A toe into the past

I've had my hot chocolate and soya milk I can blog a bit today.

Last night I had another heart to heart with a friend about weight issues. Her take, and she is very knowledgable in this field, is that we as fat women are wearing our pain and that the pain is buried deep. I said i wasn't sure I wanted an archealogical dig into my past to see what caused me to put on weight. However, after a bit of reflection I guess it is necessary on the weight journey that I am embarking on. So here it goes: wish me luck.

I was born upside down shaped like a banana. I was even slightly yellow from being a breach birth. I was long and thin.My cousin who was born sixth months after me has lots of photos which him covered in layers of baby fat, I had none. Guess which of us is the thin one?

I was fed on baby milk and not breast milk, which I know would be scary to those of you reading in 2008. I wonder if it affected me at all but I have made it into adulthood relatively unscathed so I won't be blaming my mother for her inability to breast feed- it happens to a lot of women.

One of my earliest memories if of my great grandmother's handbag. I can still recall the smell of its leather and handkerchiefs. It had a big clasp on it. Out of this she would draw Benson's chocolate eclairs in profusion- a sweet sumptuous toffee with a milky chocolate centre. It' a memory of love; being fed with love.

For the first few years of my life I didn't actually eat very much at all and this worried my mother. She would try all sort of ingenius ways to get me to eat food. Her favourite was making sausage, mash and peas into a funny face. I would pick at it and not feel like eating. I don't know whether it was becaue i wasnt hungry or it wasn't what my body actually craved. A Poor worried mother must feed her child and she insisted I eat out of love.

Every Saturday night my grandmother would stay. Saturday night was a great tv night. I would be allowed to eat in front of the television on a small teak table as i watched something from America -the Dukes of Hazzard or Buck Rogers and the 25th century. Later on that evening we would gather as a family around the set well fed and we would watch quiz programmes and then Dallas. Grandma, out of love, would bring chocolates and brown muffins for us to eat and i was responsible for dolling them out. A fair share to everyone no matter what their size.

I played out a lot with people in my close. I rode my bike, I rollerskated. A neighbour said that when she firt saw me walk i didnt walk i ran. God how far removed that is from today!

Then I was a bit fatter than my friends. No one aid anything until i was about nine when i went to see a doctor at the local clinic. Her advice to me was to "eat salads and dont eat so many chips". You'd think i was hoofing down stuff from the chippy daily. Her advice puzzled me. Salads to me were lettuce and a tomato, hardly a full meal. So in my confusion i thought you cheeky cow and realised that people didn't understand me.

Of course looking back we did eat chips but they weren't falling out of my mouth. My favourite time to eat chips was after i'd been to the swimming baths. I was ravenously hungry and the chips with their thick layer of salt and vinegar was the fuel our bodies enjoyed. Odd that I live three doors away from the chippy now.

Why do people assume all fat people eat chip every night? Yesterday as I was walking home from the chemit I read the grafitti in one bus shelter. It read "chopper is so fat as he eats at the chippy every night"

I know my diet wan't as balanced as it should have been, and for that I can't take the blame in my early years. I recollect the chips, the sweets, the ice creams, the hot dogs in Denmark, the cakes, the arctic roll. The pudding after every meal. I was allowed to have snack in between meals whilst my cousins next door had to save their lollies until after tea.

And watching my mother start to worry about her weight at the same time I put weight on. I recall her measuring museli for yet another diet.

Last night my friend and I commented on mother's have a lot to do with their daughter's psychological relationship to food. Her mother started to but on weight and so did she, just as my mother got fatter and so did i.