Sweet Irony

By the time I was ten years old I was a child in a woman’s body. There were absolutely no advantages to this. My burgeoning bosom attracted jeers from my contemporaries and my blossoming hips meant I got called every imaginable name - “lard ass” being the one I hated most. My hips were the bane of my existence and I started my first diet before my eleventh birthday.

By the time I was twelve I thought I looked pretty loathsome. What is incredible is that if you look at photographs of me at that time, I actually had quite a nice figure - a bit on the voluptuous side, and strangely womanly for a twelve year old, but quite well balanced and certainly not fat. I, however, believed myself to be huge and my contemporaries’ bewilderment at my womanly shape meant I was teased relentlessly. I prayed daily to lose weight and in particular, to have a smaller bottom. I dieted obsessively, and developed a relationship with food that was utterly dysfunctional. By the time I was fifteen I was flirting with anorexia, and by sixteen, we were going steady.

I got really, really thin. You could see my collarbones and my ribs and I got light-headed every time I stood up. I weighed just over ninety-five pounds, and my waist was less than twenty-two inches around. Still, in comparison to the rest of my visibly skinny body, my hips were voluptuous. It was beyond frustrating and made me eat even less. But the sad death of singer Karen Carpenter’s in 1983 made me realised that if I didn’t stop starving myself, anorexia could kill me too, so my body and I developed an uneasy peace and I eventually returned to a more normal weight.

I still hated my hips though, and over the next twenty years, pregnancy and getting a bit older meant that they didn’t get any smaller. Even today, when I am more active than I have ever been, practicing yoga and Pilates regularly and working out at least three times a week, my hips still make me sigh. I’m pretty happy with my shape in general now, and my tummy is really flat, but if only my hips were a bit smaller! Nothing I do seems to budge even an inch off them.

But today I am vindicated, and today I understand why the good Lord refused to answer my prayers. As always, He had my best interests at heart. Ladies, if you are pear shaped too, read this article from the BBC and rejoice!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8451674.stm