If only there was an injection to stop us being so judgemental
Wegovy jabs, food-free diets and running really, really far: the extreme measures we take to combat fat-phobia...
In the last edition of Keep It Up Fatty!, I talked about how running doesn’t make you thin.
Last Sunday I ran The Big Half when it was unseasonably hot and it was ABSOLUTELY BLOODY AWFUL, I scored my personal worst half marathon time and felt like I was going to throw up for several hours afterwards.
I also weighed myself when I got home (yeah yeah, scales are toxic but I like data) and I was 3lb lighter than I had been that morning. So, it turns out running does make you thin - you just have to run 13.1 miles, every day, when it’s 25 degrees, feel so sick that you can’t eat and, as if by magic, you will dehydrate so much that you will eventually evaporate completely. And that’s what we all want, right?
It is a sad fact of life that every woman I know wants to either stay thin or get thinner than they are. There are a lot of reasons for this but for me, the biggest one is the lived knowledge that when you are below a certain size, people do not make snap judgments about your health and your attitude simply by looking at you.
Who are these judgy monsters? Women, men, doctors, midwives, van drivers shouting “keep it up fatty!”, recruiters, shop assistants, gym instructors, bots delivering life insurance quotes, you, me, and especially the absolute cow-bag in the pool at my gym a few weeks ago who told me to go into the slow lane even though I was faster than her. LITERALLY EVERYBODY.
There are people on Instagram - and occasionally on the cover of magazines when publishers are craving attention - who are trailblazing body positivity and health at every size. They are bold and inspiring and doing important work. But they are not most people’s reality. Most people would rather fit in, buy clothes where they want, and not be judged.
Because while we might have moved on from openly calling Mariah Carey “porky” in print, the hatred for bodies outside the given era’s cultural ideal still burns as strongly as ever. These days it’s just usually a bit more subtle.
Less subtle examples that really piss me off include those tabloid articles about Emma, 32, from Barnsley, losing a lot of weight. They delight in reeling off what bubbly Em allegedly used to eat in a day, and claim that she’d start with a full English, tuck into a multipack of Monster Munch for elevenses, then a supersize Big Mac meal for lunch, a packet of HobNobs with her afternoon cuppa (four sugars, obvs) followed by five Greggs sausage rolls for dinner, all washed down with 3 litres of Fanta while watching Corrie.
It is bullshit designed to feed into the “FAT PEOPLE ARE GREEDY AND DISGUSTING AND DO NOTHING BUT WATCH TELLY” narrative.
Most overweight people really, really don’t live like this. Aside from the fact that we’re all built a bit differently to start with, it is very easy to be a bit fat, or even obese - BMI-wise, I am currently teetering on the border of overweight and obese and as we have established I am FIT AS FUCK - by just eating slightly more than your slimmer friends without even really noticing, even if you exercise quite a bit.
I recently went away camping with a friend who I think of as effortlessly slim (she also has really great hair and perfect cheekbones. I’d probably hate her if she wasn’t so brilliant). She loves bread and cheese and wine and I’ve only ever seen her exert herself in a karaoke booth. Out for lunch, we both had a slice of garlic bread and a few olives and then she ordered the seafood spaghetti and I ordered the seafood risotto. So far, so samey. We also both had one glass of white wine, but I went for large and she went for small. Then, when the dessert menu came round, she passed, but I enthusiastically gobbled up some chocolate ice cream.
So is she effortlessly slim or does she just intuitively eat about 400 fewer calories a day than I do? The difference is, I’d been for a 5K run that morning followed by a frolic in the sea while she’d merely pottered about a bit. I imagine we both maintained our weight that day, we just chose to do it differently
But does what I consumed sound as extreme as bubbly Em’s alleged daily menu? Are you revolted by my excessive gluttony? Probably not - but eating like this a couple of times a week without exercise would make me gain weight quite rapidly.
This stuff is in the news at the moment because, after much hype, the NHS are now able to prescribe Wegovy, the weight loss drug. It works by suppressing your appetite and making you feel full for longer and GPs plan to give it to people “with the highest medical need”. In reality anyone who wants to lose a few pounds can join the queue to get hold of it, because there are loads of private clinics flogging it and they don’t ask for a huge amount of evidence that you actually, medically, need it - if indeed anyone does.
Injecting yourself every day must sound so extreme to anyone who’s never felt helplessly out of control when it comes to their weight. Because surely maintaining a healthy - or, more accurately, socially acceptable - weight is just about eating less and moving more, or the right-on 2023 version, “Just eat intuitively and move your body because it feels good!”. The people bleating these sorts of platitudes are usually the same ones saying that diets don’t work, which can make an overweight person feel even more helpless, because to lose the weight that repulses society so much, they would need to consistently eat less and that would be a diet.
So, if you’re going to be pitied for dieting because it doesn’t work and ridiculed for exercising because people don’t like the sight of you in Lycra, it’s probably easier to just stay fat, when you’re already pitied and ridiculed anyway.
Or do something really extreme - like injections or surgery. Or what I did 15 years ago…
The thinnest I’ve ever been was in early 2009 when I had literally not eaten food for six months. It sounds completely bonkers to me now but I signed up to the LighterLife diet, in which you pay money to exist on 600 calories a day of dust whipped up into shakes/soups, and I stuck to it religiously. Oh, I also allowed myself black tea. Towards the end of the six months, I went wild and snuck in a dash of skimmed milk from time to time. But that was it. No solid food. No booze. I actually found it really easy, because I lived alone, so the only food I kept in the flat was Go Cat. I lost five and a half stone and went from a size 18 to a 10-12. I wrote a blog and Elle magazine turned it into a long feature, and weirdly only included a tiny headshot of me, which I always assumed was because they didn’t want my still decidedly un-modelly body contaminating their glossy pages.
So I was slim(ish). But was I happy?
Actually, yes. Sorry. I bought mountains of nice clothes from all the shops I’d previously been too fat to enter, attracted loads of not necessarily more eligible but definitely vainer men and even got a new job that almost doubled my salary. My confidence was off the scale.
But was I TRULY happy? Yes, I’m very shallow, so that will do it.
It’s possible, though, that I might be looking back at that time through rose-tinted bodycon. I couldn’t maintain my lowest weight - which was still technically a bit overweight because baby got back - without continuing to eat very, very little. I had constructed an entire personality out of hating exercise so, although I remember doing a fair bit of swimming and a single pilates class, no consistent fitness habits were formed. I didn’t eat as much crap as I had previously, but I was out drinking four or five nights a week and sometimes there would be free mini burgers, so slowly - and then quickly, when I started having babies - a fair bit of the weight crept back on. If appetite suppressant injections had been available at the time, I would have been queuing up to stab myself in the stomach.
I’m aware that there are people in the world - people in my phone, in fact! - who say things like “I’m such a pig, last night I secretly finished off the kids’ leftover Easter eggs!” and I just shake my head incredulously because “leftover Easter eggs” is an oxymoron in this house LET ALONE IN SEPTEMBER. When I hear things like this, I realise that eating healthily is harder for me than it is for some people. I simply don’t keep chocolate in the house, because I have no will power and if I ate and drank everything I craved I would be huge and unhappy.
Obviously in an ideal world I would possess will power and/or not associate size with unhappiness, but that seems much trickier to implement than regular exercise, so now I eat some of the things I want, enjoy running and working out, and I am not huge or unhappy. In reality, I think this is how most people in the socially acceptable body size realm live, it’s just become unfashionable to admit it.
Interestingly, men seem less bothered by it being unfashionable - I’ve noticed quite a few who, after a long run or bike ride, write Strava captions about “burning off” last night’s burger or curry, without fear of judgement. For women it’s become shameful to admit you might exercise to burn calories, as we’ve been told we should only do it to feel STRONG and ENERGISED and POWERFUL.
I absolutely do feel all of those things - but I also like burning calories. However, you’ll be pleased to hear that on the evening of the Big Half, when I’d finally stopped feeling like I was about to drop dead, I ate some nice barbecue food and quite a few squares of Tony’s, and the next day the scales had edged up again.
And so it goes on. And how boring it is that we are all so consumed by it.
Extreme exercise is healthier and less boring than extreme dieting though, right? I hope so, because last week I also signed up for the LONDON MARATHON 2024. Holy shit…
Hello - joining you from Farrah's masterclass :)
Running a half marathon in that heat is hugely impressive. I did 3km in the mid-afternoon mugginess and thought I was going to pass out. When I read you'd got your slowest time and then looked again at the picture I thought you'd completed the race in 12hrs 17min, which would have still been, y'know, an achievement. Then I realised that ofc was a clock in the picture and not your actual race time!