'Some people change duvets for winter, others change coats or entire wardrobes. Me? I change handbags.'
First of all, I am not overweight. An immediate phone call to a friend who always tells it as it is confirmed this. What’s more over the past two years I have spent more and more time at the gym. Not the sweating pounding cardio sort of a gym which involves treadmills and, heaven forbid, running, but the stretching and strengthening sort of a gym which might not look it but is still pretty hard work.
We have become obsessed with being the right weight when the right weight is different for all of us. Newspapers and magazines go from describing women as showing their ample curves to flaunting a washboard stomach. Dress sizes go up in inches to make us feel better about ourselves about what size we buy when we should always feel good about ourselves, no matter what size we are.
We know when we are carrying too much and we know it’s not good for us. We also know how it got there by putting in more calories than we are burning off. We also know that in times of great worry, some people, myself included, use food as a prop. In times of financial hardship, our diet suffers as food becomes more costly and less nutritionally balanced. But can we please stop judging each other on how we look or what we see as the the “norm”. There is no norm when it comes to weight.
So don’t let anyone tell you who you are, what you should look like or who you need to be. Eventually, like me, everyone reaches an age when they know who they are and have the guts to say fat chance when it comes to listening to what others have to say about them. As for smearing food over a waxwork king, what a total waste of perfectly good chocolate cake that was.