Dear World…
… I’ve held off blogging about this so far, in part because I hoped my feelings about it would shrink, but they haven’t.
So, as I tweeted back on 6th May (albeit more succinctly with the 240 character limit):
Dear World,
in the highly unlikely event I ever experience a sudden and dramatic weightloss (especially following a lengthy disappearance from the public eye due to difficult personal circumstances), could I please ask you to respectfully refrain from congratulating me, or in fact commenting at all, until I have commented myself on the topic. Particularly, please don’t treat that weightloss as though it’s more important than any of my other achievements - my MA, the job I love, my publications, my excellent scone recipe - or insinuate that I’m somehow a better person because I’m thinner.
Because I can assure you I won’t be. A better person, that is.
As I’m sure you can imagine, a recent photograph of a beautiful, talented, world-famous woman who used to be bigger and is now smaller sparked this blog. I won’t name her - and actually, who knows, there’s every possibility that in between me writing this and me publishing it, another picture of another beautiful, talented, world-famous woman might appear who used to be bigger but is now smaller, so naming her is unnecessary and only going to make re-publishing this later more difficult.
The thing is, I don’t need to name her, do I? This is such an old story - so old it’s even started happening to men as well. Longbottoming, anyone?
I watched the Dawn French Netflix special the other day, incidentally, in which she talks about her relationship with the media and especially the way her size has been discussed in the public eye. She also mentioned what happened when she’d lost a bunch of weight - I’m not going to quote her directly because frankly the whole show was warm and funny and heartbreaking and you should watch it your bloody selves - but it really brought to the fore, for me, that there are tropes I see around this narrative every time it crops back up in the media.
‘she’s had lipo/gastric band/other form of surgery’ (I mean, she might - and so what? Still none of your fucking business, Sandra)
‘She must have a DVD coming out’ (fatphobia AND snarking about women in the creative industries figuring out a new way of making money, fabulous)
‘Ah, she’ll pile it all back on in a few months…’ (and I’m sure you’ll be just as poisonous and jealous then, as well)
‘oh she looks so much healthier now’ (but you DON’T KNOW THAT)
No, seriously, I know you THINK you know, and I know that it seems to make a certain type of surface-logic, but You Don’t Know.
You have no fucking idea, and the very fact you’re on the internet commenting under a Daily Ma*l article that a celebrity you have no hope of ever being mates with now looks so much healthier despite the fact you know nothing about her medical history suggests to me that you don’t actually give a toss about her health, you just don’t like fat people.
Someone I know, who is sadly no longer with us, got a metric shit ton of compliments about her weight loss shortly after she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. I know several women (and men, actually) whose weight losses and subsequent gains are largely down to deep seated mental health conditions and eating disorders.
I’ve grown up watching the women of my family fall in and out of diets, and as I’ve got older I’ve done it too; between us we’ve done SlimFast and Slimming World, Weight Watchers and Cabbage Soup, Atkins and Clean Eating, South Beach and F Plan, Diet Chef and Celebrity Slim. I did the Special K Challenge - that one where you eat cereal twice a day for two weeks to ‘drop a jeans size’ when I was TWELVE. Also, I did it again when I was 21, 23 and 24.
Diet culture gets us young, and although sometimes something takes, most of the time it doesn’t.
I’m not pretending I’m immune, and neither am I suggesting that I personally can be ‘healthy at every size’.
I can’t; I’m predisposed to arthritis as it is because of my hyper mobility so excess weight won’t help matters and my blood sugar migraines, PCOS and ‘borderline’ thyroid are all indicators I need to watch my food. They’re all also reasons I struggle to lose weight though, and at 30 I’m absolutely done with crying in fitting rooms because I don’t (literally) ‘fit in’ with fashion.
I’m not going to stop people from being judgy little horrors on the internet with this blog post, or with my righteous replies on Twitter that frankly only serve to spur them on, but I do want to end with the last of the tropes that piss me off (this one, unlike most of the others, almost exclusively from men):
‘it’s just biology that men want non-obese women’
To which I’d like to answer pretty plainly: