Driving to the supermarket in the early morning, the roads empty, a grey mist unfurling from the bay like a wrapper pulled from the still water, I noticed a young woman walking along the coast, her steps determined, her eyes intently focused on the road ahead.
I was one of the first shoppers in the supermarket, arriving as the fresh bread hit the shelves. On the way home I spotted the young girl again. She had turned and was marching resolutely along, the gradient rising beneath her feet. Fawn-like in her fragility, her cheekbones seemed to pencil the still air, her knees pierced the fabric of her baggy leggings, her shoulders looked bird-like under her long fair hair. It wasn’t hard to imagine an exhausted parent or loved one watching the clock, waiting for her to return.
I had bought a loaf of fresh bread. It lay on the front seat, warm to the touch. I’d been telling myself for a couple of weeks, however, that I couldn’t eat before noon or after 8pm. Black and blue from falling off that particular restricted-eating bike, my resolve was faltering once again.
Like my mother before me, a regular commuter on the mad-fad-diet train, I too hop aboard every now and again with some scheme for losing a couple of kilos. Cheerfully waving at the conductor and brandishing my ticked to purgatory, I never seem to make it all the way to the terminus.
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My mother had implored herself to ‘start that diet! and stick to it!!!’ She was 90. By my lousy maths I reckon that, between us, we’ve been worrying about weight for 100 years
The handful of kilos that I routinely decide to shift have been mates of mine for years. They like hanging around with me — the larks we’ve had in wine bars — unwilling to dissolve into weightless oblivion. They can go unnoticed, but when I’m feeling tired or underconfident they worry at my psyche like a rash.
In one of the few journals I’ve kept from my late teenage years I found an entry, written in pink marker. “Get to 8 stone. Stay there!” A later diary entry tells me that I weighed 8½ stone at the time.
I’ve written about this before, but after my mother died, around the time we were dispersing the 2kg bag of her ashes, which had been neatly packed into her plastic urn, into the sea near her childhood home, we found a similar entry in her diary.
On January 1st, seven months before she died, she’d implored herself to “start that diet! and stick to it!!!” She was 90. By my lousy maths I reckon that, between us, we’ve been worrying about weight for 100 years.
The day before I observed the thin girl walking in the mist I’d met up with a pal outside a city-centre department store. Grittily determined, she’d elbowed work aside to make time for an appointment with a personal shopper and had asked me to come along.
My pal, a hard-working woman, had a public event coming up. She was going to be in the spotlight, and she worries about her weight. Although we have many things to discuss and we both lead interesting lives, our conversations often reference how good, or how bad, we are feeling about our bodies.
The personal shopper turned out to be a blithely magnificent young woman wearing a bandage top underneath her strikingly well-cut jacket, the eye-catching garment perfectly tailored to accentuate her toned stomach
The personal shopper turned out to be a blithely magnificent young woman wearing a bandage top underneath her strikingly well-cut jacket, the eye-catching garment perfectly tailored to accentuate her toned stomach. She was sweetly enthusiastic, bringing various designer ensembles into the large private dressingroom, where I slouched in a bucket seat while my pal writhed around in the cubicle.
“Could I try a larger size?” my friend politely asked, despite the chokehold of a capsule-collection high-neck that looked to be deftly cutting off her air supply.
It turned out, however, that stock was low and many larger sizes — the size that a great swathe of the female adult population wear — were sold out. Should my discombobulated chum wish to part with a sizeable chunk of her pay packet for a new gúna, she’d have to wait for shipping, sorting and various sorceries before said item would materialise in the store.
We left empty-handed. Went to a cafe, ordered a tomato and mozzarella sandwich.
I thought of my mother at war with her body in her 10th decade, of my pal’s abashed face in the dressingroom glass.
Our lunch arrived.
“I really shouldn’t be eating this,” she said, lifting the sandwich to her mouth.
I thought of the girl in the mist becoming smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror until she disappeared and wondered if this journey of denial would ever end.