[Writer Bryony Gordon has never been happier Photo: Marco Vittur]
Today, British girls were seen as the fattest in Europe sparking a debate over how unhealthy we are becoming as a nation. However, here Bryony Gordon explains why she is happier (and arguably healthier!) than ever…
'My name is Bryony and I am fat. I am not just being an irritating woman desperate for compliments here - I really am fat. According to my BMI, I am not just slightly overweight. I am classified as obese. My belly is so round that I sometimes get offered seats on the tube, and my breasts so large that it is useless shopping in normal lingerie departments - bras that don’t resemble a scaffolding system are out of the question. I hover somewhere between a size 18 and a 20, and I can only wear high street clothes if I want to fashion a Zara belt into a necklace, or turn a Topshop skirt into a makeshift mitten. Polite people around me say I’m curvy and voluptuous, but I know the truth of the matter is that I am Rubenesque. There’s no getting around it. In the past three years I have put on not just one, not two, not even three, but a massive four and a half stone. That is the combined weight of two toddlers, or several sacks of potatoes. Mmm, potatoes.
Of course, I have also had to put up with people judging me for the way I look today. It’s astonishing the amount of hatred there is for the overweight out there (in my experience, the overweight do not tend to be so eaten up inside with bile about the thin) and I have experienced this at the sharp end. One guy emailed to say he was disgusted by a picture that had appeared in the Telegraph of me riding my bicycle with my daughter on the back; I should be ashamed, he berated, that it was ever published. Closer to home a friend, at the end of a drunken 20 minute diatribe about how unhappy she was, actually asked me how I could be happy looking the way I do now.
But that is the weirdest thing. I have never ever been happier about how I look. Really. For most of my adult life, and a great deal of my non-adult life too, I have had a pathological fear of fat. Before I even knew what a diet was, I knew that I would always be on one. I watched my mother do the cabbage soup, the blood type, the south beach; I’d marvel as she went for the burn to a Jane Fonda workout video in the living room. I don’t blame her for this - in the eighties, this was simply what women did. As I listened to the conversations between her and her girlfriends, I came to learn that ‘you’ve lost weight’ was a massive compliment, even if you were never supposed to accept it.
At secondary school I felt a failure because no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t have the willpower for anorexia. I tried laxatives, and spent an unhappy few years vomiting up food, until a back tooth fell out and a dentist said he knew what I was up to. In my twenties, I was a trim size 10-12 but I still insisted on wearing two pairs of Spanx under every outfit, because I had read that was what Gwyneth Paltrow did. Never mind that I could hardly breathe - it would make me look thin! I would workout obsessively and count calories like some sort of demented mathematician; I never enjoyed sex because I spent most of it worried that my belly was too bloated or my bum too big.
I may have had the perfect BMI, but I realise now that I was unhealthy. I never got my five a day - fruit is full of sugar dontchaknow?! - and I was always so bloody tired. My skin was grey and sallow. I always had spots. But I just thought this was normal. I see now that a lifetime of swallowing almost nothing but deranged female insecurity had left me deeply lacking in self-esteem myself. But all my friends were the same, so why change?
[Bryony as she was before]
I know this isn’t cool and it doesn’t paint me in the most sisterly of lights, but I finally learnt to accept the way I looked when I met my husband. He loved cooking and he loved me, not for the way I looked, but for the way I was. This was nice. This was different. We started making paellas and roasting chickens and dreaming up ever-more exotic couscous recipes. By the time we learnt I was pregnant, almost three years ago, I decided to treat my body with respect. “Do you have any cravings?” friends would ask me. To which my answer would be: “No. I’m just letting myself eat all the things I denied myself before.”
Having a daughter only solidified my belief that I had to start loving my body more. I don’t want her to grow up with the same insecurities that I had. I can’t stand the thought of her in 15 years time, sneaking off to the loo and running a bath to mask the sound of her vomiting. And while some of you might think that being overweight hardly makes me a great role model for my child, I honestly think that I have never been healthier. In fact, a new book called The Obesity Paradox by the cardiologist Dr Carl Lavie argues that being underweight is more of a problem than being overweight, and that diets, which cause our weight to fluctuate, are the real enemy. Certainly, I am a lot healthier mentally. I love my body, I it. I am fun. I feel sexy without having to squeeze myself in to skin tight frocks. The other day I saw a woman in the office loos looking thoroughly miserable as she analysed herself from 15 different angles, and I just thought ‘you poor, poor thing.’
And so for me, getting fat has been a feminist thing. It has been a big two fingers up at all the systems in society that made me think I had to be thin to be beautiful. I feel by eating what I want, when I want, I am not adhering to some ridiculous and frankly unobtainable female aesthetic. I want people to find me attractive not because of what I look like, but who I am, and I want that to be the case for my daughter. If I found out I was at risk of diabetes, I would lose weight in a second. But until then, judge me not on the size of my waistline, but by the smile on my face.