind of thing my mother used to say, so I think that’s how adult women communicate.”

• “I am scared of mortality and so can’t accept that the body changes as it gets older.”

• “I don’t know how to value myself, and so rely on numbers on a scale to tell me whether I’m good or not.”

• “I’m trying to tell you I feel any or all of the above but don’t want to sound like I’m whining, and it’s more socially acceptable for a woman to say she feels fat than that she feels unhappy. So I’m saying this instead.”

To what extent should Kendall Jenner be held responsible for the Pepsi advert?

Mary, by email

I’m going to go with “quite a lot” here. Normally, I would argue that a model should not be held accountable for a campaign. But Jenner is not a normal model: she is not only one of the most successful in the world but also one of the most powerful, given her enormous Kardashian-based fame.

Reports say she is “distraught” about the reaction to the idiotic “white girl fixes Black Lives Matter” ad, and that says it all. At no point did she or any of the many fixers around her say during the protracted negotiations to appear in this nonsense: “Hey! Maybe it’s not a good idea to use the current protest movement to sell caffeinated sugar water?” No, she is just upset that people didn’t like it. I get that she is only 21, and I’m not saying I hope her modelling career is destroyed. But I do hope that this puts an end to the all-too-popular idea that the Kardashians are the media geniuses of our age. And, the next time someone tells you that, just show them a gif from the advert of Jenner blithely handing a blond wig to a bemused African-American woman, and let’s hear no more about it.

Post your questions to Hadley Freeman, Ask Hadley, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Email ask.hadley@theguardian.com.