INDIA’S STORY

I was never fat. I was a tall, skinny child, often mistaken for a boy. I always liked food — I come from a family who appreciate their dinners — but I also regarded it as fuel. It appeared three times a day; I ate it; I ran off to play. I went to boarding school at 13, which is where, I think, the problem started. Suddenly, I found myself in the depths of Buckinghamshire, faced with old-school-style meals: boiled, grey, worm-like mince, overcooked vegetables and gristly bits of meat that looked and tasted like donkey. We were supposed to finish everything on our plates, because of the starving children in Africa.

I left boarding school at 17, a size 12-14 on top (I have big tits) and a 10 below. I’m 5ft 10in, so that seemed about right. At 18, I went to university, and basically lived on pasta for three years. Oh, and chips. And pitta bread and hummus. And, of course, there was alcohol — rivers of it. I left university a size 14-16 on top and a 12 below. I was well upholstered, more curvaceous than was fashionable, but I looked pretty good, in a 1950s kind of way. I certainly had no issues with my weight. Indeed, I didn’t own a bathroom scale until the summer of 2005.

Life went on. I worked in a series of offices. Quick drink or three after work. Sandwiches on the hoof. Crisps. Sausage rolls. Chocolate bars. I was a 16 all over, and it started to bother me slightly. I was reconciled to the tits, but the size-16 waist wasn’t part of the plan. I’d got to the stage where I vaguely thought I ought to do something about it. Then I got pregnant.

Chances are you’ve been there. It’s so hard to shift, isn’t it? I was too busy being delighted with my baby to worry much about my waistline. But it was at that point, aged 27, that I started having minor difficulties with clothes shopping. I could no longer buy anything very fitted or tailored.

I got pregnant again a few years later, and had a second caesarean section. By that stage, my stomach — never my best feature — was a disaster area. I avoided looking at it in the bath and made sure my then husband never got a look at it. As my marriage started falling apart, I did the opposite of what you’d expect someone in that situation to do (fade away): I ate more. It seems to be true that in moments of stress, some women bump up the portions to make themselves bigger. Bigger equals stronger, braver, harder to squash, harder to hurt, harder to ignore or dismiss. It’s as though the fat becomes a carapace, a sort of protective outer shell. Illness, divorce, stress, the death of a parent: if you’re the coper in your family (and I always have been), chances are you’ll realise at some stressful point that you can’t actually cope at all.

Then, on July 15, 2005, my size-18 clothes stopped fitting. I was in the fat people’s department at Selfridges (they don’t call it that, of course; they call it something absurd like “relaxed clothing”), and I had a moment of revelation. A light went on in my head, and I thought, “For f***’s sake. Enough!” Excuse my French, but that’s what I thought.

I’d never got to that point before. I had a panoply of little tricks — magic knickers, make-up, décolletage, self-deprecating jokes, blah blah blah. I remember feeling murderous at a party when a woman who was rather admired for her sartorial style came up to me and complimented me on mine. “You’re so well dressed,” she said. “I love the way you’re so comfortable with your size.” She wasn’t being a bitch (I don’t think), but I wanted to stab her.

In my head, until that point, I was slightly overweight — that was all. But that wasn’t all, at all. I was a size 20. I was a woman in my prime, frankly, with an okay face and a well-proportioned body, and for some crazy reason known only to myself, I was entering my 40th year weighing nearly 16 stone.

A few times in the previous couple of months, I’d decided at the last minute not to attend a party that I’d been looking forward to. I’d told my boyfriend it was because I was tired. I wasn’t tired at all. I was too fat. I had, for the first time, become embarrassed to be seen in public. I had nothing to wear. I was Giant bloody Haystacks.

So there I was, boiling with rage in Selfridges, surrounded by hideous plus-size clothes for outsized matrons. I put down whatever elasticated-waist horror I’d been examining and marched down to the basement, to the books department, where I bought all the diet books I’d ever heard of. I went to the supermarket the next day, and started dieting for the first time in my life.

NERIS’S STORY

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