The summer of 2003 and I was 25, newly single, living in a top-floor flat in Brighton. The skylight splayed sunshine across the rooms, and if I leaned out the front window, dangled and craned my neck, I was rewarded with a sea view. I was writing the second half of my second novel, eating more vegetables than I ever had, going to the gym regularly and interspersing all this odd, out-of-character healthiness with long nights drinking Long Island Iced Teas with my brilliant friend Debs, who lived a few doors up. My world seemed so bright and blanched, in fact, that I even went swimming occasionally in the sea, having always been put off before by those gleeful pub stories of used condoms adrift on the waves. I felt invincible. Some might say smug.
Come autumn, I had finished the book, started going out with a fantastic bloke – then suddenly crashed into depression. The novel wasn’t autobiographical – it was about a girl growing up on a prison island in the 50s; I had grown up in an Essex terrace in the 80s. But it had brought up memories of a childhood event long since buried. As the skies darkened and winter loomed, I was unhappier than seemed sustainable.
My weight – around 11st (which might sound a lot to some, but suited me fine) – plummeted. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to eat, or that I was punishing myself. It was that I wasn’t thinking about food at all. I had other things on my mind. And I felt nauseous all the time. Not a subtle, teasing nausea. When I ate, I puked.
By spring, things were looking up slightly, and I started to eat again. Now, I’ve always been pretty big – I was a nine-pounder at birth, and, as a toddler, I was regularly compared to Helen the Hippo from the Captain Beaky poems, who, if I remember rightly, had a body “like a large melting jelly”. During my teens I was sent to a boarding school for disadvantaged kids, where I avoided the questionable dinner fare by eating nothing but toast. According to the school nurses who forced us grumbling on to the scales each term, this singular regime left me perennially half a stone overweight.
Still, I had never been all that huge, and in that nastily judgmental way that I guess is pretty normal, I had always wondered how anyone ever got really fat. After all, I wasn’t in the habit of denying myself anything, I thought, self-righteously, yet I was always at least in spitting distance of a healthy BMI. To get properly fat, you’d have to eat constantly, wouldn’t you?
For those of you who entertain similar thoughts, I’m happy to report that getting fat is actually extremely easy. Given the right combination of food, drink and inactivity, you can put on 4st in four months, without any real effort at all. I know people sneer at the notion that metabolism might be a factor, but I can’t help thinking it exerts at least some influence, as I can’t recall any especially heroic eating stories. I have none of those tales that crop up in binge memoirs, of chugging back vats of chips, making midnight runs to kebab shops, or digging half-eaten chocolate cakes out of the rubbish to gobble down gloriously in a single sitting. I just ate what felt normal, without thinking about it (I still had a lot of things on my mind) and, like Violet Beauregard in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I grew and grew and grew.
And you know what? I didn’t mind. In fact, as I started to escape the fug I had been in, looked down and noticed my belly, I realised that being fat was kind of cool. Sure, there were downsides. I no longer looked good in jeans. My bra cups were bigger than my head. My tights rubbed together as I walked, making me sound like a particularly large and irritating cricket. But there were pluses, too.
Most of all, being fat meant that I was suddenly cast out of that uniquely depressing dance that goes on – particularly between women – of policing each other’s weight. Taught from a young age that looks and size are all-important, women often learn to keep a check on their eating, and each other’s, too, before they even reach kindergarten. So, for instance, you hear grandmothers tell their three-year-old granddaughters that they’ll never get married if they don’t cut out the cake. You hear one schoolfriend (OK, me) being asked by another how much she weighs, to which the only reasonable answer, of course, is to subtract 10lb from the actual amount and announce the revised figure. Being met with a look of disgust and “Oh, how awful” told me all I needed to know. Next time I’d subtract 20.
As an adult, the conversations often become less vicious, but descend instead into a soul-sucking round of apology and reassurance. A constant run of dialogue between women that starts, “Oh, I’m so fat” (meaning, “Do I look fat? How much do I need to deny myself today? How long can I leave it before I ask this question again and make it clear to everyone around me that – yep, that’s right – I don’t actually like myself all that much?”), to be met by the reply, “No! You look amazing!” (meaning, “You look fine, same as usual, and please respond similarly when I assail you with this question.”)
I understand why women engage in these conversations, and why we feel that if we don’t apologise for the space we take up, we’re afraid that someone else will get in first and cut us down. I understand, too, that for some women these conversations are actually a way of highlighting just how thin they are, thus shoring up their place in some vast unspoken pecking order. And while I find it utterly depressing that a woman would feel that her weight – or lack of it – represents her major achievement, given that we live in a society in which women are, on average, paid 17% less than men, make up only a fifth of MPs, a 10th of leading company directors, and have little choice but to watch in horror as less than 6% of reported rape cases end in a conviction, I can understand why women often don’t feel that they or their abilities are really valued, and try to assert whatever small slice of power they can through drawing attention to their body by denigrating it. I understand it, and I don’t blame anyone who does it, and I have done it myself, but I also really hate it. It is boring. It is tiring. It is sad.
But I found that when you get properly, recognisably fat as an adult, you stop having to have these conversations. It’s not that people don’t say horrible things to you – like the cyclist who shouted, “Watch out, fattie!” as he careened through a red light and almost ran me down. That happens, sure. But the moment when I said to a friend, “God, I’m so fat,” and she looked me up and down, pity drenching her eyes, and replied, “Yeah, but your skin looks really good,” was the moment I realised that I had been exiled from that exhausting diet-talk loop.
I felt depressed by my friend’s answer for about five seconds, before I realised what it meant: I was free! It felt liberating – in fact, the one good thing to come out of my despondency. I no longer had to take, or fake, an interest in any of my friends’ new diet plans. They simply didn’t tell me about them. I was no longer part of that culture that counts calories, compares dress sizes and says, “No carbs after sundown!” as though this is a fabulous motto to live by. (My motto has always been “Go big, or go home”, and I can’t see that changing.)
So I kept happily eating – bread, butter, brie, ice cream – and put on a few more pounds here, a few more pounds there. And to my utter annoyance I found that, while it was great not to have to participate in all that shared self-loathing, the weight I was putting on meant I would shortly have trouble participating in many other things besides.
For instance, I had never understood why anyone worried about the size of their bottom, on the basis that you can’t see it unless you crane your neck almost as much as I had to for a sea view that summer of 2003. Suddenly though, I became concerned about the width of seats on airlines, buses and in arthouse cinemas. I started to eye up wicker chairs, and, indeed, a huge variety of folding chairs, with trepidation.
My friend Debs invited me paragliding, and the thought that they might not have a suit big enough to fit me, and that whichever instructor I was going to be strapped to could be grounded by my girth (or, worse, we’d take flight, only to crash straight back down to earth) put me off entirely. I began to dread having my photograph taken. In the mirror, my face looked exactly the same to me as always. In photos I bore a remarkable resemblance to, well, Helen the Hippo. I am not without vanity – who is? – and so the minute anyone plunged a lens towards me, I took to obscuring my face with a two-fingered salute. To be clear, I didn’t hate myself – I’ve been depressed, I know what self-hate feels like, and this didn’t come close – but I didn’t feel completely comfortable in myself either.
Adding to this anxiety, itching away in the back of my brain, was the recognition that my father – who had a similar build to me – had died of a heart attack, aged 34, when I was two – just dropped dead in a sports centre car park after a game of squash. Then my older brother died while out riding his bike, when he was eight and I was six. The sum of which has bequeathed me a couple of legacies. First, I fear dying young. This is exacerbated by the fact that my only other sibling, my younger brother, has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, will always need looking after, and would benefit from me being alive to do this, should anything happen to my mother. Another legacy of those deaths was that they gave me an antipathy to sport, which I only ever managed to overcome that one hot Brighton summer, and which has been getting steadily more acute as I’ve been getting steadily fatter.
There is a growing school of thought, particularly in the US, that when it comes to fat people’s health, the key isn’t to lose weight, but simply to make sure that you’re active. There are a good number of studies to back this up – including one published late last year by Professor Steven Blair, of the University of South Carolina, which found that, as long as they were fit, overweight and even obese people had a lower risk of dying young “than unfit people at a normal weight”.
The trouble is that, for me, being overweight isn’t conducive to activity. While I may not have been sporty, I was always active until I got fat. As a theatre nerd at school, I took every dance class I could – from jazz, to ballet, to those ones where you pretend to be a flower unfurling in the sun. At university, I went clubbing regularly, danced for hours each week, and did some fairly physical jobs, too, standing up all day packing Toilet Ducks in a factory or standing up all night vacuuming the unkempt aisles of Primark. After university, well – I still danced a lot. I walked everywhere, too, and occasionally swam, and very occasionally played a bracing game of “cocktail tennis” (a pursuit that involves necking pitchers of Manhattans while playing tennis). Essentially then, though I’ve never done a lot of organised sport, until I put on weight, I moved a lot.
The fatter I have got, though, the less I have felt like exerting myself, which perhaps isn’t all that surprising. As a teenager, I remember being given a pair of rubber bangles for my birthday, each weighing a few kilos, which were supposed to be worn while “aerobicising”, to make the experience just that little bit more taxing. Well, now I carry around the equivalent of 10, 20, 30, even 40 of those bangles as excess weight all the time. I have nothing but admiration for overweight and obese people who keep fit, and I’m more than prepared to accept that they’re as healthy – if not more so – than their skinny-but-unfit peers. And while I’ve never suspected that being fat is an impediment to looking gorgeous, I also suspect that those who are active often look particularly good – if there’s a sexier woman on the London stage right now than the all-singing, all-dancing Leanne Jones, who stars as Tracy Turnblad in Hairspray (and rocks a horizontally striped dress better than anyone I’ve ever seen), I’ll be damned. Carrying this much fat around with me though, I just don’t have their resolve, their will to work it. My weight makes me feel sluggish in the most literal sense of the word.
Anyway, hatred of physical jerks or not, hatred of the diet industry or not, hatred of conversations about low-calorie alternatives to cheese or not, by the start of this year I knew that I had to do something about my weight. I knew that this would be difficult for a lot of reasons: said problem with sport; an inability to be told what to do; my psychological association of being thin with being depressed. But I also knew that I was not alone. Though being fat often feels alienating, the reality is that the majority of UK adults are now overweight. This means that there are a lot of people out there like me. People who feel that they should lose weight, but have done so before and seen it all go back on, and then some. People who feel that the diet industry is a vast conspiracy, predicated on failure – after all, if any diet actually worked the whole billion-dollar baby would go bust. People who feel sick at the thought of buying into anything that Gillian McKeith or the countless other preaching, screeching diet “gurus” have to say. A lot of people, then, who know that they have to lose weight, but approach the project with ambivalence.
In writing about my experiences, I won’t be including updates on lost kilos (I don’t weigh myself). I won’t be providing fabulous tips for reducing the size of your behind (what do I know? I just plan to eat less and exercise more). I won’t be declaring that Rosemary Conley was right when she said, “Nothing tastes as good as being slim feels!” (Clearly impossible, as ice cream exists.) I won’t be providing endless portions of self-loathing, as I don’t hate myself – or anyone else – for being fat. I know that many people consider being fat a crime akin to murder. I do not. I shall simply be charting some months in the life of a person who is, at best, reluctant about diets, and, at worst, disgusted by the very notion, but who knows, unfortunately, that something must be done. I warn you: there will be grumpiness.
· Kira Cochrane’s column starts next Tuesday.
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