Don’t You Think Its About Time You Dropped A Few Lbs?

The Fairy Elephant was the nickname that they gave my mother as a child, as she dragged her heavy limbs around as per ballet class instructions. It was a double cruelty, to enforce the rigours of classical dance upon a teenage body recovering from war-rationing, round with adolescent puppy fat, and then to mock its failures. Mother’s undiagnosed astigmatism didn’t help, meaning she was unable to see the right spot, let alone land upon it any part of her body as directed. Catching and throwing balls was a regular embarassment ending in pain as the other girls hurled missiles to land with extra force in her face, or to hit her handsomely burgeoning chest with a nasty smack.

The only race she ever won, she proudly told us as children, was the slow bicycle race.

When to everyone’s surprise this awkward, shy girl blossomed into a darkly beautiful woman, her adult shape shed pounds and revealed a curvaceous, attractive figure, suiting her so much better than the previous versions of herself, she was pleasantly aware of the changes in others’ reactions. She learned to jive and bop. She got a life. She smoked. She married her teenage sweetheart. Five children and fifteen years later, she was back to being overweight, and depressed about it.

We were in the throes of the 70s diet industry, wafer-thin zero-cal Nimble bread was being advertised on TV and suddenly low-fat options were available. Ryvita crispbread replaced thick slabs of gluey white, skimmed milk like watery paint replaced full-fat thick with yellow cream, and as she became more obsessive, the fridge began to fill with rather faddy, mostly inedible diet food, the shelves with meal-replacement nutritious milkshake sachets.

We the children detested this cardboard-tasting muck, needing all the calories we could get to fend off the yawning empty pit of hunger.

Mother was determined not to lose the last of her youth to being unfit and overweight and demanded our sympathy as she launched herself upon her campaign. We endured it with long-suffering patience as we knew it meant such a lot to her. Once Weight Watchers worked, she gave up smoking. Then she took up teaching, which we found more demanding, although it seemed to give her some satisfaction, and transformed the finances and thus the prospects of the entire family.

Having a mother who struggled with such negative physical self-image shaped me quite a lot, I came to realise.