So I was out the other night. A long-awaited catch up with a couple of ladies I got to know from dropping off my eldest at kinder last year. We rarely see each other these days, so after a few tries and a concerted effort on each of our parts, we finally coordinated a night out. I dusted off one of two sets of ‘night out’ clothes, the other girls even put on high heels and we set off to paint the town red.
As it happens, Mornington’s original colour scheme remains intact as we stopped and possibly left imprints at a cosy wine bar on Main Street, opting to chat the night away rather than lowering the tone with post 30 dancing or screeching on karaoke. The evening sprawled into the wee hours and was decidedly more about the cocktails than the food, thankfully, as the bar snacks were mediocre at best, but the French Martinis helped me to relive my youth, taking me back to the bars of Sauchiehall street in Glasgow. Multiple cocktails were necessary then to keep you insulated while waiting in line on a winter’s night to flash your ID at a power hungry security guard, who checked your speech for slurring before allowing you to proceed into some dingy, sticky-floored, cattle market with ‘Summer of ’69’ playing. What fun.
Anyway, I digress. Back to Mornington. Conversation with the girls led on to food and diet. Weight loss and gain. Babies. Hormones. And women being women, each of us somehow felt the need to justify our size. Is it just me, or have we all been there?
‘For me, it’s not about weight loss, it’s just about feeling good.’
‘I’d love to get back to my pre-baby weight.’
‘If I could just get into my skinny jeans, then I’d be happy.’
‘I don’t understand it, I eat all the right things.’
Plump or slender, fat or thin, pear-shaped or bean-pole, why do women feel like they owe the rest of the world an explanation for their shape? And I absolutely don’t exclude myself from this frustration. I am most certainly not immune .
My relationship with food and my body has always been tumultuous. I was brought up in a culture where everyone passed comment on how you looked, whether your face was fat or thin-looking, whether you had ‘they chunky legs’ or ‘thon sticky out chin'(Scots, where there is an additional demonstrative pronoun, just by the way!) and compliments were somehow always back-handed. ‘Haw Karn, you’ve lost pure heaps’a weight, man! Yer lookin’ pure magic!’ Well, really.
Then, I moved to a culture where nobody would comment that I looked nice, even when I was going out. Make-up and all. Nothing! I was starting to give up all hope and chain myself to the sofa with an almighty bowl of cornflakes and a stash of ‘Vicar of Dibley’ DVDs, when I realised that nobody had commented upon my chicken skin or muffin top either. Aha! Australian women must have it sorted, thought I. They don’t have the same body issues and put themselves down the way we Scottish women do. Alas, this was not really the case either.
10 years in Australia, 2 children on and a third cooking, age 32, I still have the same conversations about the way I look, my extra kilos, my now too small clothes. Not always instigated by me, but often. As though somewhere, deep down, I want somebody to say, ‘really? An extra 8 kilos? I don’t know where you’d lose it from!’ But they don’t and it doesn’t make me feel any better.
Eating well makes me feel better and so does cake, in equal measure. I see no reason to drastically change my eating habits, fast, cleanse or fear food, but what I would like to do is stop with the fat remarks. Surely the first step to truly believing that you are ok, beautiful even, the way you are is to stop the self-deprecating fat humour. That is probably the most unattractive thing about me.
The truth is that I am responsible for my own happiness. I have the ability to choose one thought over another. I must choose to think positively about this body that I am in for it is healthy and has grown two precious children. I must choose to not fall into the trap of explaining my shape to others, to my friends. I must choose not to resent women who have the iron will to keep in shape.
And so it begins. The next time I pull out the old mascara and skinny jeans and head out with the girls, I will not compare. I will be more accepting of them, and of me. Size 16 or size 6. I will not judge, compare or idolise, but relax and revel in the absolute wonder that is womanhood. I will paint the town red and deliver a fabulous rendition of ‘I am who I am’ to an adoring crowd at a very classy Mornington establishment…ok, I’m getting carried away now. But you heard it here. Fat Karen is no more. There will be no kilos shed. And no tears either.
mrsmixalot 