Goodbye Skinny Girl

I happened to glance at myself in the mirror last night. I was wearing one of my favourite tops over a pair of leggings and noticed that it was fitting a little more snuggly these days. Ooh, I thought, time to take things in hand and make more of an effort to keep in trim. Like taking the dog for a walk more than once a flood or using the exercise bike we bought at the beginning of the first lockdown more regularly. In the almost a year since we’ve had it Paul has used it a couple of times and I have used it sporadically when I can be bothered. So why was I worrying about my size now? Why was I suddenly feeling the need to exercise madly? Why did I feel so guilty when I didn’t? Then the answer hit me. No matter how happy I claimed to be, I still feel skinny inside. Just like I still feel blonde or 17 years old.

I spent all my childhood and teen years being thin. No matter what I ate I never gained weight. At 19, being only 6st wet through, my mother had to make my wedding dress as nowhere sold child size wedding dresses. Nowadays of course, sizes 6, 4, and 2 abound in the shops which used to make me feel guilty for being so huge as to need a whopping size 10, never mind the size 14 I have now become. As an adult I remained painfully thin; even after having five daughters; and at 33 years of age I only just scraped through the medical for my nurse training by 2 ½ lbs at 7st 2 ½ lbs. With my clothes on! I wasn’t even allowed to donate blood; despite being that precious blood type, O negative; because I was under the weight limit of 7½st. It wasn’t until I was well into my fifties that I began to fill out. Over the last few years I have been slowly going up in dress size and, more noticeably, bra size, putting it down to being a lady of a certain age. I wasn’t even upset when my GP, on seeing me outside the surgery, commented that I had put weight on; quickly recovering himself by adding to my colleague that it was a good thing and she should have seen how I looked when he first knew me; didn’t upset me. Because he was right. Looking through old  photographs with my grandchildren I am often struck by how unhealthy I looked back then. There was one particular photo, now thankfully destroyed, which was particularly shocking. Taken by Paul it showed me lying on a sun-lounger in a bikini. It was a far from flattering picture, with sunken cheeks and rib and hip bones sticking out I looked anorexic; and before you ask, no, I might be a picky eater but I have never had an eating disorder; rather than a healthy forty-something woman enjoying her holiday. I was quite happy with my size and weight up until quite recently. 

It doesn’t help that the skinny girl inside my head listens to the relentless whisperings of the media, which in all forms promotes the idea that slimness should be our ultimate goal. Thinking back to the comics of my childhood, the skinny message was always there in the background, the fat kid was always the comedy character and how many movies have we watched where we see the fat kid bearing the brunt of all the jokes? And yes, there have been several “pro fat” TV series and books over the last few years but in general we are still fed a diet of slim heroines and villainesses. Take Cat-woman for instance, would she be taken seriously if she were a size 14 – 16? Social media doesn’t help either, with it’s subtle body shaming through the use of filters, all designed to make you look thinner, thus reinforcing the notion that skinny is good, skinny is healthy. The way clothing is promoted is another way this message is delivered, we all know what “skinny fit”, “mom fit” and “boyfriend fit” really mean; let’s face it, no-one is going to promote “fat fit”, “chunky fit” or “baggy fit” jeans are they? Because of this I have wasted years falling into the trap of buying figure hugging garments from skinny jeans and pencil skirts to vintage wiggle dresses in the belief that they made me look slim, sexy and attractive, until I realised they didn’t. At which point I went through my wardrobe like a dose of salts and turfed out all the stuff I knew I’d never wear again. I have gone back to wearing the more flattering and comfortable styles I used to wear for a time during my twenties and thirties. I did have a little wobble in confidence when I was returning several bags of vintage clothing my sister had given me when she got too big for them. She had lost a lot of her excess weight and was now down to size 12; whilst I had crept up to a size 14; and could get back into many of the returned clothes commenting that, for the first time ever, she was officially skinnier that me.

Which brings me to the current preoccupation with exercise and keeping fit. As a teenager I used to be fit and athletic. I danced; ballet and tap; ran 400m, 800m and cross-country for school, played hockey, hiked and sailed. Many of these activities, such as hiking and running, I carried on into adulthood and was well into my forties before I gave up running, when my knees began to pay the price. I even joined a gym once but soon lost motivation and interest so stopped going. I do still enjoy hiking to this day, although I tend to keep to shorter distances these days. So it’s not as if I’ve been a couch potato all my life. Now it is my sister who does all the exercising. She likes nothing better than to go out riding her bike and does so regularly, and when not doing that she’s on her stepper. Heck, she even used to get down on the office floor to do her Pilates in the middle of the day when she had nothing else to do! But what is the attraction? Keeping fit in the media has, I know, been around for decades; I had my Jane Fonda workout video and who can forget working out to The Green Goddess or Mr Motivator every morning; but over the last few years, especially with the development of fitness monitoring gadgets, everyone seems to be counting steps, clocking up miles and climbing virtual mountains. Even gaming developers have got into the market with games where you have to cover a certain physical distance to progress in the game or get killed by zombies if you don’t move fast enough. And then came the pandemic with it’s multiple lockdowns bringing a new plague of personal trainers, fitness instructors and gym-bunnies on Tik-Tok crawling out of the woodwork to encourage us to leap around our sitting rooms or run up and down our stairs, because we mustn’t let ourselves go must we? Not to mention the plethora of virtual walks and treasure hunts all designed to prevent you from slipping into couch potatodom. I felt so deflated after that last visit to my sister I returned home with the full intention of joining that happy band of fitness fanatics by finding exercises to shift the weight and tone up my body in an attempt to regain the slender me who still resided inside my mind. My first attempts were to set up a knackered old manual treadmill; Suzy got it for us from Freecycle; which, apart from a couple of half hearted attempts, had stood unused for over a year. I did try, I really did, but rather that making me feel good I found it more of an unrelenting slog. Listening to music didn’t help either so in the end I just gave up. But I was still prickling at my sister’s comments, hence the exercise bike. For a few weeks I managed to keep to a routine and even added in some toning exercises but, and herein lies the problem, I very soon got bored and began to skip a day here and there, then a couple of days, until it was going weeks between exercising. Which brings me back round to that glance in the mirror. After my initial feelings of guilt for not being more strict with myself I got to thinking. Does it really matter? Who am I trying to impress? For goodness sake, I told myself, I am 64 years old, I’m healthy, been married for forty-five years, had five children, 14 grandchildren and now I’m a great granny as well. It’s time to to reassess my body image, wave goodbye to the skinny girl and let the curvy lady free. Which has to be a good thing.