For about two years now, and I blush to admit this, I've had a gym in my house
Julie Burchill Saturday February 22, 2003 The Guardian
Yes, that's right - cross-trainer, stationary bike, abdo-crusherator, weights, the works. And approximately three times a week during this time, my dearest compadre and I have roused ourselves from cocktails by the pool, sighed deeply at each other and pranced around like crazed things for a couple of hours at a time.
My friend, because she's single, self-disciplined and hard-working, has lost loads of weight and now looks quite like Reese Witherspoon. Me, because I'm smugly attached, terminally self-indulgent and bone idle, I've lost half a stone in the whole two years and still look quite like the After photograph in an imaginary and self-defeating advert demonstrating the effect of too many Reese's Peanut Butter Cups on the middle-aged female human body. But we are equally happy with our progress, for different reasons. My friend's happy because she can get into size 12 jeans; I'm happy because I'm still only a size 18.
I never minded when I started putting on weight in my 30s because:
a) I grew up in probably the last time and place, the 1970s working class, when it was considered perfectly normal for a woman to double her dress size between the ages of 20 and 40.
b) I've got the opposite of the body dysmorphia and general self-loathing that seem par for the course in many successful women these days, and always feel ridiculously pleased with all aspects of myself. This is a fool's paradise, no doubt - but any sort of paradise is not be sniffed at, in my experience.
c) I was the thinnest girl with the tiniest hips and biggest tits on the 1970s London punk scene, and what did my handspan waist get me? Tony Parsons!
d) It's not my job to be thin - a fact that remains a source of endless glee to me.
Nevertheless, two years ago, I decided that, although I wasn't going to diet or deprive my supine, sultry self in any way whatsoever in a bid to get thinner, I certainly didn't want to get any bigger. To be blunt, I didn't want to end up as wide as I was tall; I didn't want to injure people unlucky enough to sit beside me on aeroplanes; I didn't want to look like a fat person more than I looked like myself - admittedly a slightly hall of mirrors version of myself, but nevertheless still recognisable after a fashion and taking into account that I'm now 43 rather than 17.
There's a level of fatness - as with its far scarier, non-identical twin, self-inflicted starvation - where men, women and children have the same basic face, are literally lost inside the belly of the beast that has swallowed them. I'm totally up myself, so I didn't want to disappear like that; at a size 18 I could still see myself, whereas as a size 28 I wouldn't be able to.
Above all, I really didn't want to keep getting bigger as I didn't want to get bitter about thin girls, as the saddest sort of fat woman does - when being irrevocably overweight becomes a selfless (hah!), spread-the-gospel crusade, rather than a result of giving in to one's adorably animal appetites.
When I was a perfect 10, I was the sweetest person in the world - no, really! - and had to put up with so much judgmental cattiness from chicks of the chunky persuasion that I swore I'd never go that route. I've actually got Dawn French to thank for my ever-increasing stamina and suppleness; her tragically babyish, bitchy mantra of "Thin women = neurotic and sexless, fat women = fun-fun-fun" struck me as the most anti-feminist, bullying bullshit I'd heard in years.
She's toned it down a bit since her allegedly lard-loving husband was caught in a compromising situation with a blonde dolly several years ago, but I'd like to thank her nevertheless for giving me the wake-up call every fat bird needs: the fervent desire never to be like her.
Somehow, I've been really lucky with the Fat Thing in a way most women don't seem to be: I can't be arsed to lose weight, but feel totally unthreatened by thin girls, and thus see as little point in being "proud" to be podgy as I would in Kate Moss being "proud" to be thin, which I'm sure she isn't.
Incidentally, I don't know either French or Moss, but I do know people who've had close-up experience of both, and the skinny, therefore supposedly neurotic Moss is apparently a sweetheart, whereas the rotund, therefore supposedly jolly French is allegedly ... not quite so easy-going, shall we say.
So I don't give a toss that Sophie Dahl's lost weight - she's a model! - or that Kate Winslet was streamlined for a magazine cover. Their job is to be looked at! Instead of carping about them not being like us, we should thank our lucky stars that we don't have to be like them; models-actresses-whatever, peaking at 19, over at 29, for ever looking over their shoulders for the thinner, younger challenger.
If your face and figure are your fortune, you've got more, not less, trouble in store as time goes by. The last thing you need is a bunch of moaning Teletubbies on your case in the name of feminism. "Real women have curves"? Not necessarily. They come in all different sizes.
But real women of any description aren't threatened by professionally thin women; they can enjoy their other-worldly, differently-abled contribution to our culture, and see them first and foremost as our surreal sisters under the skin. Even if there is a lot less of it.