Sweet like Chocolate

I am working my way through a deluxe box of chocolate creams. Really. All by my ownsome. It's been a long time since I did something like this. But then, an elderly gentleman, who didn't know that people don't do suchlike these days, gave me a box of chocolates.

I reacted with that usual pull of guilt in the gut. Like, oh my God, all those calories, all that fat, fat, fat, fat, fat. What was I gonna do?

Fortunately I was reading Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth at the time. And Kim Chernin's Womansize. Throw in Cathie Dunsford's The Long Journey Home and you have, well, me. I realised that I had been worried about my weight from the time I was 20. Which means I have spent more than a decade worrying about my weight.

Yes, self-loathing definitely factors into it. So much so that earlier this year, I actually went on a juice diet for a month. I had nothing but fruit and vegetable juices twice a day for all that time. Life lost all its flavour, I withdrew into my room and talked to nobody and I developed a permanent stitch in my side. And my jaw and gums ached continuously. I stopped watching my favourite shows like The Waltons because nearly episode had the family gathered around the dinner table at last twice a day. I avoided shopping centres because I couldn't take the smells. All my waking hours, I was looking through recipe books and dreaming about food. Dreaming about the taste of blood on my tongue. Dreaming about biting into something adequately satisfying.

Yeah, so I lost about 10 kg in that time, and could fit teenage jeans sizes, so what? I lived a half-life and was constantly in pain. It amazes me to think that somehow I thought I was doing something good. So when I read through Wolf's wise words on hunger, it was like something went off in my head. How can skinny be attractive? Women's sex hormones are stored in fat. So no fat, no sex drive. Hahahahahaha! What an irony.

Both Chernin and Wolf talked about how women grow larger as they age - and how it is OK. In fact, studies show that women who are 10-15 pounds over their supposed ideal weight according to life insurance companies, lived longer. As long as they hadn't screwed their systems up with dieting.

Then I read how thin had suddenly become fashionable in Nigeria, a place they used to send brides-to-be to fattening farms to bulk up before marriage, after Agbani Darego won the Miss World 2001. Most of the older Nigerians were stunned. They didn't find her beautiful at all. Too tall. Too skinny. Now thin was in. It was lepa. Oh dear.

Or how the rate of eating disorders in Fiji had quintupled in 38 months after the introduction of television, according to a study done by the Harvard Medical School. Girls, fed on media images, had started to lose weight. Before this, if you started to lose weight, the elders would gather around you and medicate, convinced that you were suffering from a wasting sickness. Suddenly, it was OK to be wasting away. Oh dear.

And then there was Cowrie, the protagonist in Dunsford's lesbian, postcolonial novel. When a young dyke called her fat, she responded poetically, talking about the beauty of making love to a large woman, which she compared to entering the face of a giant hibiscus. There was something about an exploding frangipani in there, which was all very sensuous, but since I don't have the book with me, I can't quote verbatim. She said, after all this, who would want to lie down next to a blade of grass. Who indeed.

So that is what I think of as I work my way through this box of delicious chocolate creams. True, it has hurt my tongue and I now can't taste much besides, and I feel tired and cranky for no particular reason, but goddammit, I am making a point here.

Stay tuned for developments.