Tuesday 18 September 2012

If there was a prize for competitive under-eating, I'd win it.  Honestly, in my long life as a woman with appetite, I don't think I've gone for so long, eating so little.  I could do a Bridget Jones food diary and it would read for yesterday:
half a tub of no-fat cottage cheese
five wafer thin slices of parma ham
two cups of coffee
one cup of tea
one cup of skimmed milk cocoa with candarel
four pickled beetroot
several tastes of home made pesto for a meal I cooked for someone else

I mean - how can you eat any less than this?
Am I not doing the 500 calorie starvation diet?
And so why are the scales to fricking unresponsive?

It's torture.  I watch them inch down in quarter of a pound increments, slower than continents, so that in a week of these semi hunger strike rations, I have lost maybe a pound and a half.  And the 'ho dress still make me looks like Mae West in a frontier saloon.  And since I had an argument with a bottle of bleach, and lost, the hair isn't helping.  I don't know how I'm supposed to turn myself into a New York slim society matron in two days.  Corsetry will only take me so far.

It's depressing.  What happened to slim(mer) me?  Where did all the extra pounds -  all 11 and a quarter of them - come from?  I mean, I know where they've gone - I'm sitting on them.  I made the mistake of going to Marks & Spencer yesterday to buy tights and while there caught sight of myself in a full length mirror - short little dumpy woman with a round stomach, an arse you could put a vase on, and bottle blonde hair.  This is not going to translate well to the Upper East Side in time for the party of the year on Saturday night at the Museum of the City of New York.  I suppose I can comfort myself with the knowledge that my host and her family will both be wearing couture and even if I turned into Sarah Jessica Parker overnight (god, I hope not - she looks rough.  Thin, but rough)  nobody is going to notice me.  There will be a momentary head-to-toe from the gay style consultant who will say something like 'working it darling' with an arch twitch of his eyebrow, but then, probably, behind my back say 'Jeez, has she looked in the mirror?  She looks like a drag queen...'  And he'd be right.

I'm fat.

And worse, fat and not resigned to it.

The other gay uncles, though, will say I look 'wonderful' darling, and the older one, who used to be straight, will mean it because - bless him  - he's old school and still thinks glamour comes from 1950.  That's why I love him.

So I shouldn't stress about the vintage Biba dress being stretchy man-made fibre and there being so much elastine going on underneath the dress that I'm hot - literally - with static electricity and might start a fire if someone happens to have a can of petrol on them.  And I shouldn't stress that Luiz, also gay and one of New York's top stylists, as well as being the most beautiful man I've ever seen in my life, will think my hair colour trashy, because he'll smile, and dance with me when the band strikes up.  And I'll just be that 'British' woman - the odd one who looks a bit like a 'ho.

Put it on my gravestone.

Except I'm not exactly wasting away.