Fat for the love of food
April 18, 2009From the Jeffrey Masson end of the extreme to the other, today’s Australian mag reprints this Observer article by food mag editor Lucy Cavendish (by the way do Australian weekend newspapers actually commission local writers to write anything anymore?) about having to lose weight. So far, so boring – but she is refreshingly frank about her eating “problem”, and her suspicion of thin people:
My problem is simple – I love food. I don’t eat because I’m bored. I don’t eat because I am unhappy. I eat because I just love food and I happen to be living with a man, the father of my subsequent three children, who is an excellent cook.
…
But the weight is going. Each week I count the days down to Wednesday. On Tuesday I eat nothing but carrots and apples. I exercise all the time now. I bicycle hither and thither and then stare down at my stomach to see if it has deflated just a little. I can see other women looking at my stomach, too. In the shop the other day, my thin friend asked me, to my amazement, if I had lost weight.
“Good on you,” she said.
Conversely, my more rotund friends are not happy about my commitment to weight loss. They keep asking me round and waving glasses of prosecco under my nose.
I am not sure if I like this new me. I think rounder people are happier people. They don’t do denial. They don’t pound around villages in trainers at all times of the day and night. They don’t boxercise and bicycle and run marathons and go to spinning classes and work out and pay vast fees to gyms. They just sit and eat and drink and have fun.
Neither do they beat themselves up when they’ve had a bite of a chocolate eclair. The saddest thing in this world is watching my thin friend march up and down the hilly fields in front of my house because she ate half a chocolate eclair and is now disgusted with herself so much and to such an extent that she has to march, march, march it off.
How to shuck an oyster 
No, they don’t.