ARABELLA WEIR
The Real Me is Thin
FOURTH ESTATE · London
For Helen Scott-Lidgett and every woman who’s ever thought the way she looked mattered more than anything else about her.
Contents
Preface: how to tell if you think you’re fat
Kurt Waldheim finds out I’m fat
All you can eat at the boy buffet
Don’t eat pudding if you want to get a job (or a boyfriend)
Preface: how to tell if you think you’re fat
All women think they’re fat. Here’s how to tell if you think you’re fat, too.
TEN TOP TIPS
You think you’re fat if:
You’re reading this book.
You think not eating is a good thing.
You think you’re fat even though no one else does.
You think you’d like yourself better if you were thinner.
You think that people who don’t eat are better than you.
Unless catering for others, you have nothing in your fridge except a small sliver of mouldy cheese and a rancid piece of fruit, both of which you know you’ll eat rather than chuck out.
You never order pudding but eat a bit of someone else’s.
You decide not to have a glass of wine because you’re ‘not drinking at the moment’, and then have half a glass but not in a wineglass, and then top it up but only halfway again, and so on – but manage to end your evening still kidding yourself you didn’t have a drink.
You’ve got clothes in your cupboard that are too small for you and you’ve never worn but can’t get rid of because they are going to fit just as soon as you’ve lost some weight.
The title of this book means anything to you.
The real me is thin. Of course she is. The real me does not need a size 16 (sometimes even a 18) to accommodate her mammoth arse (not my real one, obviously) when buying trousers. Properly fat women wear sizes 16 and 18, not me. I am not fat. I can’t be. I don’t feel like a fat woman. Well, not all the time. Obviously, I feel like a fat woman a lot of the time. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t think there was another ‘me’ out there, another, thin me available somewhere. The fat woman I feel like a lot of the time is my go-to person, the one I feel like when I feel bad about myself, which is how I feel when I eat, more often than not. But that can’t be who I really am. Admittedly, I find myself temporarily housed in a slightly-larger-than-planned-for body but, you see, that’s OK because it’s not my real one. In my real life – the one I’m supposed to be having, the one I had planned on having, the one I’m going to have – I’ll