I love my body. Not because it’s the sort of body that people ask to the beach, for oily, tousled, soft core photo shoots. Not because it could double for Kylie’s or Cara’s or Cindy’s. Not because it looks fabulous in jeans. Not because I have contrived and maintained a thigh gap (although if I want one, I just stand up with my feet about a metre apart.) It’s because after well over a decade of disordered eating, deliberate vomiting, mad diets and whole packets of custard creams eaten with a compote of salty tears, I have started to make my piece with the fact that it is not to be looked at. It is for doing things.
My body can, with practise and prompting, manage 24 out of the 26 Bikram postures with reasonable ease. My body has just started to do something odd and thrilling when I laugh. A new muscle, just under my boobs, contracts, juddering and shuddering, which makes me giggle harder and harder. My body is a sort of fleshy Swiss army knife. I have long toes, which allow me to pick up travel-sized bottles of shampoo if I drop them in the shower. I have an up there for thinking and a down there for dancing. My kindly bottom is capable of holding doors open for hurried, harried strangers.
I spent over a decade waiting for someone to tell me everything I already knew about my own body. I think I genuinely believed that if I just got thin enough, someone would hand me a special passport and whisper: ‘You’ve made it! Now you can talk to cool people, and have sex!’ Whenever I have made an extended effort to be thin, I have never felt less cool and sexy. I spend 800 per cent more time weeping, and many waking hours wondering whether you’d face a lot of jail time if you were to mug someone in the street for their sausage roll.
I still have the odd wobble. I went to an awards do on Monday, and had a slightly overemotional response to the fact that my first choice of dress did not zip up. Every six to eight weeks, I will have six to eight tabs open on Chrome with Google results for ‘JUICE FAST?’ And if a friend asks me if I’ve lost weight, my immediate response is ‘OH MY GOD, HOW FAT MUST I HAVE BEEN BEFORE?!?’ but I’m better than I’ve ever been at respecting my body and food at the same time. This makes me a size 14, which is the dress size I’ve had since I was 11, before I started all the bingeing and purging. Whenever I have been less than a 14, it’s because I’ve been desperately unhappy, usually horribly broken up with, and I’m finding food less interesting than a televised wiffleball championship. Whenever I get bigger, it’s because I’m overworked, edgy, and substituting ‘meals’ for ‘standing in front of the fridge for 90 minutes and systematically shovelling everything in without chewing or tasting it.’ We all have a different happy size/weight/shape, and it turns out size 14 is mine. If you’re a happy size 14 too, you’ll know these things.
You don’t have to be anybody’s poster girl
People will be keen to politicise your hips. They’ll congratulate you for throwing off the shackles of body fascism and sticking it to the man, when your ‘bold’ work constitutes the discovery of the Sainsbury’s peanut butter flavour ice cream, which is half the price of premium brands and twice as delicious. This is usually benign, and comes from people who have good intentions and just want you to sign a Change.org petition to make sure the ring mannequins in Ernest Jones have fatter hands. However…
Curvy is a cuss word
People will ‘congratulate’ you with a Carry On style wink and a hip thrust, shrieking ‘real women have curves’! I was once at a party with a tedious, large lady who kept going on about how much her boyfriend loved her body, and how bored he’d be with a ‘skinny bitch’ - her words, not mine. She wanted me to be in her special club, but if the only rule is ‘slag off people who are thinner than you are’ I’d rather be banned from entry and drinking warm Red Stripe from a can in the car park.
Our bodies are different. Our metabolisms are different. One of my best friends is a size six, and I’m lazily covetous of her ability to glide into American Apparel mini tubes, but then I remember seeing her gloomy face when I turned up to a party with my tits jacked up in a lacy corset top. ‘I tried that on, but…’ she said, and shook her head, gesturing to her chest. We’re both about the same height. We both get through a lot of wine and melted cheese. I probably go to the gym more than she does, but she’s a Pilates fiend. There’s a moral to this story, and it is NOT that Pilates makes you thin. And on that note…
You don’t necessarily go to the gym to lose weight
Occasionally I’ll bump into someone when I’m going to or from the gym, and they always say the same thing. ‘Good for you!’ It’s a cheery, slightly condescending message that actually says ‘Well done, you’re finally doing something about your love handles!’ The gym has actually made my arse bigger, in a way that I’m totally into, but mostly I go because when the sweat is burning my eyelids, I stop thinking about deadlines and invoicing and who I haven’t. When I’m on the leg press, I can feel my thighs becoming more powerful, and I imagine myself as a Transformer, crushing a cartoon city. I love bouncing along the treadmill to DMX and Lil Jon. Also, my gym has a really great steam room.
It can be hard to find dresses to cover your bum
It angers me that shopping as a size 14 is hard. It shouldn’t be. And changing rooms are my personal bete noire and mellow harsher. When you’re shopping, you feel like you ain’t nothing but a number, and not in a good way. My body is built in a way that means any skirt shorter than ‘midi’ will reveal 25 per cent of my buttocks if I so much as sneeze. Until a couple of years ago, I just showed my bum and blamed the high street. Now I’ve decided it makes slightly more sense to dress a little bit like Kate Middleton, if only to avoid arse hypothermia. This means I will buy one semi expensive item at a time and have a good think about it, instead of breathlessly buying 20 Primark dresses at once.
Confidence makes you sexy, not tits
I truly believe that the hottest thing anyone can be is ‘not bothered’. Whether you lose or gain half your body weight, you’re fundamentally still you, and any external changes are pretty much meaningless compared with what’s going on in your head. If you think that having a bigger or a smaller bottom would make you happier, go for it. But know that everything works from the inside out. If you focus on your happiness and wellbeing first, you’ll be much more appreciative of the body you have, and you might realise that you don’t need to do anything drastic at all. I’ve been every size between a four and a sixteen, and the only thing that changed significantly was the notch I was using to do up my belt. With that in mind, I am a big fan of my own boobs because I have made peace with having the tits I deserve - those of a genetically heavy set girl who likes eating and singing and laughing and sweating and having sex and falling over.
Follow Daisy on Twitter @NotRollergirl
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.