Here comes summer. Bollocks to it.

Fat girls hate the summer. Fact.

See, the winter is fine. You get to wear big jumpers, and coats and things that you can hide under. Winter rules. But the summer? Meh. I am surrounded by skinny girls. Skinny girls in shorts. Skinny girls in vest tops. Skinny girls with no bellies or bingo wings, and I hate them. All of them. Every last skinny, lithe, effortless one of them.

I’ve never been what you might call slight. As a child, I learned the art of eating to pass the time during endless hours spent at the pub with my parents. From midday on a Saturday until (sometimes) eleven on a Saturday night, plus Sunday lunchtimes, from the age of around five until I was about twelve and permitted not to go any more, I filled my time with pub lunches, ice creams, crisps, peanuts, cheesy biscuits…anything to relieve the monotony of listening to old men telling dirty jokes and my mother ordering yet another dry martini and lemonade. But this isn’t the place for me to convey the utter, desperate boredom of being sidelined every weekend; suffice to say, I hated it.

So anyway, I was destined never to be skinny. Over the years I’ve gone from a size twelve to an eighteen to a size twelve, up to a fourteen and pretty much everywhere in between. I put on loads of weight last year (fat and happy), so I’ve lost a stone since Christmas, but am now stuck. And the weather keeps getting warmer and the prospect of feeling just ever-so-slightly uncomfortable and holding my stomach in all summer is too much for me to bear. It’s a real dilemma though, as I love eating. I really, really love it. I love lager too, on sunny evenings (and cold ones, and dark ones, and snowy ones and…well, you get my drift). Something’s got to give though, and so last week I swallowed my pride, put on my lightest clothes and joined the Cult of Weight Watchers.

I resent slimming clubs. I resent the enforced jollity, the conceit that we’re all just happy thin people waiting to be set free, the way you have to pretend to be pleased because Brenda-with-the-hips has lost three pounds this week when you know she deliberately put potatoes in her pockets at last week’s weigh-in so that she could go to that barbecue at the weekend and still look like she’d lost weight. It’s all sarcastic applause and simmering resentment, and it doesn’t sit well with me. Regrettably, neither does two extra stone (I was horrified), so I am religiously measuring out pasta and trying not to mind that fruit comes out of my daily points allowance. On the plus side though, every time I go running I accumulate four extra points that can be counted towards what is euphemistically referred to as “socialising”. Since I run three times a week, I get twelve extra points. And what do twelve extra points make? Six pints of Stella! Result!

It’s all so hopeless, isn’t it? Podgy, miserable women* gamely surviving on lettuce and fat-free dressing all week, so that they can put on ever-decreasing** sparkly tops*** and fall out of Chicagos****on a Friday night.

Still. You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?


* I am one of them.
** A general trend, regardless of actual ongoing weight loss. Or is that just where I live?
*** Not me though. I’m strictly t-shirt and trainers, thank you.
****I would like to say that I have never been to a Chicagos in my life, but that would mean telling a lie. Terrible places. However, when my divorce comes through I plan to purchase an ill-fitting animal print top and maraud around our local one, cruising inappropriately young men. By the looks of it, that’s the law.