SOME THOUGHTS ON WEIGHT LOSS

For the evening of this International Women’s Day, I thought I would write a few words about an issue that bothers nearly all women, in the west – WEIGHT. Most of you know that I spent the last three months of 2008 being ill and consequently shed quite a lot of the stuff. I am now down to the 52.5 kilos , or 8. 27 stone, that I was in my twenties and early thirties. Well, I am 52.5 kilos in the morning but 53 – 54 kilos at night and the fact that I’m weighing twice a day shows I’m already unhealthily obsessed with the issue, does it not?

I did not react to this weight loss in the way lamented by Kim Chernin in Womansize - The Tyranny of Slenderness:
“When she was discharged from the hospital, with the condition undiagnosed but possibly abdominal cancer, my friend came home. There, the first thing she did was to rush into the bathroom and go over to the scale.
‘I’d like to tell you, ‘ she said to me, ‘that I’d willingly gain back the five pounds rather than go through that horrible pain again. But I honestly don’t know whether that’s true.’ ”
Nevertheless, I was happy to be slender again and I’ve lost a stone more since coming home, without dieting.

In case any of you out there are thinking it’s all right for me to preach at 52.5 kilos, let me remind you that I have been there and here I am with lovely, slim Liz in 2007:



But I don’t think I looked too bad most of the time. [On my birthday in 2007]:



I would also point out that, quite apart from the inconvenience and expense incurred in having to throw out or give away most of your wardrobe, being very slim at 59 is very different from being that way at 29. For weight, dammit, does not always come off where you want it to. I’ve been lucky enough to have retained something resembling a bosom, but this time my arms look awful and my face is gaunt. “You look better facially when you are chubbier”, said a “friend”. [Did she have to use that word? What’s wrong with “plumper” , “rounder” or just “a bit bigger”?] Getting attention from men is not hard in Italy if you are any shade of blonde, whatever your age, and sometimes I think I got more of it when I was “rounder”. “Most men like something to get hold of”, my father used to say. That’s probably true, but try telling that to a woman about to subject herself to the torture of a beach! I cannot find the exact quote by Oprah, but she did once say something like,
“There’s only so far your personality will take you – on a beach.”
I sympathise with that view, but we are not talking here about the desire to lose a few pounds in order to look better in a bikini. Thinness has become almost a religion to some and we solemnise the cult by according it religious language, talking of certain foods as “sins” for instance.

As a child, I was very small but what Raquel Welch once termed “the equipment” was well installed by the time I was 13 and I soon discovered that when it comes to our bodies, women can’t win. We are supposed to have breasts, right? If we are not voluptuous in that region, we risk elective surgery. Yet when we are, we go through hell: the British Home Secretary shows a little cleavage and there is public uproar. If Ms Smith were 20 years or so younger and uneducated, presumably it would all be all right as then she might make page 3 of some of our national newspapers one summer day together with the caption, “Cor, what a scorcher”. My own hell in this regard was the Woolworth’s store in Kingswood, Bristol, where my friends and I would go to buy Miner’s makeup and trinkets on a Saturday. A boy from the year above ours at school was nearly always there and he would usually make some remark about my breasts in order to ensure that my weekend was a tearful one. On one occasion he excelled himself: “There’s something on your shoe. Oh, I forgot. You can’t see past your tits, can you?” That was the day I started hiding my breasts and the barb hurts as I recall it even today.

There I am above at 14. [Sorry about the length of the photo and I cropped out the guy who was with me.]

Now, take the same girl a few years later when Twiggy’s was the body shape we all wished to emulate and you have a ready anorexic. With my curves and thighs that refused to reduce whatever the rest of me did, the Carnaby Street look didn’t suit me and I didn’t wear a pair of denim jeans till I was 28 and 7 stone!

Yet all this is a twentieth century phenomenon . It began when most people in the west finally had enough to eat. It went on to make the lives of millions of women miserable and to make millions of dollars for the diet industry. “Take this powder to replace one meal a day.” “Try these Slimmer’s chocolate biscuits” [which are nothing more than ordinary chocolate biscuits]. “Take these appetite suppressants during the day”. The small print on all of these reads, “Only works as part of a calorie-controlled diet”. So are women too stupid to read the small print, then? Of course we’re not! We’ll just clutch at any straw that might help us to look like a size 0 model – which we never will, as most of us are [a] not hooked on drugs which will make us look ill and therefore skinny and [b] unable to afford the gym fees, personal trainers and lifestyles of these women.

In a little-noticed section of the book that accompanies Jane Fonda’s original “Workout” tape, [oh, yes, I “went for the burn” in those days, in an effort to stay 7 stone!] the actress-activist admits to episodes of bulimia. I could hardly believe this when I first read it. Jane Fonda?! An intelligent political and feminist activist? And she’d done this before the ideal body shape changed from Marilynesque to that of a female who “makes clothes look as if they’re still on the hanger”, as one designer put it. If Jane Fonda could fall for this “thin” nonsense, I realised, then any of us could – and did!

So I have one question, readers: WHY? Why do we allow ourselves to be bullied in this way? It is surely the last tyranny exerted over western women. Why don’t we just PUT A STOP TO IT?

Do you want to look like a dress on a hanger? I don’t! I’ll do my best to stay slim but I’m not going to take laxatives, get obsessed any more or deny myself the odd chocolate. When I showed my very heterosexual Sicilian hairdresser a picture of Nigella he did not exclaim, “Gawd, she’s fat” or “Worra pair of knockers” . He smiled and said, “È una bella donna - She’s a beautiful woman.” And this wise lady still has much to teach us.

I’m not claiming that being clinically obese is good for you or suggesting that we all go out and eat chocolate covered in lard. However, I am saying that the amount of suffering caused by the few extra pounds that most women carry is totally disproportionate to the importance of that weight. As this International Women’s Day draws to a close, couldn’t we give ourselves a gift? We are constantly being told to celebrate diversity. Let us celebrate it in OURSELVES.