The dreaded D word

The funny thing about watching what you eat is it means you think about food all the time. Except it’s not funny at all. It’s miserable. I’ve never been one to diet and I don’t weigh myself. Ever. I think it makes you paranoid. I’ve done it a couple of times, for a laugh, like when I was due with Jonah, or super super slim after a year off the sugar, but generally I think you’re a glutton for punishment being a slave to the scales.

I got weighed at the doctors when I signed up at a new surgery, recently, and let out a sigh of relief as the nurse calculated my body mass index and got told it was perfect. But then what’s considered “a perfect body weight” often depends on who is doing the looking.

I am not big. I am curvy with tiny bones. Size 3 and a half feet and snappable wrists, a long, willowy neck. My tiny head means the minute I put on weight, my body looks too big for it, and my weak jaw catches my face at bad angles in pictures. I don’t like having my photo taken, but on video, I can look quite lovely. My face is much prettier in motion, and veers between a younger, fatter, blonder Duchess of Windsor, that girl from Interview with a Vampire whose name escapes me, and the gawky, sexy one from Secretary. But the person I like to think I look like most is a slightly past her best,  pale Vivienne Leigh, concentration lines starting to etch through well defined eyebrows.

I have been told I’m beautiful, although I suspect only as a ruse to get in my knickers, but I’ve also been told I was Rubenesque, the poetic way of telling me I was chunky – for a stripper.  I am S shaped, which means I have T and A, the former relatively unaffected by breastfeeding, really – and Ava went at it for 15 months – and the latter about which men have waxed lyrical over more than once, mainly while drunk. My backside has garnered more than its fair share of unwanted attention over the years, many if which I have spent fretting over it, and pummeling at its stubborn cellulite, which first appeared when I went on the pill, for acne, aged 13.

I can look great. I can look fucking awful, but really, most of the time, short of looking tidy, I don’t give how I look a second glance. I am certainly not vain. Make-up takes ten minutes, and I like nice clothes as much as the next woman, but I’ll as happily pick up something second hand as designer, which I haven’t afforded for years, and I am much more classic than I am trendy. LBDs, jeans and blouses, nice shoes and handbags – you can wear them, whatever size you are. That’s how I know I’ve put on weight. Not the handbags. My jeans. I’m avoiding them.

My weight’s been creeping up through work and stress. It’s true you can be too tired to eat properly, too fed up to care that much, and when the highlight of your day is a piece of chocolate at the end of it, what’s really going to stop you putting it in your mouth? I haven’t really cared. I still look alright and who am I trying to impress, anyway?

But now Jonah keeps pointing at me when that Big Fat Butt song comes on the radio and slapping my bum, inappropriately, so it’s time to do something. I have a system for weight loss, like everything else. Eat everything you like, as long as it’s not beige. Bread is my nemesis, pasta gives me a paunch and there’s nothing quite like white wine to make me go pouchy and round. But it’s only recently I’ve got a workable Way to lose weight sorted.
I first got tubby aged 21, slyphlike after a bout of traveller’s tummy in India (yes I did a gap yah), I followed up by getting the fattest I’d ever been at in Australia, right before I started uni. I was a waddling cliché (everyone gets fat in Australia, or so goes the traveller’s rubric), so for three weeks before I started uni, I lived on fresh fruit, with a meal of fish and rice while topping up my tan and buying optimistic size 27s at a Levi’s Shop in South East Asia. I returned, slender enough, only to pile on the booze pounds in my first year. By my second, I was a religious gym nut and would go to classes or swim lengths at least every other day. That way, I kept fit and could keep up with all the boozing. But who has time for that when you’re an actual grownup?

By 24 I was pregnant, if not exactly barefoot, and ironically, looked trimmer throughout my pregnancy because I was no longer guzzling two glasses of white with Tom every night. I crash dieted after Jonah, the excoriation of his birth made me feel super human for months until I  crashed headlong PND from sleep deprivation at ten months post partum, but for a while, I lived off smoothies and breastfed myself back into my jeans, and then a bit extra, just to prove I could.

Pregnant with Ava, Tom lost his job, and with it, my weight plummeted from worry, and soup making,  until it didn’t anymore. In the absence of eating out, Tom started cooking, cheap, wholesome, stodgy food. Pasta, homemade bread, puddings, anything to keep him busy and me from feeling desperate. I filled out, as I struggled again with sleep and Jonah being three and four and having a baby to boot. By the end, of it all, I was ill. Hair stringy, falling out in handfuls, a mysterious rash plaguing my eyelids and under my armpits. I developed a chronic pain and went on strong medication that just about finished me off. I realised quite how ill I was when I kept falling asleep all the time. It was like every time I ate, my body went into shutdown.

Luckily I have a nutritionist friend who gives me free advice, and she put me on an anti-candida diet. Basically you can eat what you want as long as it doesn’t have sugar. It was a new way of thinking. Oh, I’d toyed with Atkins over the years, for a couple of days here of there, but it always felt wrong, guzzling down steak Bearnaise – and I’d never cut out the booze. But this was really strict.  No fruit. No dairy, no grains. Meat and veggies and water. A cube of cheese every now and again. Lots of smoked salmon. But I was desperate to feel better. For three whole months I stuck to it. Within two weeks, people were commenting on my weight loss. By the end, I was accused of being an anorexic, but not before nearly everyone told me how great I looked. For a year, I stuck vaguely to the plan, introducing brown rice, and vodka cranberry soda so I did’t become a complete social pariah. After all, I felt wonderful. I had more energy. The skin rashes cleared up. I’d cut my hair short by then, and was reveling in hip bones and a lumpy breast bone, wearing my newly flat chest with boy jeans and cropped tops. My boobs weren’t what they had been but I didn’t worry about my cellulite anymore. I wore cut off shorts for the first time EVER.

It was clear that I became a bit obsessed with food, but everyone – my mum, sister, friends, all kept telling how much better I looked. Inside I was sad, and i was chain smoking, out of boredom every time the kids left my sight.

Eventually, I took a conscious decision to eat normally, to set a good example to my daughter. I eat well, but what anyone would say is normal healthy eating – fruit and yoghut for breakfast, salad or cous cous for lunch, a meal in the evening – sometimes pasta, bolognaise, the odd meal out, seems to tip my tiny frame over the edge. Ok, so I often have a square or two of chocolate, the odd glass of wine. It’s hardly pigging out. But my weight has crept up, and up, back to where it used to be, and then a bit more. This holiday I split the zip of a dress I wore when I was up the duff with Ava. Shit just got real.

But I wouldn’t even contemplate dieting unless I felt up to it, and finally, after a week and a half of lounging, wine drinking and bread eating, I feel ready. And I keep falling asleep after I eat. I don’t care that the woman in the bikini shop, thin as a reed offered me a size 40 bikini (fuck off, I’m a 34, but whevs), or that I’ve been walking around sucking in my stomach on the beach. That I can cope with. But I can’t cope being scared of my jeans when I get home.

Yesterday I subsisted on a natural yogurt, green salad (with olive oil and vinegar – fat is NOT the enemy) black coffee and pastis – I AM on holiday. Come dinner time, however, I went for fish but it came with potatoes. I ate a couple. They are stingy on veggies in this country. And then, the bread came out. Perfect, handmade seeded little rolls. Life’s too short and I don’t get bread like this very often, I reasoned. I mopped up the buttery sauce with half a roll. Then guiltily, I finished it. I sulked while the children ate ice cream and hurried everyone back to the apartment where i fell asleep on the balcony as Tom supped desert wine. My nutritionist friend thinks that the tiredness is the result of yeasts fermenting in your gut, making toxins. Pretty grim.

So, day two, begins, and I’m up with the lark, feeling energised. The less you eat, the less hungry you feel. So I begin all over again. But it won’t be till I get home that I can really banish the bread and wave goodbye to the wine. When you’re abroad, you may have the energy, but will power goes out of the window too.