Why Be Happy When You Could Be Skinny?

The topic of fat as a feminist issue has hit the headlines again. Namely the gob-smackingly smug missive Michelle Thomas received from her Tinder date, who considered her too fat to fancy. 

Then, in the same week, I watched a video of comedian, Luisa Omielan.  I was expecting to find it funny, and it was - but I wasn’t expecting it to land a punch right quite so firmly on my ego. That ego that still witters on annoyingly in the background with its doubts and criticisms. 

As Luisa hugged her belly and knocked her thighs together (and how the words ‘ample’ and ‘shapely’ beg to be collocated to those nouns) Ego/Vanity - whatever you like to call it - gave a horrified scream and Real Self raised her regal head and nodded - “That’s right, Love. You are still influenced by the bullshit beauty standards that were instilled from the moment your boobs began to bud and hormones wreaked havoc on your girlish, bum-less, beanpole body and turned it into that of a bodacious-buttocked sexually mature female. 

Remember?

Yes. Cue criticism and self loathing. 

In fact I can remember the exact moment. It was a Sunday. I was wearing jodhpurs, about to go riding. I was looking out of the window, my back to the door when my mother walked in and uttered a cry of dismay. I turned around. What could it be, I wondered. What could be so bad that it made my mother exclaim out loud? I looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to tell me of a catastrophe, an awful omission…

“Your arse!” she gasped. “It’s absolutely huge!”

And from then on, she felt duty bound to remind me of this, along with her keen observations on my imperfect nose, my meager breasts and my appalling posture. As I described in my post about Marilyn , I came to realise eventually that such afflictions did not preclude me being attractive to men. However, the ‘ huge arse’ comments and the complete contempt in which my mother held anyone even slightly overweight made its impact. 

I recall the first time a man said I was beautiful, I thought he must be slightly mad, or a flatterer, or just kind. I didn't know what to do with compliments.

I was far too busy frantically trying to stave off any trace of fat. It was so hardwired I didn’t even realise I was doing it. I’d say things like ‘I can eat anything I want!’ and partly in thanks to a youthful, maniacal metabolism firing on nicotine and caffeine, the minimum exercise came up with the right results: skinny. 

When I checked my height to weight ratio I was bemused by the fact that it always came up as ‘underweight’. But I’m not! I thought. 

For a while taking the contraceptive pill and being actually quite happy put pay to my skinny obsession. When my ex-husband saw photos of me from this time in my life he remarked: “What a fatty!”

What a crime! I was proving my mother right - inside me there was just a hideous fat cow waiting to slip out when I was preoccupied with silly things like enjoying myself. “I’ll show her!” I thought. 

Living in Japan was the perfect place to nurture such an ambition. Imagine living in a place where no shoes are big enough - and when you tell the shop assistant your size, she exclaims, “Gigantic!” Imagine discovering you even too big for the fat-granny’s oversize department.  Imagine only being able to buy clothes from American catalogues (apologies guys). This was a sorry episode in my personal style. I was so happy when Freemans became available overseas. British fashion in my size! 

But, by then, I had subjected myself to such a gruelling regimen of exercise and food control (in my head I was never on a diet) that I had slimmed down to the largest size available in most Japanese fashion boutiques: British size 8 (American 4, European 36). But I still believed I was too big. Especially when another smirking shop assistant was kind enough to ask me when the baby was due. Miaow! 

It was years later, on that watershed day I have reflected on in a previous post, when my mother was finally too ill with dementia to recognise me, that it finally dawned on me how the chief motivation in my battle with weight-gain was simply to spite her! Now she didn’t know who the fuck I was, there was no one to prove wrong anymore. 

I’ve done enough work on myself to extinguish almost entirely the spiteful voice that once had the power to reduce me to a baseline of self-loathing and self-harming every time I did something ‘wrong’ or looked less than very slim. And now I am suspicious of my relationship with exercise - I question why exactly I do it; whether it’s doing me more harm than good.  

Food and drink are two other contenders for addiction and abuse. That’s a whole blog post in itself.

But, as Luisa Omielan says as she cuddles her middle. “I love this - this means I have dinner with friends.”

She’s so right. Listen up, Ego.