I am fat. I even edge into being clinically obese — by the BMI calculation of dividing my weight by my height squared. Yet into this squared pigeonhole, this round and roly-poly peg refuses to be squished. Because what it says on paper is not the truth of who I am: I am no couch potato, no blob, no wobble-butt or lardarse. I do not overflow from my seat on aeroplanes — nor do my cholesterol levels or blood pressure in any way fit the profile of an obese person.
The news this week that fat women benefit more from exercise than from diet is no revelation to me. If you didn’t know what I looked like, my weekly exercise diary would read almost like Demi Moore’s . . . two hours sweating around West London with a personal trainer, an hour-and-a-half session of Pilates, an hour of hilariously bad tennis and, in between, an obsession with bicycling everywhere. I don’t do this to sweat off the calories, I do it to keep fit and healthy and to justify eating. When I ski, I out-ski everyone I’m with, skiing harder, bumpier, higher, longer (notice I don’t say that about the tennis). As one friend put it, as she saw me picking up not one but three children to carry them across a stream last summer, “you are scarily strong”.
So I am fit, healthy and fat. I am also, when the clothes, make-up and lighting have all come together, confidently fat and sexy. I follow fashion, not the fashion of midriff-baring or the minidresses of skinny minnies, nor the fascism that masquerades as fashion for fat people – the kaftans, three-quarter sleeves and elasticated waists — but a cherry-picking of those trends that suit me. I can look fairly good with clothes on — and exponentially better without. I am the opposite of an anorexic: they look in the mirror and see a fat person; this fat person looks in the mirror and sees only perfect curves and a marvellous bosom. But there is no getting away from the fact that I am fat — and nor do I need to. It is the self-love that dare not speak its name.
There are a few of us self-lovers about but society is, at best, ambivalent. After all, no one wants to be too different. My confidence even begins to wobble towards the defensive when faced by celebrities such as Nigella Lawson and Charlotte Church who, first lauded by the press for their womanly curvaceousness, are then praised even more when they “slim down”. But I’m going to stick to my buns on this one. I may actually be fat, but every woman I know thinks that she is fat. Even the friend who hasn’t a spare inch to pinch anywhere on her body is plagued with body issues — and desperate to find the perfect diet. So I’m not so different after all — I’m meant to think I’m fat — with the only deviation being that I’m going to be less tortured about it. It’s a funny thing, being fat and fancy-free. I was at a series of workshops recently, run for the store managers of a chain of shops that sell women’s clothes in sizes 16-26 (I hover between 16/18 for trousers and 20 for tops), and the word “fat” was not mentioned for the first two days. When I josh about being fat, I watch people’s reactions: watch the struggle between pity and admiration that I could be so frank. When I go running with my personal trainer, who isn’t exactly rake-thin herself, I chuckle at the confusion on the faces of passers-by. “Two fat birds! And look at them go!” The greatest tease was when I had naked pictures of myself taken as a present for my husband’s 40th birthday: even my closest friends were astonished at my blatant — even brazen — acceptance of my body.
As Ogden Nash put it: “I am constantly in/The mood/for food.” For me, food is not about pigging out on deep-fried Mars bars and living in McDonald’s, but a reverence for food that is fresh, wholesome and, yes, probably a bit naughty. So for me, Christmas lunch will be about lingering over the voluptuous curve of the turkey’s breast; sinking my teeth into a well-cooked sprout; lolling in the lambent glow of a golden roast potato — oh, that delicious surrender as crunch gives way to velvety softness — and luxuriating in the tart little tingle of an occasional lick of cranberry sauce. Champagne will be dealt with greedily. Brandy butter will be stroked on to that mouthwatering tangle of fruit and naughty bits known as Christmas pudding. This isn’t just food, this is guilt-free food.
After Christmas and New Year, I will not, therefore, be going on a diet. I may well have put on (more) weight but, unlike the majority of the female population (an estimated 12½ million Brits are trying to diet), I will not be scanning the bookshelves and the health and lifestyle sections of the newspapers for This Year’s Way to Lose Weight. I may be a devoted follower of fashion, but I am beyond fashion when it comes to diets. Why would I want to sign up for weeks of deprivation, expensive and exhausting detox, or the tyranny and self-obsessiveness of examining the few morsels I am allowed to put into my body and analysing their ability to make me thin? Why suffer the side-effects of bad breath and bad temper? Not to mention the inability to think about anything else other than food? I love food — why should I suddenly have to hate it?
I won’t be going on a diet because I know something that you all secretly know too: dieting makes you fat.
More accurately, it makes you fat and makes me fatter. If you diet — in the modern sense of the word — you will, when you stop “dieting”, put on weight. It was something I always suspected from looking at my own history and those around me — my mother has spent most of her life on one diet or another and hates her figure more now than she ever did — but it was only when I was researching my book, Fat So?, which started off as an anthology of diets and ended up a crusade against its very subject, that I put flesh on to the bones of that basic observation.
In a study of the survivors of the two years of famine in the Warsaw Ghetto of the Second World War, the truth was there in the starkest possible way. Of those survivors (nearly all of whom had also gone through the starvation of the concentration camps), most became markedly fat after the war — flabby, with devastated muscle tone. Scientists worked out that, for years, these men and women had an average daily calorie intake of between 700 and 800, suffering a daily deficit of 1,700 calories. Faced with so little coming in, their bodies went into famine mode, secreting fat stores and eating into muscle tissue instead. Once their diet went back to normal, their bodies did not replace the burnt muscle tissue but, assuming that starvation might happen again any minute, shunted any surplus calories straight into fat cells. What was true for the Polish Jews is true for us. Crash-diet in January? Don’t do it, because as soon as you resume normal — or even sensible — eating, your body has the same reaction: stashing the stuff straight into fat cells because who knows when that starvation routine is going to happen again. As the comedienne Rita Rudner said: “It takes six months to get in shape and two weeks to get out of shape. As soon as you know this, you can stop being angry about other things in life and only be angry about this.”
There’s even worse news. So primeval are we that, if we go on a serious diet, we waken the primitive beast that is our “fat memory”. While we spend our entire lives struggling to reach our “ideal weight” — the thinnest we’ve ever been or the “thin memory” of what we used to weigh as teenagers or pre-babies — our body has a different agenda. Its “fat memory” is a different animal and is programmed to get us back to the highest weight we have ever been — as a caveman’s survival mechanism to keep the body in a state of readiness for any more famine. These days, with abundant food, ever-increasing portion-size (yes, that’s you, burger chains, with your doubled and tripled Big Macs and Whoppers) and yo-yo dieting, our fat “thermostat” gets set artificially high, so the body stores fat above and beyond a caveman’s dreams. The really shocking news — you may want to stick your fingers in your ears here and sing “La! La! La! Can’t hear you!” — is that the sadistic bastards who worked out the “fat memory” explanation tell us that once this has happened — once we’ve got a bit fat, dieted furiously to take it off and then got fatter afterwards as a consequence — it takes the body upwards of 20 years to reset that thermostat and “forget”.
I was put on my first diet by my mother when I was 12 and stopped dieting about ten years ago. Since I am now nearly 38, on the 20-year “fat memory” timetable I will be 48 before I can undo the damage done by that first diet. Thinking about this — or, indeed, any of the thousands of other diet theories that heckle us through life — is enough to make one crawl under the duvet and frogmarch through a few Flakes. But I won’t. I’m fat. So what? I last longer when tossed into the Arctic Ocean and, in the meantime, I like my eating life — unlike my friends, who dread every dinner invitation, business lunch or children’s birthday party.
So I shall not be lard-butting my way through the festive season. I will be as active as possible (perhaps not the full 18-mile hike required to work off the calories consumed at an average Christmas lunch, but exercise will be taken) and I will choose my food carefully for a mood-enhancing mixture of nutritional goodness and pure pleasure — a little of what you fancy does you good. I love my food and I love my body — why should the two be mutually exclusive? At one end of the scale is the old maxim of “Eat less, exercise more”, but we all know that’s true (as Edina says in Absolutely Fabulous: “Sweetie, if it was that easy, everybody would be doing it”) so I won’t insult your intelligence and I will step to the other end. This is where we can celebrate food — the freshness, the deliciousness of home-cooking, the news that red wine, avocados, olive oil, even chocolate, are not all bad — and celebrate living.
Let’s eliminate our excessive use of dairy, refined sugar, processed flour. Do you know why we like these foods in the first place? Because we’re snobs and show-offs. It’s all a con, the “haute cuisine” of fancy food based on meat, cream, cheese, sweetness: a legacy from the Age of Enlightenment (and Enfattenment) when the emerging middle classes of the 17th and 18th centuries had less to fear from famine and plague and had a more assured food supply.
Rich food — involving long processes and using expensive new imports such as sugar — was just one more way to show off their riches; so why do we still hold up as a “treat” a way of eating that is unnatural, unbalanced and founded on mere prosperity? The day we realise that brown rice is simply more delicious than white is still perhaps a way off, but the first thing we must all to do is to throw away the meal-for-one, steer clear of fast-food joints and sandwich shops, get back in to the kitchen and start enjoying food that is then enjoyed by our bodies. Bon appetit – now you can have a very happy Christmas.
Fat, So?, by Susannah Jowitt, will be published by Think Books on January 5 — available at The Times Books First price of £8.54, including p&p, on 0870 1608080.
Do you love your curves — or do you loathe them? Post your comments using the form below
