HAD you been strolling past SureSlim's offices the other day and happened to glance up into the window, you would have witnessed a fight.
Before you get over-excited, let me just say that my diet consultant, Francesca, and I were not rolling around tearing out each other's hair and threatening to displace an eyeball with a deftly deployed shoulder pad (even if they are back in fashion)
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However, unlike Krystle and Alexis, we weren't fighting over a man, money or the South China Sea oil reserves. This was a heated disagreement about our relative size.
It started innocently. Francesca casually asked what size clothing I wear these days. I screwed up my face, employing the universal sign language for: "That depends on whether it's separates or a dress, and also depends on the cut, the material, the manufacturer and whether or not the month has an R in it."
She scrunched back at me to say, "Tell me about it!"
Take these trousers, I said, indicating a pair from Gap that I bought in a certain size and which, a month later, had to be taken in rather a lot. (You don't think I'm fool enough to name numbers, do you?)
The other weekend I returned to try on a variety of other styles in a great many sizes – including the original size of the trousers I stood before her in. Nothing fit.
In fact, one pair of same-size-in-different-style trews was so ludicrously minute that I concluded they had accidentally migrated from the children's section.
Now, Francesca – have I ever mentioned that she's slim? – has this obsession with my waist. It's nine inches smaller than my hips, but, all things being relative, the only man who'd easily span it with his hands is the Big Friendly Giant.
Still, she insisted that the pair of us could now swap clothes. Not in a month of Sundays, I insisted right back, causing her to measure her waist to prove that mine was smaller. (Only just.)
That's how the fight started. Instead of throwing punches, we yanked a tape measure back and forth.
Lucky you, if you glimpsed Fran hoiking up her pencil skirt to run the tape around her thigh. And voila! Despite similar hip measurements, the route round my thigh is longer.
Waist or no waist, where it goes – appropriately – pear-shaped for me is from the hipbones down. (By the way, Sharon Olds's newest collection of poetry, One Secret Thing, contains a magnificent paean to her wobbly butt. Do read it.)
Somewhere in the middle of all this arguing and measuring, I thought: Lee, what do you have invested in being a big girl? Why are you desperate to convince Fran you're so much larger, especially when you're here to get smaller?
There's an exercise where you take a life-size sheet of paper and draw the outline of your body from memory. Then you lie down and trace your actual shape. Most women with eating disorders and body dysmorphia "imagine" a body noticeably larger than the one they inhabit. You may think you're wide as the Clyde when, actually, you're a tributary.
My strong visual memory means I do picture myself pretty accurately naked. But it was still a shock when Fran held up her tape and marked off four-and-a-half inches – the amount I've whittled off these hips. Written down it looks puny – on the tape, not so.
And remember that big, yellow lump on her desk, representing 5lb of fat? Line up seven of them and that's what I'm no longer lugging around. Looking at it that way, is it any wonder I was so unhappy?
But the fact remains that it's easier reconfiguring a fat tummy than a fat head.
The full article contains 645 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
