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

Preface: how to tell if you think you’re fat

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

The real me is thin

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.

This book is for any woman or girl trapped in the wrong thinking that there’s another, better, ‘real’ her out there. It’s for any woman who has trouble accepting the size and shape she is. Really, it’s for any woman who’s ever thought twice about anything she’s putting into her mouth.

When their ship came in

On 6 December 1957, in an uncharacteristically chilly San Francisco, it snows for the first time in 17 years. A much-longed-for baby girl is born. Encouraged by the forward-thinking obstetrician (and very unusually for the time), the father witnesses the birth. A sister for two boys: Andrew, a few weeks away from turning three, and Matthew, a few weeks past turning two. Now the parents have three under three (as they would often say in future years with an air of both pride and disbelief). A telegram – a wild extravagance in those days – dispatched to the parents’ parents back in Scotland contains only one word.

Arabella.

That’d be me.

They tell me this story many times over the years. My adored Granny Sheila, my mother’s stepmother, also repeats the story many times. It has always made me feel like an important event, like a ship’s maiden voyage or a spacecraft successfully circling the sun. No explanation necessary, no further information required. Everyone reading the telegram will understand: that’s it, mission accomplished – the longed-for girl has been produced. As the years pass, my mother never fails to add the extra, not so welcome, detail: ‘and she weighed nearly 11 pounds!’ So in some ways, given that the average newborn’s weight is 7 pounds, I sort of was a ship, actually more of a tanker, practically an ocean liner compared to the tiny dinghies most babies are.

The family was in San Francisco awaiting removal to Washington, DC, where my father was to start work at the British Embassy a few months after I was born. I have very few, fragmented recollections of the following four years, except of time spent with our wonderful Jamaican cook and nanny, Innes. She was a short, round, squishy woman who showered us with affection all day long. She wasn’t officially our nanny. A fierce Scottish woman had been brought with us to do that job, but she’d soon left, not able to compete with the loving and beloved Innes. Innes used to feed us in front of the television and give us Coca-Cola in glass bottles! A combination of thrilling indulgences tolerated by our parents, thanks to Innes’ irresistible charm and easygoing nature.

My parents’ marriage was probably at its happiest in Washington. And why wouldn’t it have been? Those were the Kennedy years, the Camelot years. Washington was full of exciting, young, politically active people. Professionally, Dad, though still very lowly, was right in the thick of it; Mum got to know other like-minded, bright, capable women and she didn’t have to cook. What could have been better? Although, unusually for the time, Mum had lived independently before getting married (and had therefore, presumably, fed herself), she’d managed to overlook the obligatory grind that was central to a successful married life – the provision of endless, appetising, not to mention nourishing, meals for children and spouse. It’s the iceberg lurking under seemingly calm waters, the unspoken yet taken-for-granted clause of most marriage contracts: there will be cooking, day in, day out, whether you feel like it or not, for year after year after year. In the early Fifties, when my parents married, this chore fell exclusively to women. And there was no discussion about it being a chore. More than 50 years on, little has changed. Sure, there are plenty of flamboyant male cooks around now, taking the sting out of cooking being a ‘girly’ thing to do, but the relentless daily grind of actually feeding a family still falls to the mother in the vast majority of instances.

In my mother’s case, I guess she’d imagined (as she often did about anything that irked her) that if she ignored this inexorable chore, it would somehow go away. Up until that time, though, she hadn’t had to deal too much with that most wearing of responsibilities, since they’d had only a few years of married life in London before being posted abroad – and a foreign posting always included an allowance for ’staff. Obviously, the poorer the country of your posting the more staff you could get, since you were paying wages at the local rate. So, in America in the Fifties as a First Secretary to the British Embassy in Washington, Dad’s staff allowance meant they could afford Innes, who was doing the job of both cook and nanny. I’m not sure how many of the changes promised by the burgeoning civil rights movement Innes was ever going to see, but she was much loved and greatly treasured by all our family, even Mum and Dad.

If they were having a big dinner or a party Mum and Innes would cook together. One of the very few positive food-related memories I have of Mum is the sensational sweet-sour salad dressing she made with a ‘secret ingredient’ she attributed to Innes – dark brown sugar. The dressing was richly brown and gooey, like very liquidy tar, and tasted so good. Nowadays, of course, anyone who fancies themselves as a bit of a turn in the kitchen uses sugar in salad dressing, or balsamic vinegar which, tasty as it is, is really just sugar in a bottle. Back then, it was Innes’s own invention, or at least a trick brought with her from Jamaica, and I can’t taste or make that dressing without thinking of our cuddly, uninhibitedly affectionate nanny-cook.

Mum was a good cook but lazy or rather unconventional about how and when to cook. Added to that she was breezily capricious about meting out food, constantly, and always on a whim, changing her mind about who deserved what. It was like being fed by King Lear. She cared greatly about good-quality food; just not if she was the one who had to provide it. But I can still remember some fantastic things she cooked: chocolate souffl$eAs she’d unintentionally leave in the oven too long, so that the top skin crustified a bit and became chewy and nutty, like a brownie; leeks slow-cooked in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, and brown sugar (again); mushroom risottos; apple crumbles with raisins and cloves, the crumble buttery and crunchy with sugar. And bread. Mum used to make batches of delicious wholemeal bread long before wholemeal was trendy and everything was suddenly supposed to be home-made and not-white.

But all this stopped when she and Dad started breaking up. I say ‘started’ because, like some unloved old clapped-out car, they let the marriage limp along for years, giving it an occasional kick to see if it could be made to work properly, but then letting it conk out again, not really knowing if either of them cared enough to put the effort into getting the engine restarted. It’s hard to make something work if you don’t know whether or not you really want it to. The first time I think I realised my parents were in real trouble was when I bit into a slice of Mum’s bread and got a mouthful of rock salt. There was so much of it that the skin on my lips puckered up instantly, as if I’d dived into the Dead Sea with my mouth open. Mum hadn’t crushed up the salt properly before mixing it in. That’s when I knew things were really beginning to fall apart.

Open the box

I started changing shape and gaining weight as they started breaking up. Actually, I’d say, using as evidence the few photographs there are of me from around that time, 1965–6, my body was simply plumping out, maybe in readiness for puberty, or maybe I was just putting on weight. I don’t look as though I’d have needed two seats on the bus, but neither could I be described as svelte. As if to accentuate my non-sylph-like self, I’d been given an all-the-rage-at-the-time Beatles-style pudding-bowl haircut. I don’t know whose idea that was. I knew who the Beatles were and I liked them well enough, but I was more of a Monkeys’ fan. I don’t remember yearning for a Beatles’ haircut; quite apart from anything else, they were boys. It’s hard to imagine a more inappropriate choice for a not terribly pretty, not very confident, chunky nine-year-old girl. Like some awful judgement barometer, as they started arguing more and more, I started getting rounder and rounder. At the same time Mum became more openly and vocally angry about and resentful of her ‘wifely’ duties, chief amongst which seemed to be cooking.

After we’d returned to Britain in 1963, with my little sister, Christina, born the year before, we set up home in a large flat in central London while Dad looked for a suitable house to buy. Dad was back in the Foreign Office and I can barely remember him being around at all, and Mum clearly wasn’t happy. One day, outside ‘eating hours’, I complained to Mum, ‘I’m hungry.’ She replied brusquely, ‘Fine. It’s good for you.’ I didn’t know what she meant. I had no idea what she was talking about. At that young age I knew nothing about dieting and the process of denying yourself food in order to lose weight. Mum didn’t go on to explain the procedure or my apparent need to know about such things. However, I did immediately realise that my telling her I was hungry had made her cross. And I remember quickly thinking I’d have to get something to eat without her finding out.

There must have been other ’ticking off incidents related to my hunger and or food before this, but it’s the one that sticks in my mind as the moment when the dreaded box was first opened: the box marked ‘how to have a neurotic relationship with food’ or, depending on who’s responsible for producing the box in the first place, you might call it the ‘how to give your child an unhealthy attitude to food’ box. Or put simply, and without apportioning any blame, it was a key lesson in ‘how to get fat’.

Thwarted and confused, I was – naturally – still hungry, and could not begin to work out how the gnawing in my stomach was in any way ‘good for me’. Satisfied that I was going to accept her reaction to my announcement, Mum went off while I hung around in the hall. I allowed a few minutes to pass and then strolled casually, with as best a nothing-to-see-here-rm-not-thinking-about-food-anymore-at-all air as I could fashion, past the open door to the living room, where my mother was now immersed in a book, and snuck into the kitchen.

Once there, I did something I’d never done before and it surprised me. After a last-minute perimeter check I went over to the cupboard, sneaked out a packet of biscuits, and wolfed down the entire thing. As each successive one made its dry, crumbly way down my throat I quickly realised that I didn’t actually want the whole packet at all. I knew I only really wanted one or two, but I was panicking by now. It had been made clear that I wasn’t going to get any through the approved channels, so I thought I’d better secure as many as I could covertly, and by any means necessary. I was anxious that, when official ‘biscuit time’ came round, my hunger, left unsated, would be so massive that there simply wouldn’t be enough biscuits in the world, never mind in our flat, to hold it at bay. In any case, the prevailing ‘biscuit law’ in our house meant that no one was ever really allowed more than two for fear of unleashing an avalanche of eyebrow raising and sharp inhalation of breath, accompanied by a tirade of unfavourable comments about what wanting more than two said about your entire personality, and that’s leaving aside the very real possibility of being called a ‘greedy pig’ in front of everyone else.

But to me this hunger wasn’t my friend, it wasn’t being nice to me, so how could it possibly be ‘good for me’? When has hunger ever helped anyone do anything? I was completely bemused. It wasn’t like brushing my teeth, which I was always being nagged to do. It was tedious but did at least feel good after I’d done it and I believed it stopped my teeth from falling out. An unfed hunger is a monster on your back. And when you’re a hungry child, unable to cater for yourself and someone, apparently deliberately, won’t feed you, you just feel upset, enraged, and powerless. From then on the whole ‘hunger is good for you, eating is bad for you’ became established as a recurring theme in my life and I very quickly lost all sense of proportion regarding food. I lost the ability to distinguish between nice food and food I didn’t fancy. I lost the ability to eat moderately. I lost the capacity to know what ‘full’ meant. I just had to eat what I could when I could. I began to crave food, in any form, all the time.

On that particular biscuit day something had to be done to kill my hunger, and if Mum thought it was so ‘good for me’ to be hungry, then obviously she wasn’t about to help me tackle it to the ground. I couldn’t waste time thinking about how many biscuits I actually wanted. Now that I had in my grasp the means of reducing my hunger I just had to stuff in as many as possible before I was discovered. Only that way would I get rid of the hunger, ensure it didn’t return soon, and, most importantly, avoid being at the mercy of Mum’s erratic feeding regime again that day.

In adult life I’ve learnt that this kind of bingeing is known as ‘ensuring your supply’, where you (or more specifically me) do something irrational like, say, cramming down a whole loaf of bread in one go because you fear you won’t be allowed any, even a perfectly reasonable slice or two, when the time for eating bread comes along. I’m told that, when a social event is looming, alcoholics who are acknowledged as such by family and friends drink in advance and in secret, downing much more than they need to reach the inebriated state they crave, because they know they can’t have one or two drinks in public like everyone else, since that will inevitably lead to questions about their drinking.

My mum and dad, by this time at loggerheads on practically everything, were at least united in the shared worry that their first-born daughter was getting fat and agreed I needed to be reigned in. Once my parents started focusing on my size it was made clear that I wouldn’t be allowed to eat the same things my siblings were eating, since they weren’t deemed overweight. The scene was now set for what turned out to be a lifetime of feeling under attack by the enemy – hunger, which raged seemingly constantly on one side, with parental disapproval looming on the other. As a result I have never felt entitled to eat nor, moreover, to enjoy eating. Good girls don’t eat.

It’s probably fair to say that I have never, ever put anything in my mouth without thinking about whether it’ll make me fat – well, fatter – and I do mean not one single thing.

‘Arabella’s fat’

In my experience most family members have affectionate nicknames for each other (or supposedly affectionate, at any rate). If not actual nicknames then a shorthand way of referring to their relatives. These monikers are often taken from a dominant characteristic that particular family member is seen to demonstrate. When we hear people say ‘My sister’s the bossy one’ or ‘My brother’s the grumpy one’, we don’t think that’s the only trait their sibling has. We know what they’re talking about. We understand that it’s their ‘thing’ and that that person is more neat or bossy than the rest of his/her family. We are ‘placed’ by our family members and our position is carved out from early on. It doesn’t have to mean very much at all about how your family gets along. It’s just something families do, bigger ones especially. The same is true of school friends and work colleagues; any group of people spending a lot of time together replicate a family of some sort.

Your position in your own family may be perfectly benign and extend to no more than being ‘the forgetful one’ or ‘the tidy one’. However, if the label your family gives you is reductive, and informs how they treat you, then it’s less benign and harder to break away from. In my family, for blindingly obvious reasons (not least because it was said out loud), I was the fat one. Even when I’d grown up and sometimes wasn’t actually fat (or, rather, was less fat than at other times), eating with either of my parents remained fraught with anxiety. Any discussion of anything edible, never mind the act of actually eating, in the presence of any member of my family still hurls me into a gripping panic that I won’t get enough.