The Fatslayer Chronicles

Did I mention that I treated K and myself to a new bike each? Well, I did (last week), and for the first time ever we’ve got front and rear suspension. What a difference it makes! Yesterday we went to Thetford forest and searched out the muddiest, rootiest, ruttiest, gnarliest single-track that we could find, and rode it for two and a half solid hours – and by the end of it I wasn’t the least little bit saddle sore. My legs felt like two strands of overcooked spaghetti, but my – ahem – delicate bits were just fine and dandy. Woohoo – what a breakthrough!

There was a race meeting on, and I did manage to go arse over tip in the start area in front of about 250 fit young guys when I couldn’t unclip out of my SPD pedals fast enough, but even that wasn’t enough to cast a cloud over my day. The sun was blazing, the bike was great, my bits were comfy and I felt fit and fabulous. What a difference a new bike and (almost) fifty fewer pounds of blubber makes! Just think how great I’ll feel when I’ve lost a hundred pounds!

There’s something primitively satisfying about hurtling down bombholes and getting covered in mud and scratches and nettle stings – it makes you feel so vibrant and alive! I had a couple of hairy moments when the terrain was a bit beyond my technical bike-handling abilities and I thought I was going to catapult myself over the handlebars and do myself a serious injury, but amazingly I managed to stay upright apart from the aforementioned face-plant and only came home with a few bruises. I’m already looking forward to next Sunday so that I can do it all over again!

Wouldn’t it be great if exercise was always that much fun? If instead of cycling on turbo trainers or running on treadmills, or using rowing machines or skiing machines at the gym, we could be out cycling hell for leather down alpine hillsides or running through sun-dappled tree-shaded country lanes, or white water rafting down turbulent rapids, or hurtling downhill on some off-piste black run. Suddenly it wouldn’t feel like ‘exercise’ – with all it’s negative connotations – it would feel like plain simple unadulterated fun.

My female co-workers and I were discussing what we did “for exercise”, and one of the guys chipped in and said “why don’t you stop doing all this ‘exercise’ and start doing some sports instead?”

Then he sauntered off with a smug grin on his face, in that really annoying way that some men have when they think they’ve just scored a point over the ‘girlies’.

It got me thinking though, I have to admit. Dammit, he had a point. Probably the people who are out there pushing themselves to their physical limits running up mountains, or competing in marathons, or doing 24 hours solo mountain bike enduro races, or cross-country skiing, or playing rugby or football, or pounding the hell out of each other at boxing or karate, or practising their ballet moves over and over again etc. don’t think of what they’re doing as “exercise” at all. If they give what they’re doing a name, they probably think of it as “doing sports” or “having fun”.

It’s like when I was a little kid and I’d be “out playing” for hours and hours and hours at a time, just riding round the neighbourhood on my bike, or roller-skating, or running round with the other kids, or climbing trees, or skipping, or swimming in the river. I was an overweight kid, but I never thought of what I was doing as ‘exercise’ – I was just doing what all kids do naturally without giving it a second’s thought. If someone had told me it was ‘exercise’ I’d probably have thought it was too hard for me to do, and gone indoors and read a book instead.

Now Shakespeare may have been technically right when he said “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet”, but there’s definitely something to be said about trying to change the mental terminology to think of workouts as “doing sports” or “having fun” instead of “exercising”. It may take a stretch of the imagination to think in those terms when I’m pounding the treadmill or the turbo trainer, but if I can manage it, it could make a world of difference to how I feel about this whole business of getting hot and sweaty.

I had dinner last night with a friend who has lost 5 stones (70lbs), and I have to be honest, I was bored to tears and thoroughly depressed by the end of the evening.

I’ve examined my reactions closely to see if I’m suffering from jealousy or sour grapes (after all, she’s lost more weight than I have and is a lot closer to goal) but I truly don’t think I am. When my friend Maddy visited back in September (she of the 175lb loss discussed here) I wasn’t the least little bit jealous, even though she looks fabulous, lives in Rome, has pots of money, a fantastic job and a husband (who looks a bit like Andy Garcia) who absolutely adores her.

Jealous, moi? Not a bit of it. Bitch! You know what? I bet she had to have tons of lipo and cosmetic surgery to look that good, and you should see her cellulite…

Heh heh.

No, I’m just kidding. I had so much fun catching up with Maddy that it never crossed my mind to be jealous. On the contrary, I was sincerely and completely thrilled for her, so much so that I’ve decided I want to be like her when I grow up. She’s my fabulously inspiring dieting role model…

Last night it was different, though. The visiting friend (lets call her Donna) talked tirelessly for six solid hours about herself and her weight loss.

Now, lest I seem churlish, let me say that I can appreciate how proud of herself she must be, and how much her self-esteem must have improved since she started to look so good. And, frankly, she did look good. Gotta give her credit for that.

But I kid you not, in the course of the evening I heard at length about every size 12 outfit she’s ever tried on, every weight-related compliment that has ever been paid her, every chat-up line she’s received since starting her diet, every indulgent treat she’s denied herself, every second of exercise she’s endured.

I learnt about her daily food intake for the last 15 months, the length and duration of her workouts, and even the regularity and consistency of her bowel movements.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, all of this self-absorption was accompanied by the most red-in-tooth-and-claw competitiveness I’ve ever had the misfortune to come across.

It wasn’t enough that she was getting herself healthy – she seemed to have an obsession with being better than everyone else. She couldn’t stop gloating about how she was getting skinnier than her colleagues, getting chatted up more often than her sister, running farther and faster than her best friend. She said at least a couple of times “I’m the pretty one now!”, as if being prettier or slimmer or faster or fitter or more desirable or sexier than her friends and siblings was the most important thing in the world to her.

When she started telling me how thrilled she was that her best mate’s husband was constantly coming on to her sexually, I’d had enough.

Afterwards, when I’d finally got rid of her, I was thinking about the difference between her and Maddy. Maddy was funny and fascinating and fabulous company because her weight loss was only one part of her. It didn’t absorb her so much that it eclipsed everything else in her life – she had great stories to tell about her job, her family, her husband, her Italian in-laws. And all her observations were warm and witty and enormously generous in spirit.

There was none of the awful competitive one-upmanship and the spiteful sourness that Donna displayed. And it made me wonder whether losing weight had simply revealed an existing but previously hidden side of Donna’s personality, or whether the self-absorption required to achieve sustained weight loss had corrupted her in some way, and made her shallow and malicious.

I’m hoping she was always like it but never expressed her hidden side before, because the alternative is too awful to contemplate! If becoming that nasty is a side-effect of successful weight loss, I’d honestly rather stay fat!

Eagle-eyed readers of this blog may have noticed that I’ve gone back to the very beginning and edited out every reference (names, locations, photos etc.) that could identify me in any way to anyone of my acquaintance who happens to stumble across this blog.

In case you’re wondering why I’m so keen to be anonymous, let me explain.

A while back I wrote a post about my friend, and the struggles she was experiencing with her weight. Well, at the weekend she attempted suicide, four years to the day after one of her twin brothers took his own life. Though I’m relieved to report that the attempt was unsuccessful, it made me realise the huge burdens my friend is carrying at the moment, and it seemed suddenly unforgivably insensitive to write about her without her consent in a blog that could easily identify me – and through me, her.

Her daughter told me she’s been obsessing more and more about her size (which is the biggest it’s ever been), and spiralling deeper and deeper into depression. She’s started spending hours on the internet every day reading diet message boards, chatting in diet chat rooms, reading fat blogs etc. in an attempt to motivate herself into action. The fact that as a catalyst this isn’t working seems to have been the last straw.

It struck me that while the whole point of this blog is to be (sometimes painfully) honest about my own struggles and experiences, it isn’t fair to air other people’s struggles in a public forum. If my friend were to stumble across this site and recognise me, and the fact that I was revealing some of her most private, shameful secrets, she’d be absolutely mortified.

Consequently, I had to choose between a) trying to throw folks off the scent through anonymity b) locking/password protecting the blog c) quitting writing it altogether.

I chose the first one.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got to say today. I’d like to write something profound, but frankly I feel numb and sick to my stomach. My friend’s pain and unhappiness are so raw – and all the more sad for having at their root something so seemingly superficial and unimportant as the fact that she’s fat.

It shouldn’t matter, should it? It shouldn’t be important. It shouldn’t define her and crowd out all the positives in her life. It shouldn’t make her hate herself, or wish she were dead.

I feel so angry and upset and furious and sad and mad and just downright depressed that I live in a society where something as trivial and shallow as what you look like takes on such a weighty significance. Something is seriously wrong when someone would rather be dead than face another day being fat.

OK, that's enough for today.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my last post – and the thoughtful comments it generated – and having analysed my ambivalence some more, I have to admit that in part at least it’s down to old fashioned sour-grapes and jealousy.

Seeing those women acting so confidently makes me uncomfortably aware that I’m one of those overweight people who have allowed their weight to blight their lives.

I’ve not agonised over it constantly, or allowed my feelings of bodily dissatisfaction to metamorphose into self-loathing, but I’d be lying if I said that in a million and one small ways it hadn’t affected how I’ve conducted myself since very early childhood.

In my family weight defines whether you’re good or bad, attractive or ugly, a success or failure – everything is measured against it. I realised this, and internalised it, from a really early age.

I loved sports and dancing when I was a very young child, but as I became increasingly aware of maternal disapproval of my size, I gradually became more and more of a wallflower. Then the shyness and self-consciousness spread into other areas, until there were clothes that I would feel uncomfortable wearing (sleeveless, clingy, revealing etc), places I would feel uncomfortable going (nightclubs, parties, holiday resorts etc), things that I would feel uncomfortable doing (flirting, dancing, water sports etc)….and so on and so on.

I’ve never been uninhibited and unabashed and carefree when it comes to size. I’ve always been aware of feeling unattractive, undesirable – almost unworthy in some fundamental way because of it.

So when I see a whole new generation of young women acting as if they’re large and proud of it, it stirs up some uncomfortable feelings. Feelings of frustration and annoyance against myself, mainly. I see them enjoying themselves and having fun, and I get angry at myself for having spent my life being so damn hung up on shallow trivialities like what people (strangers!) were thinking about me. I just wish I hadn’t cared so bloody much, and then maybe I wouldn’t have let so many opportunities pass me by.

When I think of the summers I’ve wasted being hot and miserable because I wouldn’t dare wear gauzy sleeveless blouses or go swimming or wear shorts I could scream. So maybe to some people I’d have been an eyesore, but I’d have been a hell of a lot more comfortable. Why did I give those people so much power over me, and why did (does!) it bother me so much whether I gain their approval or not?

K’s mom is a lovely woman, who I love and admire with all my heart, but she has one flaw, and that is her predisposition to judge everyone – but particularly women – by their appearance. I’ve always deplored this tendency in her to determine a woman’s merits by the amount of designer labels she owns or by how slim and attractive she is, but I’ve always cut her some slack because I think that’s the sort of trivial worldview you develop when you’ve owned designer boutiques your whole working life and have steeped yourself in the covers of Vogue.

But really, when I come to think of it, I censure myself just as much as K’s mom censures other women. I rule myself with a rod of iron, and am not only my own worst critic but also my own judge, jury and jailer.

I’ve imprisoned myself my whole life in a restricting web of what I’ve judged acceptable for a fat woman to do and wear. I can’t blame anyone else - I robbed myself of all those opportunities, and that’s a hard pill to swallow.

So yes, when I see fat young women letting it all hang out, I have ambivalent feelings. Part of me exults in their freedom and wishes I was like them, but another (nasty) part of me wants to see their spirit broken so that they become like me and don’t act as reminders that things could have been different if I’d just had more courage.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s hugely important if I’m ever to stand a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming a nice person that I don’t let the sour-grapes side have the upper hand. Surely the goal is to break the bars of my own prison, not wish there were more inmates incarcerated alongside me!

I’ve been looking at a lot of bellies lately, and I have to say I’m pretty ambivalent about this whole “if you’ve got fat, flaunt it” attitude. On the one hand, I sort of admire women who have the confidence to bare their fat, but another part of me is appalled at their lack of decorum and – dare I say it – self-respect. That inhibited, judgemental part wants to run up to them with big baggy sweaters and cover them up, as if I was some priggish Victorian father appalled at a glimpse of ankle or cleavage. That’s the part of me I’m fighting against at the moment.

It seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon, to see these hefty gals walking around with their untamed wobbly bits protruding in the gap between their shirt and their jeans. It’s caught on like wildfire – suddenly all this flesh has burst forth and multiplied like some kind of marauding chubster virus, and you can’t swing a cat on the average high street without it bouncing from one Buddha belly to the next.

Either this is due to some sort of widespread reverse body dsymorphia, whereby all these girls look in the mirror and see a Kate Moss physique rather than a Dawn French one staring back at ‘em, or its down to a fundamental change in their attitudes towards their bodies – they think they look great and they don’t give a flying fuck what anyone else thinks of them.

If it’s the latter, it’s refreshing – and intellectually I applaud it – but I’ve got to be honest, I’m struggling to actually find it attractive. I try to find it attractive - and I honestly don't turn my nose up at them for being that size and shape - but the thought of joining their ranks and letting it all hang out simply horrifies me!

I’m old school, you see. I’ve spent a lifetime covering up my batwing arms and my chunky calves, wearing marquee-dimension Tshirts that reach to mid-thigh, avoiding anything clingy or figure-hugging. I find it shocking that women with figures like mine have started to hit the beaches in thong bikinis, and to sashay down the street on an average Friday night wearing clobber that wouldn’t look out of place in a Rocky Horror audience. Fat girls aren’t supposed to show cleavage! Fat girls aren’t supposed to go clubbing in a basque, fishnet stockings and velvet cheek-skimmer hot-pants (like I saw a big gal wearing at the weekend!). Us fat girls are supposed to be discreet, understated and inconspicuous - aren’t we?!?!

The fact that fat girls in their droves are challenging this self-loathing world-view has turned all my preconceptions on their head, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’m still Little-Miss-Inhibited, and it doesn’t seem to matter how many leg-of-mutton upper arms or Michelin-man waistlines I see, for me personally nothing would persuade me to strip off and throw caution to the winds. I guess forty years of discomfort with flashing my fat in public can’t be easily cast aside.

But there appears to be a whole generation of young women who don’t have the same embarrassment about their girth as I do, and they’re standard bearers for fat acceptance. I think that that must be a good thing. Certainly if it leads to big girls living richer, fuller lives, and throwing themselves unashamedly into physical activities with gusto and enthusiasm (sports, sex, dancing etc.) instead of standing on the sidelines like shy wallflowers  - and thus ensuring that they’re not only fat but also happy and healthy - it’s definitely a good thing.

Do I sound as if I've convinced myself...?