The Fatslayer Chronicles

I’m back on track with my eating, and it feels good. On the 3 Fat Chick message boards most folks seem to have exercised a lot more self-restraint than I did, but when I compare myself against the average English glutton  I don’t think I fared so badly. At least, not if my colleagues are to be believed when they confess how much food they stuffed over the holidays.

I’ve never enjoyed the feeling of being crammed to the gills, so maybe that helped. I ate more crap than I should have done, but I didn’t stuff myself to bursting at any point, and that bodes well for the long term. Plus, I’m back in the saddle, so that reassures me that I’m not a hopeless recidivist after all.

Now all I need to do is start exercising again.

There, the weather is conspiring against me. The snow is inches deep, and the temperatures are heading towards minus 10. Our house (which is heated only by crappy storage heaters ever since our log burner set the chimney on fire) is like a refrigerator, and in the evenings K and I have been huddled together under blankets on the sofa with hats, scarves and gloves on, trying to retain some body heat. I know getting nekkid in those circumstances is supposed to be the best way of keeping warm, but we’re swaddled in so many layers that it doesn’t seem worth the effort to disrobe even if it’ll warm us up in the long run. What a wild and uncontrolled sex fiend I am. Heh heh.

The thought of leaving that warm(ish) zone and heading into the freezing dining room to hit the turbo trainer or the rebounder is not a pleasant one – so consequently exercise has been low on my list of priorities.

But hell, I never expected to turn into Wonder Woman, so I’m cutting myself some slack. All this shivering must be burning SOME extra calories, and the layer of blubber will still be here when the snow’s long vanished and I’m exercising like a demon.

Talking of demons (we were?), my neighbour told me this morning when we were companionably scraping the snow and ice from our cars together, that the reason he’s lost so much weight lately is because his house has been invaded by a particularly nasty and unpleasant poltergeist, which has been turning all his food bad, souring his milk, keeping him and his wife awake at nights, and causing his cat to lose all its hair.

Bloody hell.

I tried to discreetly sniff his breath for alcohol fumes (my neighbour, not the cat or the poltergeist) because I assumed that even though it was 4.30am he was pissed, but (somewhat alarmingly) he appeared to be stone cold sober.

Stone cold sober and in deadly earnest.

Gulp.

I have to admit he’s been looking a bit haunted and frayed around the edges lately, so maybe he really is being spooked (literally and figuratively) by a creature from the other side. Either than or he’s heading for a fucking meltdown. K and I are going round to his house for a drink tonight (by prior appointment), so by the end of the evening I may know for sure one way or the other.

My neighbour’s a nice guy so I’m hoping he’s not undergoing some kind of psychotic break – but on the other hand, living next door to Spook Central doesn’t exactly appeal to me either. As a weight loss method, being scared witless by a poltergeist (whether real or imaginary) appears to be pretty effective – the poor guy’s like a bag of bones – but on balance I think I’d rather be a little less freaked out and a little more porky. There must be less nerve-wracking ways to shed the blubber…

Well, I survived Christmas, and hopefully the worst of it is over! On Boxing Day the scales registered a 6lb gain, but by this morning it had dropped a couple of pounds – the scales this morning registered a depressing but bearable 180.0lbs – 3.5lbs higher than my lowest weight, but not so out of the ball park as to make me feel like shooting myself.

The most depressing thing is that I didn’t really eat ALL that much crap. At the time I felt as if I was being horrendously out of control, but when I think back over the past 4 days, it could have been a whole lot worse.

Let’s start with what I DIDN’T eat, ‘cos that’ll make me feel better! OK, I didn’t eat any Christmas cake, Christmas pudding, sherry trifle, stollen, shortbread, gingerbread, brandy butter, fried breakfast, bread sauce, ice-cream, yule log, cheesecake, cheese, pork pie, buttered bread or crackers, fudge, biscuits, Pringles or double cream. I also had just three glasses of red wine and one bottle of Becks over the whole holiday period.

That’s not bad, right?

What I DID eat over the 5 festive days (including my mini-blow out on Friday at work) was…. 9 plain Thornton’s chocolates, two small buttered sultana scones, three dark-chocolate-nut-cluster chocolates from Hotel Chocolat, 12 Cadbury Roses, 100g of Walkers Indulgence crisps (Roast Pork and Mustard flavour), 5 mince pies  - each with a splash of Elmlea Light Single cream (not all at the same meal!), 25g of salted peanuts and 25g of Twiglets. Oh, and a bacon sandwich for Christmas Day breakfast on (gasp) pre-packaged white bread with Daddies sauce– but the bread was unbuttered and the bacon was grilled - honest, guv’nor!

Hell, that sounds like a lot of food...but it is a definitive list of all the naughty stuff from 4am on Friday 23rd until this very moment (14.40 pm on Wednesday 28th). So it sounds like a lot, but in reality I'm sure it would hardly have kept a sparrow alive. Heh heh.

Yeah, right.

I'm glossing over the fact that I also ate a big dollop of bubble and squeak fried in a teaspoonful of sunflower oil (Boxing Day lunch – yum yum!) and I had two (halves) of a roast potato, half of a roast parsnip and a mini Aunt Bessie Yorkshire pud with my Christmas turkey. But I also ate fresh veggies, fresh fruit, high-fibre crispbread, lean ham, tomato juice and pickles, so I think they must cancel out the bad stuff, don’t you?

All in all, I reckon I could have done better, but I could have done a lot worse too.

It may seem a bit odd of me to be writing this down so exactly but a) I’m an accountant so I can’t help myself, and b) I want a complete record of my transgressions, so that when I look back on this entry in 11.5 months time I’ll see that a slight fall from the wagon doesn’t undo 9 months of solid hard work.

Deep down I was scared in the run up to Christmas that if I started to slide down the slippery slope that I’d never be able to arrest the momentum. Hell, that’s my track record. I’ve been there and done that a dozen times, sliding all the way down to rock bottom, then wallowing in the sludge for months or years before I can summon the enthusiasm to start hauling my fat arse back up the slope again.

So in a way it’s a huge relief that not only do I feel back on track today, but I’m also champing at the bit to get back into healthy habits. If I’m being totally honest it was nice to relax and run a little wild, but it didn’t make me feel good, either bodily or mentally. By Boxing Day I was already feeling sluggish and below par, and I couldn’t wait to get out of the house and get some fresh air and exercise.

So maybe there’s hope for me yet.

Anyway, I hope everyone else out there had a good Christmas and that, like me, you’re all raring to get back in the saddle.

Or maybe you were all little angels, and never let your halos slip in the first place?

Yesterday I got taught a valuable and humbling lesson – broken eating habits aren’t easily fixed.

After 9 solid months of eating healthily, exercising self-discipline in my food choices and portion sizes, and religiously keeping within 1500 (honest and healthy) calories a day, yesterday it all went to pot.

It’s not so much the fact that I made poor choices and ate loads of crap – it’s HOW I ate the crap that concerns me.

I was sneaky, gluttonous, and utterly uncontrolled – and I’m ashamed of myself!

At work, the worktop surfaces in our little beverage bay were groaning under the weight of Christmas goodies. Mince pies, plain Thornton’s chocolates, Green & Blacks organic chocolates, buttered scones, Christmas cake, peanuts, Pringles, doughnuts, cookies, Bendicks bitter mints…that was just the stuff I remember!

Now, I could have avoided the beverage bay and gone to the water fountain instead, but I was pitifully lacking in self-restraint.

It was as if some circuit in my brain had fried, and I couldn’t help myself. The first time I made a cup of coffee, I ate a chocolate whilst the kettle was boiling, then openly walked back to my office with a buttered scone, and ate it in full view of my colleagues like any normal person would do.

OK, so a chocolate and scone aren’t fabulously healthy choices, but they’re not a hanging offence, right?

The food kept up its siren song, though, and before many minutes had passed I was back in the kitchen washing up my mug (yeah, right), and two more chocolates had somehow vanished down my gullet.

One thing I’ve learned in the past 9 months is that I like to savour the taste of good, rich, dark chocolate. I’m a nibbler, biting off tiny pieces and letting them melt slowly on my tongue. I can make one square of plain chocolate last half an hour, and I’d rather eat that one square of high quality bitter chocolate than a whole bar of crappy milk chocolate.

But, because I didn’t want anyone to know I was eating chocolates, I just wolfed them down, and missed out on all the sensory pleasure of the experience. They were just empty calories, because I hardly tasted them at all. I wasted them!

And because I’d wasted them, I still wasn’t satisfied. Over the course of the day, I had another 5 or 6 chocolates and another scone, getting more and more furtive in my gorging. I was swallowing without chewing as fast as I could, so that if anyone had come unexpectedly into the kitchen and taken a close look at my throat it would have resembled the body of a boa constrictor that had just swallowed an ostrich egg.

This is self-destructive and pathetic behaviour. It’s the sort of behaviour I’ve been working so hard to modify for the past 9 months – and patently I’ve not really learned anything.

Nothing is fixed.

I was trying to think what my behaviour was like, and the closest analogy I can come up with is the behaviour of a seriously contrite paedophile.

One of my friends counsels and rehabilitates sex offenders, and she was telling me about the last conversation she had with one of her clients before he committed suicide a couple of weeks ago. He was an earnest, moral, sensitive man, whose whole life was blighted by the sexual urges he felt towards little girls. He fought very very hard to control the urge (he’d requested chemical castration, and was in the counselling programme voluntarily), but whatever he did to suppress it, the urge was always lurking just below the surface.

He told her that he’d been watching children skating at the open-air ice rink in the city centre. The rink was surrounded by adults six deep watching their children skating, and he felt that, unlike him, those other adults were experiencing an enjoyment that was unadulterated and pure. They had no hang-ups or hidden agendas, and could therefore be unconstrained and open in their responses and actions. He, on the other hand, felt corrupt and dirty, and sensed his behaviour was furtive and underhand. Although he was doing something he knew he shouldn’t be doing (watching the children), he was taking no real pleasure in the experience because of the guilt and feeling of wrongdoing. Yet he still couldn’t simply walk away.

When my friend related this story, it struck a really strong chord in me. The feelings of having a dysfunctional and warped attitude towards the desired object (in his case children, in my case food) are similar. I know the enormity of the dysfunction is different, and obviously his plight is (was) worse than mine – but some of the feelings of shame and perplexity are the same.

As a rational, intelligent human being, I should be able to control my desires. After all, it’s what separates and elevates us above the level of savages.

But no matter how hard I try, that urge to just run riot and eat everything in sight is never suppressed fully. It’s always just below the surface, and it only takes one small break in routine or one acceptable excuse (it’s Christmas!) to allow it to burst forth.

I want to be cured, and it’s depressing that I’ve still got so far to go. I’m beginning to think it’s an incurable condition!

Dammit, I’ll have to try harder!

I’m 2.5lbs heavier today that I was a week ago. How the hell did that happen?

Maybe it’s time for an honest reckoning.

Eating has been OK. I’ve maybe allowed a little bit of calorie creep – mainly of nutritionally-crap stuff like the odd toffee or After 8 mint which I never used to indulge in at all - but it’s not crept beyond 1500 calories, and it’s usually pegged at 1100 to 1350 cals a day. It’s the season of festive cheer, for chrissakes – I don’t think one toffee or After 8 mint a day is anything to get worked up about. I can live with that. After all, I always said that I wouldn’t fall into the trap of starving myself just to see the scales move in the right direction.

Anyway, I can’t have gained 2.5lbs by eating between 1100 and 1350 calories a day, surely?!?! And I’m not cheating, because I weigh and write down EVERYTHING that goes in my mouth. Well everything edible, at least! Heh heh. So I don’t think food is the problem.

So where am I going wrong?

Exercise has been almost non-existent. I’ve been working horrendously long hours (80 hours last week!), and to be frank I just can’t be arsed to move once I get home in the evening. This is not acceptable. I am a bad, bad girl! It’s what happens to me every winter, and this year I swore that this year I’d not fall into the same bad habits, and lo and behold, here I am, Little Miss Couch Potato.

I’ve been cutting myself some slack because I’ve been getting to my office at 4am and not leaving it until 8pm at night – but the bottom line is that cutting myself slack isn’t helping me to lose weight. The excuses are going to have to stop.

It’s not as if I don’t have the resources to get some exercise – even when it’s pitch dark outside, inside in my (very crowded) dining room I have the turbo trainer, my rebounder, my taebo DVDs, my skipping rope, my weights – I’ve just got to summon the enthusiasm to use them.

I have such a sluggish metabolism that exercise is essential. I HAVE to make it a habit. But I hate exercise – at least, I hate exercise-equipment-type exercise! It’s boring! After a 16 hour day at work I want to sit on the couch and watch old re-runs of Stargate SG1 or Malcolm in the Middle, not get all hot and sweaty on the turbo trainer.

Mwaah, I don’t want to do it!

Well tough, I’ve just got to.

I admire all you Duracell bunnies out there, and I’ve got to start following the sterling example you’re setting. How hard can it be to just get in half an hour’s exercise every day? Even I can manage 30 minutes out of every 24 hours, surely?

I’ll just have to force myself…

One of the advantages of being fat is that you don't get treated like a slab of meat.

I can only really recall one time when I was ever made to feel that way, and I hated it.

I was working at a mental health trust at the time, and I was invited to a meeting in their secure unit. The unit housed 120 patients, all of whom were designated criminally insane. 115 of them were guys, and of those, 100% of them had committed sexually motivated crimes of various degrees of seriousness. The other 5 patients were women who had been on the receiving end of sexually motivated crimes, and had killed their attackers. Those 5 poor women were incarcerated alongside 115 of their worst nightmares!

Anyway, I was let into the unit and escorted by the Head Nurse through three air-locks and various other bolted doors, until I eventually came into one of the main recreation areas. I was there as an accountant for a finance meeting, for chrissakes, and he was giving me a fucking guided tour!

Because this was a psychiatric facility, not a prison, the patients were not confined to their 'cells', and within reason were allowed to roam unchecked through certain communal areas of the building. The rec room contained around 40 guys and a thick blue cloud of cigarette smoke. Some of the guys might’ve been nurses, but without uniforms it was impossible to differentiate them from the patients. I think that was intentional.

The Head Nurse proceeded to break every rule in the book by telling me confidential information about the guys lounging around the room - that guy over there raped a 92 year old woman, that guy buggered and murdered a 5 month old little boy, that guy raped his mother then set fire to her etc. etc. etc.

I was horrified. For one thing, we were standing in an open room talking about human beings less than 10 feet away from us as if they were animals in a zoo, and for another, he was scaring the bejesus out of me with all the horror stories.

The guys all started to stare at me in a really intimidating way, grabbing their crotches, licking their lips, getting up and pacing around us etc.  Admittedly they kept a couple of arms lengths away, but I was as spooked as hell, and all the while the head guy continued talking about rape and murder as if he was discussing the weather or the price of eggs. I think he was as weird and fucked up as the patients!

I’m guessing that most women would have found it disturbing, but for someone totally unaccustomed to male attention like myself, it was really really disconcerting.

I felt totally vulnerable and dehumanised – I knew it didn’t matter that I was fat and plain, to these guys that was immaterial. For the first time ever I really began to appreciate that sex crimes are not about sex, or attractiveness, or lust – they’re all about power and control and violence. It was seriously fucking scary.

You want to know something really worrying? Up to that point I’d considered myself almost immune to sexual attack because I’d assumed rapists were inflamed by lust for their prey, and I knew I didn’t have the face and figure to inflame your average guy with uncontrollable passion. I dread to think of the danger I could have put myself in with that kind of thinking – fat ugly girls get raped too!

But anyway, the whole point of this post is to say that ordinarily I don’t attract too much attention from male strangers, and ever since that day I’ve been grateful for that and I want it to stay that way.

Attention from strangers scares the shit out of me, if I’m honest.

This has been on my mind since yesterday, when my best friend said “you’ve dieted loads of times in the past but always panicked and quit when guys started to chat you up. The only reason you’re pushing on with it this time is because you had your 40^th birthday and you think it’s safe to be skinny ‘cos the guys will still leave you alone.”

In the main I think she’s wrong, but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t at least a grain of truth in that. My mom was raped and brutalised really badly when I was 12 (she was in hospital for 6 weeks, it was such a bad attack), and deep down I think I’ve always been scared that if I catch the wrong guy’s eye I’d regret it.

I really want to succeed long-term with this plan, and to stand a chance I need to see that weight loss and vulnerability aren’t necessarily synonymous. England's a safe homely place, really, and monsters aren't going to leap out of the shadows at me just because I've lost a few stones! I've got to stop being a wuss about this!

I walked into my office after a meeting this morning and interrupted my team discussing how much I weigh. Sheesh, that was embarrassing.

I’ve realised over the years that skinny people normally hugely underestimate what they think fat people weigh. Possibly it’s inconceivable to them that a 5’1” woman could still weigh 177lbs after 40 weeks of dieting. The consensus seemed to be that I’m now somewhere around the 150lbs mark.

I wish.

Not many people know how much I weigh. In fact, let’s be honest here. Apart from you, gentle readers, only I and K know the dreaded number. And I’d like to keep it that way.

When people ask me how much I’ve lost, it makes me squirm. I’m an accountant, and work with numerically-minded people. If I tell them I’ve lost 54lbs and that I’ve still got a long way to go, they can do the math and realise that I must have been 80+ pounds overweight to start with.

I don’t want them to speculate that way about me!

I don’t know why it bothers me so much, but it does. Being that much overweight seems shameful, somehow.

But it’s not as if obesity is a hidden problem.  It’s hardly like intravenous drug use, when I could wear long sleeves to hide my veins, or alcoholism when I could drink vodka and eat vast quantities of breath mints.

Obesity is in your face. An obvious ‘problem’. So speculation and gossip amongst one’s acquaintances is probably inevitable. But it doesn’t mean I have to like it!

**********

On the subject of embarrassing gossip, last night was the company’s Christmas party at one of the local hotels, and today the post-mortem was in full swing.

I missed most of the action because I only popped in on my way home from work and stayed long enough to buy my team a round of drinks and make a gracious exit. In my defence I didn’t manage to get away from the office until 8pm, and I was absolutely knackered and longing for my sofa. Besides, I HATE office parties!

By the time I showed up one guy (from payroll) was so trolleyed that he was groping his colleague’s breasts, under the thunderous gaze of her husband who was sitting three feet away from them. Honest to God, he was manhandling her nipples as if he was trying to tune in a particularly static-y radio station, and she gave the appearence of loving every second of it.

Call me prudish, but I found it a cringe-inducing spectacle.

While the jungle drums were still in full unabated swing this morning I went to a meeting in the boardroom, where the walls are notoriously paper thin. Though it was a heated meeting, we could still hear every word being discussed in the corridor outside.

It was impossible not to eavesdrop.

People were gossiping shamelessly about the groping incident, which apparently went from bad to worse as the evening progressed. Eventually the husband had stormed off, and the happy couple had allegedly got a room together in the hotel at the end of the evening.

In an echo of the ‘fat girls swallow’ comment I talked about here, speculation was rife that the reason why this (married) woman was such a willing participant was because she was a big(gish) girl, and that therefore she was grateful for any kind of male attention, no matter how inappropriate or degrading.

“He tried it on with the babes in the bar first,” I overheard one man say, “but they just gave him the brush off so he picked on a fat chick ‘cos he knew he’d have better luck. They’re less fussy and better in bed because they make more of an effort…”

Inside the boardroom we were all very professional, pretending we couldn’t hear what was being said outside, but I could feel my face flaming. I was mortified, and it didn’t help that I was the only woman at the meeting, and the only person with a weight problem.

Is that really what people say and think about fat women, when they don’t think they’re being overheard? Are we really seen as desperate, low-standard nymphomaniacs who bang like a barn door in a gale?

If so (with the possible exception of the shit-hot-in-bed part) that’s really bloody depressing!

My friend (and ex-neighbour) is heart-broken at the moment because her long-term lover has just announced his engagement to another woman.

They’ve been lovers for eleven years, but in all that time he’s never moved in with her, introduced her to his family, gone on holiday with her, or taken her to meet any of his friends or colleagues.

What he HAS done is fuck her in secret, and date a succession of conventionally slim and pretty girls in public.

My friend had resigned herself to having the crumbs from his table, but she managed to convince herself that eventually he’d ‘come out of the closet’ and announce himself to the world as a man who loves large women. Because that is the one inarguable fact – this is a man who physically adores fat women.

A few times in the past he’s tried to break things off with my friend, but he’s never been able to stay away for long. He’s intoxicated by her, and that lust and yearning breaks through the conventional mask that he hides behind. Two years ago she got pregnant, (eventually she miscarried) and even then he didn’t have the decency to properly commit to her – he told her he would support the baby financially, but that it was out of the question that they could marry or live together openly, because his parents would never accept her.

Since my friend graduated with first class honours from Oxford, is Catholic (as is he), solvent, witty, charming, good-natured, has all her limbs and faculties, no neuroses or addictions and can trace her ancestors back to Robert the Bruce, the lack of suitability seems centred round the fact that she weighs 20 stones (about 180lbs).

What other explanation could there be?

His new fiancée is a woman who – in face and figure – resembles a skinny Nicole Kidman. Yes, she makes the real Nicole look on the chunky side. She’s a partner in the same accountancy firm where he works, and she’s sixteen years his junior. By all accounts his parents are thrilled and delighted.

After all, they make such a good looking couple.

I’ve always found it hard to understand why my friend has been contented with such scant pickings but she says she loves him, as if that explains everything. I met him a couple of times when she still lived next door to me and I can't say I was overly impressed, but hell, what do I know? He was good looking and sexy, but his character is lousy and his personality seemed cold. My friend deserves better.

She’s wasted eleven years waiting patiently for him to openly commit to her, and now he’s just cast her aside as if her feelings are completely unimportant.

Then he has the gall to phone her in tears and say he still loves her.

He asked whether she would be agreeable to ‘leaving things as they were’ after his marriage – i.e. could he continue to have his fat fucks?

WTF?

Thankfully she declined – and socked him in the jaw for good measure.

But last night she came round to see me and cried for three solid hours, so I’m not holding my breath that she’ll stick to her guns.

Any suggestions anyone?

It’s finally becoming noticeable that I’m losing weight, and occasionally I get a thrilling little surprise when I catch sight of myself in a mirror and see that I’m actually not all that big any more.

I went clothes shopping at the weekend, and all the sizes I initially chose to try on were too large – obviously I’m still looking at myself through my fat goggles. I need to lose those and start seeing myself as I really am.

It’s weird, because when I was getting bigger I was in denial, and totally underestimated how hefty I was looking, whereas now that I’m losing weight I keep on overestimating how large I still am. I look in mirrors expecting to still see tons of blubber, and it’s a pleasant surprise to see that even to my critical eye I’m now looking more ‘overweight’ than ‘obese’. I AM still obese, but I’m not in the Jabba the Hutt league these days, and that feels pretty bloody fantastic.

At the weekend I was showered in compliments by my parents, and I tried hard to accept them graciously without saying all my usual things like “oh I’ve still got tons of weight to lose…” or “of course I’m not looking skinny…” I must stop doing that.

On the one hand, it was nice to be complimented, but on the other hand I felt sad that the only time my folks ever say positive things about me and my fat sisters is when we start to lose weight. My one skinny sister is perennially the golden girl, but the rest of us only get a little gilded when our parents judge that we’re approaching a more acceptable size. That seems so shallow and trivialising to me (sorry, mom and dad, but it does!).

I once had a boyfriend that acted in the same way. He always said my size wasn’t an issue, but really it was, and that became more and more obvious as time went on. We lived together for 4 years, and when I was in a losing phase he was always much more attentive, romantic and complimentary than when I was in a gaining phase.

In the end I started to resent the fact that as my weight dropped he’d get as horny as a five-balled bull. I wanted him to love me and find me attractive whatever my size, and patently fat girls didn’t really do it for him.

In the end we split because I felt I deserved better, and he needed to find himself someone who ‘fit’ him better. I didn’t want to end up resenting him for having a preference for one body shape rather than another (after all, the poor guy couldn’t help his predilections!) and I figured I needed to find myself a man whose preferences were less fixed, and who would love me and want to fuck me as much when I was fat as when I was thin.

I wasn’t going to settle for anything less, especially as I didn’t want to turn into one of those women who diet constantly just to keep their man happy.

Whilst it’s possible to give shallow boyfriends the boot, it’s not so easy with parents, is it? My folks are on the verge of their eighth decade, and they’ve judged people by their weight their whole lives, so they’re hardly likely to change now.

I know this. I even accept it – but I don’t have to like it!

They’ve totally changed in their attitude towards me the last couple of times I’ve visited, and are much more loving and warm - and I mistrust and resent their altered behaviour.

Whatever drivel came out of my mouth was greeted with effusion and warmth by them, as if I’d suddenly developed magical powers of witty oratory. Conversely, my elder sister (currently fat) said a few things that my folks would have found funny and amusing if I or my skinny sister had said them, but because they were uttered by my fat sister my parents barely cracked a smile.

It must be so tough to succeed as a fat comedienne! Talk about working with a stacked deck – getting belly-laughs must be like getting blood out of a stone!

Anyway, I digress.

Suddenly I can’t do anything wrong because I’m getting skinny, and she can’t do anything right because she’s getting fat – and I hate it!

Hate it hate it hate it.  

I hate it almost enough to put all the weight back on out of spite…….but not quite!

Childish, moi? Whatever gives you that impression...?

I hate it almost enough to throw my toys out of the pram and tell them that I’m not doing this for their approval, or to be a ‘good girl’, or because they want me to do it - I’m doing it for ME.

But that would hurt their feelings, and at the end of the day they still wouldn’t understand what I was getting at, so I guess I’d better bite my tongue.

The fact that they’re being so blatantly different towards me has got me thinking though. If my own parents have completely altered in their attitude towards me just because I’ve dropped 50 pounds, imagine what it must be like to be drop-dead gorgeous. It must be a real pain in the arse.

Beauty of that magnitude would simply attract lust-crazed bone heads and empty-headed wannabe-best-friends, whose fawning would get really annoying after a while.

I never really felt sorry for babes before, but I’m beginning to have a bit of sympathy for them!

One of the very real benefits of being fat is that it doesn’t attract that kind of attention. The friends you make when you’re fat are the real Mccoy, attracted by personality and intelligence, not just looks.

Real friends.

The trick is to find those folks when you’re fat and hang on to ‘em when you finally make it to skinny ‘cos friends like that are rare and precious!

My friend's 6 year old great-niece Lizzie is currently undergoing diversity awareness training as part of her school curriculum (I guess they’re never too young to learn!). At the weekend she was telling me all that she had learned about the innate equality of people of different colours, races, sexual orientation and religious beliefs.

She informed me earnestly that we shouldn’t say nasty things about people who are a different colour or who are disabled “because it hurts their feelings”. Nor should we be horrible to people who “want to live together as mommies and mommies or daddies and daddies, instead of as mommies and daddies like most people do, because people can’t help who they fall in love with.”

“Oh, and we mustn’t keep talking about the war all the time and making fun of Germans, either, because they get upset…” she added.

She is being taught about Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism, as well as atheism and agnosticism, which is all very laudable since her school is in a culturally diverse area, where most of the religious devotion takes place in the mosques and temples rather than in the Roman Catholic or Anglican churches.  

I asked her jokingly if there is any group of people you ARE allowed to be nasty to, and she thought about it for a little while, and said she didn’t think so.

“So nobody gets called bad names or gets bullied in your class then?” I asked.

She shook her head, but without much conviction.

“Are you sure nobody gets bullied?”

She blushed, then blurted out “Well only Morwenna, but that’s just because she’s fat and smelly!”

This gave me pause.

“IS she smelly?” I asked.

Lizzie screwed up her face. “Well no, not really,” she admitted, “but one day she will be, won’t she?!”

I ignored the logic underpinning that argument, and pressed on. “So it’s OK to be nasty to people if they’re fat?” I said.

This time she gave an emphatic nod, as if she was finally sure she was on safe ground. “Yes, silly, because if they’re fat and smelly it’s their own fault…”

*  *  *

Apart from depressing the hell out of me, this got me thinking.

Is the obesity stigma really that entrenched? Apparently so.

Lizzie has an obese mother and obese great-aunts yet she still juxtaposed the words “fat” and “smelly” as if they were as inextricably linked together as Batman and Robin or Laurel and Hardy. The fat associations were immediate and totally negative.

I hit the internet and came across an article – you can find it here  - which suggested that even pre-school children have internalised the negative associations of obesity. This is a quote from the article:

There are certain things I’m looking forward to doing when I’m skinny, and one of them is having a proper bathe.

In movies when you see a woman in the tub she is always totally submerged from the neck down in bubbles and water, with tendrils of hair fetchingly dampening in the steam.

That’s never the case with me.

If I bathe the water barely covers half of me, and a substantial part of me is always poking above the waterline, so that I resemble a goose-pimply wallowing hippo. If I lay on my back my belly and boobs breach the surface, and if I lie face down my arse rises up like a batch of over-yeasted white bread dough.

I don’t imagine that either of these are particularly flattering looks, but luckily K loves me enough to overlook such shortcomings. I discourage him from entering the bathroom too often when I’m in the tub, though, just in case he gets the notion to climb in there with me – there’s barely enough room for me, and tub sex is only fun when there’s a bit of elbow room and plenty of deep suds. I think I’ll leave such shenanigans to the skinny brigade.

I’ve just bought some bath salts so that when I’m finally skinny enough I can wallow in strawberry scented bubbles with only the tip of my nose above the surface. When I can do that, I’ll know I’m close to reaching my goal.

Talking of getting to goal, what else am I looking forward to?

Hmmm...hugging my shins, definitely.

My whole life I’ve never been flexible enough to pull my knees up to my chest and to clasp my hands in front of my shins, and it’s always been something I’ve wanted to do. When it’s done successfully, it looks so effortlessly athletic.

I used to blame my inability to perform this simple manoeuvre on the shortness of my arms, but really it was because there’s always a big pillow of pannus preventing my knees from getting close enough to my chest. I’d need arms like an orang-utan to be able to grasp my shins at the moment.

So when I can do that effortlessly, I’ll know I’m close to goal.

I’ll also know that I’m close to goal when I can walk around barelegged in the summer without my thighs chafing together, and when I can browse around the shops for a whole day without feeling as if my spine and the soles of my feet have been mashed with a hammer. Those will be happy days when they eventually arrive – I’ve just got to be patient.

I have had a couple of victories already, though.

I never used to be able to cross my legs at the knee (fat thighs and calves), or to reach round far enough to scratch between my shoulder blades with my fingernails. If you imagine me sitting splay legged like a seated sumo wrestler, scratching my back with a wire coat-hanger, your mental image won’t be too far adrift from my former reality.

Now, though, I can cross my legs at the knee like any other sophisticated woman, and scratch an itch between my shoulder blades with ease. I do both regularly, in fact, just to prove that I can – but nobody seems to notice that this is quite a triumph for me.

Painting my toe-nails has become a lot easier too (that used to be such a chore), as has bending down to pick up things I’ve dropped on the floor. I used to dread having to bend over in crowded places to pick things up – if I’d spotted a £20 note I’d probably have made the effort, but for a pencil it just wasn’t worth the huffing and puffing and the humiliation.

It’s such a small thing, to be able to bend over without a second thought and to pick something off the floor – and yet I was almost unable to do it! How sad is that? Now, though, I‘m as bendy as a pipe-cleaner – dropped objects don’t scare me any more, no siree – if I ever need to make my living by poop-scooping or litter-picking I’ll be all set!

It strikes me that weight has affected my life in so many trivial and seemingly unimportant ways. A little humiliation here, a smidgeon of mortification there – it all adds up in the end. There was always the ever-attendant dread that I’d get stuck in a turnstile, or that I’d get into an elevator and it would set off the over-loaded beeper, or that seven other people would suggest we all share the same taxi, or that some skinny sadist would suggest we all do an army assault course to help us in our teambuilding.

Life is definitely easier now that I’m on the road to skinny – I need to remember that when I’m having a bad day and it seems easier just to give up and hit the doughnuts.

Phew, the 2lb weight gain (which is still hanging around) is probably menstrually-related, since my period started yesterday.

I’ve had so few periods in my life that I can’t recognise the signs – I’m as ignorant as a ten year old. I don’t think I suffer from PMT (I’d know if I did, right?), and I’ve never noticed any other ‘symptoms’ like sore boobs or stomach cramps.

How unwomanly am I?

I think maybe I’m just totally obtuse and uninformed about the workings of my own body.

Today I noticed that my skirt (which has been hanging off my hips for at least a month) was tight enough to have caused a red ring around my waist. My stomach felt huge and was as tight as a drum.

It suddenly occurred to me that this is ‘bloating’.

Every day it seems you overhear some woman or other bemoaning how ‘bloated’ she feels, and I was beginning to think that it was one of those urban myths, like the Kentucky fried rat story. I’m sure ten years ago no-one ever mentioned it, and I always assumed it was a trendy euphemistic way of saying that you were dying for a good fart.

Not any longer. I’ve officially joined the bloated brigade. I didn’t have the urge to fart at all, but if you’d stuck a fork in me I’d have zoomed off like a pricked balloon.

Not nice.

It made me wonder, though, if I’ve ever experienced this before, and just never noticed it. Maybe I was just so fat before that I never even registered that my belly was as distended as a pot-bellied pig’s.

I wonder what other bodily manifestations I’ve been missing all these years….