Shrink to fit,

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:16:38 +0000

by Jennifer Varela

I have an incredible ability I'd like to share with you all: I am incapable of seeing myself as I truly am. Women are never allowed to escape themselves. As I get dressed in the mornings, pass the hallways mirror in my office, glance at my reflection in the supermarket window, I am always, continuously, permanently aware of myself. More specifically, aware of my body. Logic evaporates from me as I am confronted with an all too-familiar sights of my "fat" self. I quickly take a ratio of knees to thighs, clock the circumference of my upper arms and the resulting diagnosis will dictate my daily outlook.

When I take out my measuring instruments, make my calculations and move the beads across the abacus, I know that I am not fat. I am not even remotely medically fat. My Body Mass Index has always within the boring healthy range - even during my "fat" years - and for the most part, I presently sport size 6 US (10 UK). Making allowances for my height of 5'9" and on a good day, I'd even humour my shape at "thin". But to have to try on a pair of trousers in a larger size, to have to step on a scale, to catch sight of an unflattering photograph - all these normal acts constitute sources of panic and anxiety. After a recent spell of weight loss, I made a pact to not know my weight, save for the yearly checkups at the doctor, as the entire ritual fills my body with nauseas dread and even the thought of the act is met with a tightening in my chest.

Jennifer Varela is attempting to be a freelance journalist, living in London, UK. She departed from her native Toronto to embark on an M.A. in Near & Middle Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She counts Luis Buñuel films, '78-'82 post-punk and coffee among her friends.

But psychologically, I feel enormous. For the most part of my "thin" intervals, I simply find it impossible to correlate the size of my jeans to the reflection I see in the mirror. It is comparable to having a carnival mirror attached to me wherever I go; I know what I am but I can't see it. On bad days I want to quickly check my size, just to make sure an extra "1" hasn't magically appeared in front of the size number. To paraphrase Susie Orbach in Fat is a Feminist Issue, I simply have not had enough time to "recognize" my "thin" self. It is sticking up a middle finger to all the thin girls who had never been made to feel self-loathing: "Ha ha! I was once fat but I broke free and joined your ranks! How does it feel to be infiltrated by outsiders?"

With the onset of puberty and all of its glorious physical transformations, I was quickly informed by my peers that I was not of the "correct" body shape. Namely, that I was fat. In hindsight, I never was more than a normal-sized child growing into her adolescent shell. But graver, is that even at such a young age, as children we had already been conditioned to have strict ideas on what was to be attractive. As Naomi Wolf successfully named it, the beauty myth had already taken hold. By the time I entered high school, it had spread to a pandemic. My main concern became that of my size and how to reduce it. There were other preoccupations festering in my teenage head, of course - records, boys and simplistic Marxist theory - but all paled in the shadow of my allegedly large ass.

I did not want to be normal or healthy, but T-H-I-N. Achieving high marks in university, being part of a wide social circle and having a boyfriend did nothing to quell my desire for bodily perfection. It was never about making myself more attractive to the opposite sex. Rather, as I had been thrown out of the club at a young age, it was in defiance of their standards. This was a question of control and my inability to contort my image into that which I deemed acceptable to present the (mostly male) outside world infuriated me to no end.

By my early twenties, I had finally achieved my utmost aspiration and through a textbook routine of healthy diet and exercise (after a few stunted attempts at anorexia campaigns that never did last more than a few days due to my lack of will-power), I slimmed and trimmed my way down to a size my 14 year old self would have considered as attainable as a walk on the moon. Was I super-skinny? No. But was I smaller, thinner? Absolutely. And yet here I was, finally equipped, I felt, to face the rest of my life and it would be not my life experiences, relationships or personality but the inches across my waist that would be my source of strength. I was thin now. I am entitled to anything. I was a success. Read the rest of this post...

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