Pre-summer fever in the gym change rooms: 7.30pm, Thursday. I step up on to the scale. I close my eyes. I open them. I turn pale. In a panic, I cover the digital display on the scale. Did anyone see?
I’ve gained 4kg since last summer. That’s eight blocks of butter, smeared all over my body. I feel like I’m about to fall off a cliff.
I search the mirror for those blocks of butter. Where are they? What is wrong with me? I look at myself naked all the time — and I never noticed my advancing obesity before!
I have a bizarre urge to slap myself. Reason prevails. ”I’ve just got to get a handle on things.” Handle? Love handle? Oh God, no.
Driving home, past tiny children begging at traffic lights, I’m disgusted with my vanity. A nice, comforting nougat dulls the self-hatred. But I wake at 2am, paranoid. I remember that it’s been a while since anyone asked, ”Have you lost weight?”
By Friday the obsession with when I’ll eat next, with how much, and worst of all, with how little I’m planning to eat … later … keeps me eating almost constantly.
Sure, weight shouldn’t matter. Fat people have told me so: ”I used to be thin, but I’m so much happier now.” (One woman even added, ”I’ve got back problems and my knees are giving in. Otherwise, I wouldn’t care.”)
Problem is, I know I care. So how to act on it? Weight loss wisdom is dicey. Fact: Eating makes you fat — but dieting teaches your body to store fat. So, dieting actually makes you fat!
Fact: Drinking alcohol makes you fat — but I’ve been at my thinnest when virtually subsisting on beer.
Fact: Falling in love makes you thin. But one day you fall out of love and start buying chocolate again.
Fact: Fat is fattening. But fatty food tastes better. Food without fat is like sex without orgasm.
Without self-restraint or a convincing scientific evidence to guide me, my weight has always varied — 18kg since I was 16. That’s 36 blocks of butter! But control is the future. And I decide to start right away, by not eating.
I go out with colleagues for lunch. They order chicken salad. I proudly order nothing. This food thing is just a cheap thrill. I’m so above it!
In the paper, I find a column by our cricket captain Graeme Smith called ”Lunch with Minki” (his model girlfriend). As I laughingly read extracts out loud, one colleague remembers his wife cleverly satirising Minki for saying she maintains her figure by ”… trying to remember that her stomach is only as big as her fist”. I snigger along. But secretly I’m thinking ”Oh, good advice! Thanks Minki!”
So I book a table that night at a restaurant that serves fist-sized portions. I am starving. I drink four fists of red wine. I tipsily decide, ”This weight paranoia is bullshit. I’m lovely as I am!” I eat five fist-sized portions of rich food.
But by Saturday morning, I’m inconsolable and convinced I’m obese. So what if my clothes still fit me — they’ve stretched!
”I’m overweight and nobody loves me,” I blubber to my ex-boyfriend.
Being blessed with the male gift of logic, he offers to buy me dinner to make me feel better. I vow to order the salad. But five minutes after sitting down, I’m having fun. I order fist-sized portions of steak covered in chocolate chili sauce … ”Fist-sized”, that is, if I were wearing massive boxing gloves.
Minki, where are you? Help!
Sunday morning: it’s atonement time. I swim a kilometre, and feel great. But when I weigh myself, I’ve gained another 500g. That’s a block of butter, smeared all over my body. I cry in the car on the way to my mother’s house where I eat many fistfuls of comforting, butter-basted roast chicken.
To undo the damage, I take a brisk 5km hike with a friend. She doesn’t deny I’ve gained weight. This makes everything worse, until she tells me that when I was ”thin” — when I was getting all those ”compliments” — I was actually too thin. They weren’t compliments. People were worried! They thought I was on drugs.
Desperate, I try sex, which helps. But on Monday I still have to know: Am I fat? I decide to test my body mass index (BMI).
I measure myself: 1,74m. I don’t need to weigh myself … again … do I? And I go online, and fill in the figures. I click to calculate. It’s that sink or swim moment?
I open my eyes. As I read the results, a broad smile covers my face.
Turns out, I’d only have to lose 3kg to be unhealthily underweight. To be overweight, I’d need to gain 14.
That’s many, many fists of ice cream.