Leith, William by The Hungry Years Read Free Book Online

sport, and got slimmer. I played soccer and rugby and cricket. I swam. I got in the school teams. But I still wasn't quite right. I still felt fat on the inside. My weight fluctuated. I had to watch myself around food. Sometimes I binged.
    By the age of 17, nobody would have looked at me and seen a fat guy. I was more or less slim. The only person who knew my secret was me. When I went to university, I was still more or less slim. My weight still fluctuated. Sometimes I thought I was getting fat. But this was nothing compared to what would happen later. For instance, at the age of 20 I once got up into the high 190s. Big deal. This was when I was living in a house with some dope-smoking bums. I was one of the bums. Our idea of a good meal was fried `eggy bread' large doorstep slices of white bread dipped in egg, fried in butter, and covered in brown sugar. We spent our time lounging in odd positions, giggling, listening to obscure rock albums, making rounds of eggy bread through the night. But I wasn't really fat. I looked like a slim person who had become a slob.
    After this I lost weight again. I became sexually promiscuous. (This would always happen when I lost weight.) I was slim until I was 26. That's the year I left university. By the time I met Anna, though, when I was 27, I was 208 lbs fat enough to make a difference. She was a princess on the slide; I was her plump provider. I grew into the role. During my time
    I want a quick fix because I don't want to look into myself too deeply. I am afraid that I might look into myself and despair.
    I might look into myself, and despair, and never be the same again.

The Prejudice Is Insidious
    Once, during the time I was with Sadie, during my slow, inexorable-seeming ascent, or, to put it another way, while I was burrowing into the mire of pretence and self-deception that became my world as I approached serious fatness, I wondered if it might be possible to live a normal life as a fat person.
    I'd heard about the Fat Acceptance movement. Here were people who were fat, and yet who said they didn't mind being fat. I was fat, and I was beginning to despair. And these Fat Acceptance people were they not despairing too? I imagined that, secretly, they were. I imagined they were lying to themselves and others. I imagined they were untrustworthy.
    I was prejudiced.
    Of course, I had a reason to be prejudiced. I was fat.
    The first person I talked to was Shelley Bovey, probably the most radical campaigner for Fat Acceptance in Britain. At the time, Bovey was 5 foot 4, and weighed 224 lbs. She was fat, and she didn't like being fat. Her campaign was directed at prejudice against fat people, particularly women. So even though, on one level, she did not accept herself as she was, she wanted others to accept her.
    Bovey did not fall into line with the Big is Beautifulmovement. She wanted fat to be accepted, but not admired. In her book The Forbidden Body she writes, 'Big is Beautiful puts a forced smile on the face of fat without revealing the depths of unhappiness and humiliation that most fat women experience. It is this that needs to be brought out into the open. It has to be recognised. And it has to be stopped.'
    At this point, Bovey wouldn't agree to meet me in person. We were talking on the phone. I wondered, perhaps uncharitably, if she wouldn't meet me in person because she was fat. After all, she had written, '. . . in a lifetime of being fat, I have observed that it is those who fear putting on weight who treat my size with the most aggression'. And she knew, of course, that I was fat, that I disliked being fat. But what animated me most about Bovey was her level of pain.
    Being fat, for Bovey, was intensely painful. She told endless stories about it. She had worked for the BBC, in radio documentaries, but switched to working from home, partly, she said, to avoid the difficulties of being a fat person in an office environment. At the BBC, she was told that her weight was giving