Arabella Weir - The Real Me is Thin

ARABELLA WEIR

The Real Me is Thin

FOURTH ESTATE · London

For Helen Scott-Lidgett and every woman who’s ever thought the way she looked mattered more than anything else about her .

Cover

Title Page ARABELLA WEIR The Real Me is Thin FOURTH ESTATE · London

Preface: how to tell if you think you’re fat Preface: how to tell if you think you’re fat All women think they’re fat. Here’s how to tell if you think you’re fat, too.

The real me is thin

When their ship came in

Open the box

‘Arabella’s fat’

Too much

Daddy’s girl

Happiness is a warm scone

Cooking blind

Shock in awe

Funny valentine

My other family

A waist of time

Kurt Waldheim finds out I’m fat

All you can eat at the boy buffet

My fairy stepmother

This isn’t just food…

Actresses don’t eat

Doctor No

Allergies for attention

The appeal of obliteration

Everyone’s got an opinion

Passive-aggressive pudding

Flying spaghetti

Outing my bum

Don’t eat pudding if you want to get a job (or a boyfriend)

Sexual eating

The mother of all diets

Feeding Mum

Dieting makes you fat

Not eating, just neatening

Wrong thinking

Happy ending?

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

All women think they’re fat. Here’s how to tell if you think you’re fat, too.

You think you’re fat if:

You’re reading this book.

You think not eating is a good thing.

You think you’re fat even though no one else does.

You think you’d like yourself better if you were thinner.

You think that people who don’t eat are better than you.

Unless catering for others, you have nothing in your fridge except a small sliver of mouldy cheese and a rancid piece of fruit, both of which you know you’ll eat rather than chuck out.

You never order pudding but eat a bit of someone else’s.

You decide not to have a glass of wine because you’re ‘not drinking at the moment’, and then have half a glass but not in a wineglass, and then top it up but only halfway again, and so on – but manage to end your evening still kidding yourself you didn’t have a drink.

You’ve got clothes in your cupboard that are too small for you and you’ve never worn but can’t get rid of because they are going to fit just as soon as you’ve lost some weight.

The title of this book means anything to you.

The real me is thin. Of course she is. The real me does not need a size 16 (sometimes even a 18) to accommodate her mammoth arse (not my real one, obviously) when buying trousers. Properly fat women wear sizes 16 and 18, not me. I am not fat. I can’t be. I don’t feel like a fat woman. Well, not all the time. Obviously, I feel like a fat woman a lot of the time. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t think there was another ‘me’ out there, another, thin me available somewhere. The fat woman I feel like a lot of the time is my go-to person, the one I feel like when I feel bad about myself, which is how I feel when I eat, more often than not. But that can’t be who I really am. Admittedly, I find myself temporarily housed in a slightly-larger-than-planned-for body but, you see, that’s OK because it’s not my real one. In my real life – the one I’m supposed to be having, the one I had planned on having, the one I’m going to have – I’ll be wearing slinky party dresses with micro spaghetti straps, lovely bikinis and city shorts, of course I will… just as soon as I shake off this fat woman’s body, which, as we’ve established, isn’t mine anyway. I’ve no idea who put me into it. I certainly didn’t. How could the odd handful of chocolate-covered peanuts, sporadic slices of butter-laden malt loaf, and the occasional bottle of wine in one sitting possibly be responsible for getting me into this body? This overweight body I did not plan for and don’t recognise?

Right from the beginning – well, my beginning anyway, when I was little – the real me wasn’t supposed to be fat. My parents made it clear they did not want a Fat Arabella. They wanted, expected, demanded, even, eventually, a Thin Arabella. The indisputable fact that Thin Arabella had never made an appearance (my birth weight was close to 11 pounds) didn’t seem to factor into my parents’ expectations. They seemed to think that Thin Arabella must be in there somewhere and that I, Fat Arabella, was deliberately hiding her to annoy them. As I grew up it became clear from their confused, slightly irritated reactions whenever I said I was hungry that they didn’t know who this girl was. My mum and dad couldn’t possibly have been meant to have a Fat Daughter. They’d both got degrees from Oxford, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, played musical instruments – good God, they went to museums for pleasure. People like that don’t get fat kids. Other people get fat children, not people who drink real coffee and look down on people who wear driving gloves, go on package tours, and disguise loo rolls under knitted dolls wearing crinolines. My mum and dad were cut out to be winners, and winners’ kids aren’t fat.

The real me must surely be the one my parents were expecting, the one they had in mind when they longed for a daughter to follow their two boys. When a couple long for a girl they do not long for a fat one. They dream of a sweet, adorable, and, above all else, pretty girl. They must have been mystified. ‘Hey, Genepool, we didn’t ask for fat! Who ordered the fat one?! Not us!’ Who actually wants fat? No one. They certainly didn’t dream about having just any kind of daughter – thin or fat, ugly or pretty, three legs, four arms… They wanted what everyone who yearns for a girl wants: pretty, charming, a little bit cheeky maybe, bright would be a bonus, but not if it’s at the cost of being attractive. Winners have gorgeous girls. But what happens when she comes out fat? What then? You still love her, of course you do, you just set about… erm… modifying her. Encouraging her, shall we say, not to eat; and also perhaps to be a little embarrassed about her body and how much she eats – even if, at the start anyway, she eats only what her siblings eat, yet alarmingly it seems to make her fatter than them. That must be her fault.

So, right from the beginning, the scene was set for a lifetime of believing myself to be fat – whether I was or not. Fat in my head, whatever my body shape. I was a chunky wee thing, and although (I’m told) I was much loved, it felt more like much judged, particularly for my appetite and fluctuating size – a deadly combination, and inextricably linked, according to my parents. If I was hungry it must be because I was greedy, because – seeing as I was evidently not thin – I couldn’t ever be genuinely hungry. A message I learnt early on: fat people aren’t allowed to be hungry.

Of course, my parents’ attitude to my size as I was growing up isn’t entirely responsible for my lifelong struggle with food, eating, overeating, and weight. I’ve chosen a number paths that reinforced my deep-seated belief that Thinner Equals Better; but Mum and Dad’s effort to secure themselves a thinner daughter certainly set me off down that road – how could it not?

So here are a few stories from the life of a fat daughter, fat schoolgirl, fat girlfriend, fat actress, fat mum, and fat wife – or, to put it another way, how I got to thinking my bum looked big in everything, whether it did or not.