Leith, William Read online

  And the fourth thought was: Where can I buy those shoes?

  Now I'm looking at the stomach magazines and wondering if I should buy a stomach magazine and thinking that if I bought a stomach magazine I would be fine, fine. And I'm thinking about my own belly, which fills me with a familiar nameless dread, and I want to eat, but I don't want to eat, and I can feel my belly pressing outwards against my jacket, straining to get out, straining to get out and chase me through the streets.

  And I wonder: how did I get here?

  Fat History

  I didn't get fat until I was eight years old and my family moved to Canada, and I suddenly started thinking and acting like a fat person. When I tell people this, they say it must have been something to do with the burgers and the fries and the popcorn and the hot dogs. And I say that, yes, the food might

  have played a role. But what made me fat came from inside my head. When I went to Canada, I was one person; when I came back, I was another. I was fat.

  I stayed fat until I was ten. That doesn't sound like a long time, but it was. At ten, I discovered sport, and got slimmer. I played soccer and rugby and cricket. I swam. I got in the school teams. But I still wasn't quite right. I still felt fat on the inside. My weight fluctuated. I had to watch myself around food. Sometimes I binged.

  By the age of 17, nobody would have looked at me and seen a fat guy. I was more or less slim. The only person who knew my secret was me. When I went to university, I was still more or less slim. My weight still fluctuated. Sometimes I thought I was getting fat. But this was nothing compared to what would happen later. For instance, at the age of 20 I once got up into the high 190s. Big deal. This was when I was living in a house with some dope-smoking bums. I was one of the bums. Our idea of a good meal was fried `eggy bread' large doorstep slices of white bread dipped in egg, fried in butter, and covered in brown sugar. We spent our time lounging in odd positions, giggling, listening to obscure rock albums, making rounds of eggy bread through the night. But I wasn't really fat. I looked like a slim person who had become a slob.

  After this I lost weight again. I became sexually promiscuous. (This would always happen when I lost weight.) I was slim until I was 26. That's the year I left university. By the time I met Anna, though, when I was 27, I was 208 lbs fat enough to make a difference. She was a princess on the slide; I was her plump provider. I grew into the role. During my time

  with Anna, I peaked at 220 lbs. At 31, I slimmed down. I was perfectly slim 190 lbs at 31 and 32. But it didn't make much difference; when Anna looked at me, she still saw the plump provider. Later, when I met Sadie, I was back up to 208 lbs. Weird. Another princess on the slide; another chance to play my familiar role. Except this time things got out of hand.

  It was a gradual ascent, but this time it felt inexorable. There were some plateaux and some dips. There were diets. I sometimes lost a pound or two. I joined a gym. That didn't work. I started to use the gym. That didn't work either. I'm making this stupid joke, I think, in an effort to sound jolly. But there's nothing jolly about being fat. As I crept towards 40, I started to worry. At one point I did Montignac for a while. And, like I said, one day on my birthday, in fact the while ended, and I continued my steady ascent.

  And now let me put this another way. Getting fat does not feel like an ascent. There is no sense of having a better view, a clear vantage point, or anything like that. Getting fat feels more like burrowing, like tunnelling. When you get fat, your view is obscured. Getting fat has a lot in common with burying your head in the sand. Getting fat is like sinking, like being sucked down by quicksand. You panic. You feel hopeless. You are stifled and squeezed, loaded down by a strong force that seems to be outside your realm of control. Your self-hatred grows as you lumber around, grinning, pretending not to notice.

  Fat People Are Liars

  Fat people are liars. Like I said, when you're fat, you lumber around, pretending not to notice. You try to fool other people into thinking you don't think you're fat. For you, the subject doesn't exist. As a fat person, you would be upset if somebody else started talking about other fat people. But this doesn't make sense, of course, because you're pretending not to know you are fat. A lot of fat people avoid the subject of fat in order to mimic the slim. But it's a poor imitation: slim people talk about fat all the time. I know. I've been slim.

  What it boils down to is this. I am fat. I don't want to be fat. And I know how to be slim. But these three things don't add up. Why, then, am I not slim? Somewhere inside my psyche, I am untrustworthy.

  I am a liar and a self-deceiver.

  This is because I am fat; it is also the reason I got fat in the first place. Deep down, I know I am a liar and a self-deceiver, and that this is because I am fat, and also why I am fat. But every time I remember this, my override mechanism clicks into action, and I put it to the back of my mind instantly.

  I don't want to go there.

  I like to believe that I am fat, not through my own agency, but through the agency of others. I like to think I'm fat because the world around me is making me fat.

  I am looking for a quick fix.

  I like the idea of the Atkins diet because I think it might be a quick fix. When I see something that looks like a quick fix, I am capable of trusting it with a faith bordering on the religious. This is because I am a liar and a self-deceiver.

  Me, I have a one-pack. My stomach looks like dough after it has risen, before it has been baked. When I saw a recent TV ad for Reebok running shoes, in which a fat disembodied belly chases a man all over town, I had several thoughts in quick succession. The first thought was the ad's slogan, which was 'Belly's gonna get ya!'. Too true, I thought. The second was that this was an historic moment. For years, we've seen images of women's bodies chopped up into their constituent parts, and now this is happening to men. And the third thought was: That's my belly. That's my belly out there. It looks like dough.

  And the fourth thought was: Where can I buy those shoes?

  Now I'm looking at the stomach magazines and wondering if I should buy a stomach magazine and thinking that if I bought a stomach magazine I would be fine, fine. And I'm thinking about my own belly, which fills me with a familiar nameless dread, and I want to eat, but I don't want to eat, and I can feel my belly pressing outwards against my jacket, straining to get out, straining to get out and chase me through the streets.

  And I wonder: how did I get here?

  Fat History

  I didn't get fat until I was eight years old and my family moved to Canada, and I suddenly started thinking and acting like a fat person. When I tell people this, they say it must have been something to do with the burgers and the fries and the popcorn and the hot dogs. And I say that, yes, the food might

  have played a role. But what made me fat came from inside my head. When I went to Canada, I was one person; when I came back, I was another. I was fat.

  I stayed fat until I was ten. That doesn't sound like a long time, but it was. At ten, I discovered sport, and got slimmer. I played soccer and rugby and cricket. I swam. I got in the school teams. But I still wasn't quite right. I still felt fat on the inside. My weight fluctuated. I had to watch myself around food. Sometimes I binged.

  By the age of 17, nobody would have looked at me and seen a fat guy. I was more or less slim. The only person who knew my secret was me. When I went to university, I was still more or less slim. My weight still fluctuated. Sometimes I thought I was getting fat. But this was nothing compared to what would happen later. For instance, at the age of 20 I once got up into the high 190s. Big deal. This was when I was living in a house with some dope-smoking bums. I was one of the bums. Our idea of a good meal was fried `eggy bread' large doorstep slices of white bread dipped in egg, fried in butter, and covered in brown sugar. We spent our time lounging in odd positions, giggling, listening to obscure rock albums, making rounds of eggy bread through the night. But I wasn't really fat. I looked like a slim person who had become a slob.

  Af
ter this I lost weight again. I became sexually promiscuous. (This would always happen when I lost weight.) I was slim until I was 26. That's the year I left university. By the time I met Anna, though, when I was 27, I was 208 lbs fat enough to make a difference. She was a princess on the slide; I was her plump provider. I grew into the role. During my time

  I want a quick fix because I don't want to look into myself too deeply. I am afraid that I might look into myself and despair.

  I might look into myself, and despair, and never be the same again.

  The Prejudice Is Insidious

  Once, during the time I was with Sadie, during my slow, inexorable-seeming ascent, or, to put it another way, while I was burrowing into the mire of pretence and self-deception that became my world as I approached serious fatness, I wondered if it might be possible to live a normal life as a fat person.

  I'd heard about the Fat Acceptance movement. Here were people who were fat, and yet who said they didn't mind being fat. I was fat, and I was beginning to despair. And these Fat Acceptance people were they not despairing too? I imagined that, secretly, they were. I imagined they were lying to themselves and others. I imagined they were untrustworthy.

  I was prejudiced.

  Of course, I had a reason to be prejudiced. I was fat.

  The first person I talked to was Shelley Bovey, probably the most radical campaigner for Fat Acceptance in Britain. At the time, Bovey was 5 foot 4, and weighed 224 lbs. She was fat, and she didn't like being fat. Her campaign was directed at prejudice against fat people, particularly women. So even though, on one level, she did not accept herself as she was, she wanted others to accept her.

  Bovey did not fall into line with the Big is Beautifulmovement. She wanted fat to be accepted, but not admired. In her book The Forbidden Body she writes, 'Big is Beautiful puts a forced smile on the face of fat without revealing the depths of unhappiness and humiliation that most fat women experience. It is this that needs to be brought out into the open. It has to be recognised. And it has to be stopped.'

  At this point, Bovey wouldn't agree to meet me in person. We were talking on the phone. I wondered, perhaps uncharitably, if she wouldn't meet me in person because she was fat. After all, she had written, '. . . in a lifetime of being fat, I have observed that it is those who fear putting on weight who treat my size with the most aggression'. And she knew, of course, that I was fat, that I disliked being fat. But what animated me most about Bovey was her level of pain.

  Being fat, for Bovey, was intensely painful. She told endless stories about it. She had worked for the BBC, in radio documentaries, but switched to working from home, partly, she said, to avoid the difficulties of being a fat person in an office environment. At the BBC, she was told that her weight was giving the company a bad image. She pointed out that she worked on a radio programme. Yes, came the reply, but some of the interviews she did were in the field, where she could be seen. Once, she went to a doctor because she was worried that her year-old child would not eat solid food. The doctor said, `What are you trying to do? Make the child as fat as yourself?'

  `I actually feel,' Bovey told me, 'that prejudice against fat women is the biggest social injustice, bigger than racism, bigger than sexism, bigger than anything else.' In The Forbidden Body, Bovey describes a fat woman being treated by a slim woman 'as though she were a different species'.

  Bovey believed in the Cannon Conundrum. She believed she had got fat because she had dieted too much. As a fat child, she went through endless starve-and-binge cycles, dieting until she was weak, and then bingeing wildly to keep her strength up. 'I've lost thousands of pounds over the years,' she told me. She lost 42 lbs, from 182 lbs to 140 lbs, in the run-up to her wedding, and then put on another 84 lbs afterwards. 'If I hadn't dieted,' she said, 'I would not have been as high as 224 lbs; I think I would have been about 168 lbs. That would have been fine. I'm sure my natural weight is 168 lbs.'

  She wrote something chilling: that being fat made her feel like an outcast, and that she worked so hard to hide the pain of feeling like an outcast 'that I found it difficult to differentiate what was really me and what was the public face'. I began to wonder why, if being fat was so awful, she was so resigned to it. In her work, she was a reporter from the centre, the very core, of the fat world. But she was entirely concerned with the consequences of being fat, rather than the causes. I wanted to find out about the causes.

  For now, Bovey was concerned with the issue of prejudice. She told me, 'Just think about it for a while. Look at how people treat fat women. The prejudice is insidious. It creeps into everything. Once you start noticing it, you'll be amazed.'

  I Wouldn't Want You to Bring a Photographer'

  Was there anybody out there who accepted fat people unequivocally? Surely somebody did. Perhaps that somebody

  was a company called 1647, an outfit that designed clothes for large women. The name had been taken from the statistic that 47 per cent of British women wore a dress size of 16 or over. The company was run by two women, the designer Helen Teague (5 foot 6, 154 lbs) and the actress Dawn French (5 foot 2, but 'We don't put out details of Dawn's weight.')

  French was extremely upbeat about fat women. She said, 'I long for the day of the fatter supermodel.' Like Bovey, she was also inspired by anger. She said, 'It gets me so angry that sassy, proud girls get stuck in that horrible stuff chain stores think fat women should wear.'

  French was relentlessly positive. She pushed the angle that fat women are actually very sexy. She posed in skimpy gear in Esquire. 'Big women,' she said, 'are told by the men in our lives that we are lovely and good in bed. We're delicious, we're voluptuous. Then everybody else, including the media, tells us that we're not.'

  Here, it seemed, was a simple dispute. The media which, as French kept pointing out in the media, is largely run by men promotes images of thin women, causing endless anguish for fat women. And then there are the fat women who want to fight back by promoting more realistic images images of themselves, happy to be fat. From where I was standing, it looked like things might be getting better for fat women. French and Teague, for example, not content with producing the 1647 clothes for day-to-day wear, had just launched a new designer range, simply called French and Teague. These were upmarket clothes for large women. Glamorous. Sexy, even.

  I met Helen Teague in a bar across the road from the 1647

  shop in Primrose Hill, north London. The shop been designed to make fatter women feel less self-conscious about themselves; it had an air of quiet privacy. For one thing, you could not just walk in off the street you had to ring a bell. Also, there were no communal changing-rooms. Is this, I wondered, the thin end of the wedge of prejudice that Bovey had described? No, I thought. It's simple sensitivity.

  Teague didn't look exactly fat; being moderately tall, her minor bulk made her look statuesque. 'Well,' she told me, 'I am a normal-sized woman.' She wore a large, flowing white cotton shirt from the 1647 range, a shirt she'd designed herself. Not fashionable, but certainly stylish. She was planning the launch party for her new designer range, to be held at Liberty. 'In midnight blue and sensual chocolate,' ran the press release, 'a wonderful micro fabric caresses the body. Long slim pants and skirts echo the undercurrents that all women demand, of private pleasures and hidden delights.'

  We talked about the prejudices suffered by her potential customers. 'You're still allowed to abuse fat women,' she said. 'Society frowns on racism, but not on abusing fat people.' Then we talked about the broader picture, about how women's magazines have an economic need to make their readers feel insecure, because they are funded by advertising for products that compensate for this insecurity cosmetics, perfumes, hair products. And almost all the magazines advertise liposuction operations. Making women feel fat is sound economic sense.

  Teague said she believed that all of this was true. 'But I don't want to say it in public,' she said. 'My views are very radical, but they're incompatible with a consumer attitude.'

  Then
she told me about the state of the market in fat women's clothes. The market, basically, was there for the taking. `If you look at market research,' said Teague, 'you'll see that slim women buy lots more clothes than larger women. A slim woman might have ten skirts. A large woman of the same age will have three. There's no imagery aimed at big women. The images don't work for them; they're not seduced. They can't buy into it.'

  Teague, therefore, wanted to create images which would seduce fat women, images which, as she put it, 'make it acceptable for older and bigger women to send out sexual signals'. And this, of course, is terribly difficult. You have to be subtle. If you want women to buy things, you have to make them feel dissatisfied with what they've already got. You have to play with their insecurity. But you have to be careful with fat women. They're easy to scare off. You mustn't remind them that they're fat.

  Then I asked Teague if I could attend the launch party for her new designer range, and bring a photographer with me. `You can come,' she said. 'But I wouldn't want you to bring a photographer. It's a difficult situation. You're writing about fat issues. And I don't really want French and Teague to be associated with all that. I want to keep it separate.'

  Hold on, I thought. She wants the world to accept fat women without prejudice. She's designed a range of clothes to make these fat women feel glamorous. But she wants to avoid associating her clothes with fatness. So even here, right at the centre of the world of Fat Acceptance, fat is a dirty word.

  Teague said, 'We're trying to sell clothes, not ideas.'

  Then she said, 'Leave the arguments to professional intellectuals. I would never contradict them. But what do they come up with? They're not coming up with anything new. I've been hearing these arguments for twenty years.'