Imagine this. You are at a party, sucking your tummy in because that dress is slightly snugger now compared to the last time you wore it. To compensate, you have big hair, dangly earrings and red lipstick, classic distraction techniques. Besides, you take comfort in the fact that your feet look really nice: shoes are the “big-boned” woman’s best friends. Unlike clothes, they fit you perfectly even when you gain a couple of pounds.
So you feel pretty enough, at first. Of course, you are on a (yet another) diet, so you eschew the prawn fritters and the cocktail samosas and nibble (pretty girls nibble) on a carrot stick with a smidgeon of hummus and sip lime soda (sugarless, of course). You are already feeling slimmer — if you press down very hard, you can actually feel your collar-bones unfurling like an emerging butterfly — and have almost begun to enjoy yourself.
Then she happens. This acquaintance who sweeps in, spots you in the crowd and comes over in a haze of perfume.
She ignores the smile you offer , instead remarking with palpable alarm, “My god, what has happened to you? You have gained so much weight!”
And your world collapses around you.
***
“Hello, how’ve you been?” is passé. The real way to greet people nowadays is through a detailed dissection of their body weight. I must admit that I have done it too. I don’t, on policy, comment on people’s weight gain — I know how terribly easy it is to put on weight — but weight loss, yes. The minute I notice someone has lost weight, I make it a point to engage with them, surreptitiously trying to get a trainer’s or dietician’s number, or even a sample workout plan.
It is a Pavlovian response, I think. I spent most of my childhood being told that I had gained even more weight by well-meaning, if slightly intrusive, friends and relatives. When I began exercising and lost some weight, it was commented upon with such reverence, almost, that I quickly got addicted to it. My weight soon became the focus of any conversation; I could not have one without bringing it up in some way. When I lost weight, I eagerly waited for people to comment about it. When I gained, I casually mentioned it, before someone else pointed it out and broke my heart. I realised that for most of my adulthood, eating ice cream was laden with more guilt than the sort that comes out of having a surreptitious affair.
I thought I was at this junction, of weight-gain-weight-loss-weight-talk, alone. Until other women told me stories that almost mirrored my own. “I met my former boss at an event. He told me I had gained so much weight,” wailed one friend. “Someone told me that I should have a liposuction if I wanted to continue in this industry,” said another, a fitness professional, one of the fittest women I have ever known.
I don’t think any of us will be able to stop bothering about how much we weigh. Much like tall-short, fair-dark, we are too deeply conditioned in our biases. And I am not saying, don’t exercise, eat clean or lose weight — just do so if, and only if, you want to.
But let’s stop making it a topic of every conversation: both adulating weight loss and bemoaning weight gain are toxic in their own way. I don’t see why we can’t talk more about how a book or a song or an early-morning run made your heart sing. Or the steamy sex and gruesome murders in the latest episode of Game of Thrones. Or an interesting recipe, the latest in the news, the weight you dead-lifted this morning, a holiday you plan to take next year. If you can’t think of anything else, just talk about the darn weather. My weight is my problem (or not). And unless you are my trainer, nutritionist or doctor, I don’t want to discuss it with you.