My sister bought me weight-loss jabs for Christmas - I'm so grateful |
I have never felt more excited nor more of an irredeemable moral failure than I do right now. Over Christmas, my sister subscribed me to one of the weight-loss drugs currently dominating the diet industry and the headlines.
(If “my sister subscribed me to X” strikes you as a strange formulation, I can only say that it sums up our sororal dynamic perfectly and there’s nothing either of us can do about it now.)
She has been on the same one for a year and has physically transformed. It has been incredible to watch – not just the effectiveness, but the relative painlessness of it compared with traditional efforts to lose weight.
So – here I now am, a couple of injections later, a few pounds lighter and filled with unwanted insights instead of sandwiches and Rich Teas.
I thought I had sidestepped (mostly by virtue of being effortlessly thin until I hit 30) the worst of the body issues that have been a plague on especially the female population ever since we became advanced enough a society to produce surplus calories and choose what to do with them.
But then, what am I to make of the fact that only since my first drug-filled injection pen arrived have I been able to face looking in the mirror, because I can tell myself that this is the worst I’m going to look from now on? Or step into the shower without having to brace myself for the horrors of looking down at my belly because again, I can tell myself that it is only going to get better?
There is extraordinary comfort in knowing that soon, soon I will be presentable again, both to myself in the shower and in public in clothes.
I look at my wardrobe now and realise that I have bought nothing for years for any other reason or for any other purpose than shrouding my disgusting flesh. I haven’t bought anything that makes me feel (or look) good for longer than I can remember – because I have felt that there is no point and, beyond that, because I have felt that I do not deserve it.
Somehow I have taken fully to heart, despite my rational brain, despite what I would consider my active feminism, my belief in myself as – in the grand scheme of things – a good person/friend/mother/daughter and a hard worker, the lesson that an excess of adipose tissue around my skeleton negates all this and more.
And so taking the drug feels like a moral failure. I should be fighting against what it represents, not welcoming the weekly measure of appetite-suppressing chemicals into my body in order to free myself from a prison other people and/or the patriarchy have imposed on me.
I should be, in the buzz-phrase of recent years, body-positive. Though, I do note that this is a phrase generally used by the very young and the naturally thin who, with the greatest respect, know bugger all about anything, let alone the erosion of will and the sapping of confidence that come with age and an increasingly recalcitrant metabolism.
At the same time – it’s wonderful. It is wonderful not to be hungry all the time. It is wonderful to have cut out all the “food noise” and to be able to eat just a little, now and then when it is right to do so, and not to be reaching for chocolate for comfort or a slice of toast out of boredom. The urge simply isn’t there any more.
It is liberating in a deeper sense, too. Because if this is how some people – you know, thin people – feel all the time, then they aren’t better than me after all. They are not forever defeating the foe of hunger, it’s not that they have the willpower that I lack. It’s that they are built differently. There are people out there who feel like this all the time. Who can eat to satiety and stop. Whose bodies put those satiation signals out at a reasonable juncture instead of halfway down the second packet of Jaffa Cakes and enable the hand to be stayed.
So it is possible to see my little loaded pen and its needles as simply bringing balance to the universe. Why should we not induce the advantage some get given as a genetic gift? I like this idea very much.
But it doesn’t solve the real issue, which is the weight we attach to – well, weight. The moral value we assign to (again, especially) women being able to control their appetite for food to stay thin and to take up as little space literally as possible (because we like them to do so metaphorically, too) is irrational and wrong and represents an accretion of all sorts of historical injustices and enduring imbalances that should be rejected, loudly and unequivocally, in every way.
But here I am, instead, injecting chemicals into my plentiful subcutaneous layer. It turns out we’ve all swallowed even more that was bad for us over the years than we ever could have suspected.