Occasional Scribbles

The following is an extract from a book I began writing (which will no doubt, never be finished, let alone published) which I thought might be amusing to post today.

People often say that fat people are jolly.  Laugh and grow fat is another saying.  Presumably because you have so much fun on the way to fatness, all that eating and drinking.  Does that mean that thin people are miserable?  Well obviously you get both, fat miserable people and jolly thin people and everything in between.  I think the miserable thin ones are the ones who are constantly watching everything they eat for fear of putting on the pounds.  All that worrying probably keeps them thin if truth be told.  I imagine the naturally thin ones are the happy jolly types.  Which brings me to ‘genes’.  Are some people born with the ‘fat’ gene and some with the ‘thin’ gene.  Undoubtedly they are but of course the beauty of having the fat gene is that you can overcome it.  You can actually be rid of the pounds if you so wish by watching what you eat.  The thinnies, on the other hand are stuck with being thin.  Not a bad gene to have I know, but there are some people who are too thin, I know, you can never be too thin.  But there are downsides.  These people complain that they can never get clothes to fit them just right.  They also get cold in the winter without the extra padding that a fatty has and being able to eat anything and everything doesn’t make them any healthier.

There are people who blame their upbringing for their size.  It is of course very popular to blame ones childhood for anything that is wrong in your life.  Indeed, are there any criminals who have not blamed their abusive parents when caught in the act?  Since it is the done thing to cast blame anywhere but on oneself, I feel inclined to jump on the bandwagon.  My lifelong trouble with food stems from my upbringing, my parents.  There I’ve said it.  I blame you, M&D.  (Love you lots too!)

My older sister and I have had an ongoing issue with food.  As an adolescent, she was, lets say, (kindly) chubby.  Our father made ‘remarks’ at the time and she has not forgotten.  In her late teens and into adulthood, these painfully remembered comments changed her. She became extremely thin and when she got married she looked really superb in her tiny wedding dress.  At which time, I was following on as a ‘chubby’ teenager myself and as a bridesmaid did not look superb in my opinion, although I remember one of the ushers making suggestive remarks to me. But he was drunk.  Worse, my sister’s other two bridesmaids were thin and stick thin, respectively. 

As she took up her married life, my sister began to have problems with eating in restaurants.  She’d got it fixed in her head that she would be sick if she ate anything while dining out.  I remember my parents being supportive (and, wrongly putting it down to nerves) and all of us being tactful and in due course she got over it, mostly.  Along came the first pregnancy and my goodness, she ballooned.  And she went on to balloon at each and every one of the next three.  She finally felt she had a justifiable reason to relax and eat what she wanted.  After all she was eating for two, again and again and again.  But, and this is the important but, she always got back to her pre-pregnancy slim weight within a very short time afterwards which was commendable.

Things went differently for me.  I lived a wild lifestyle and was stick thin for most of my twenties and through the births of both my boys.  And then it started to fall apart.  I cleaned up my act, a bit, and with the onset of a slightly more stable life, got fatter and fatter and worse, stayed that way.

We have discussed this issue between ourselves and have neatly traced our fat/food issues back to our upbringing.  When we were children, we always had to eat vegetables and always had to finish everything on our plates.  We were rarely allowed sweets and NEVER allowed to eat between meals.  Added to this was a strictly enforced education of mealtime etiquette.  We were taught how to hold our knives and folks, elbows would be knocked off the table with the back of a knife, (our father’s),  Adding salt was frowned upon, (insulting to the chef) and food must not be galloped down and we must pay attention to other people so we all finished our food at around the same time. Never cut a roll, (common) or butter a whole piece of toast, this must be broken into pieces and then buttered. We mustn’t be greedy, ever, but mustn’t leave anything uneaten (wasteful). Apart from negotiating this minefield, we were further expected to make interesting conversation, though never with a mouthful.  There were other things, too many to bother with now but you get the gist of it.  Of course some of these things I have passed on to my children, but many I have not.  My youngest son will barely eat vegetables but I know he will gradually come to like them and our meal times are infinitely more relaxed.  Both boys eat between meals though I try and limit that.  Teenagers have huge appetites and even though they snack, they still eat mountains at mealtimes.  But I remember being hungry on occasions in my childhood and so was my sister.  She was always a good meat eater and I recall one day, when our parents were out, her bringing out a cold joint of beef from the fridge and very stealthily, she thinly cut off a few slices to eat, making sure she carved it so carefully so it would not be noticed.  She offered me some, but I was too chicken to take it lest we be found out.

I realise that all this sounds at the very least, Dickensian, like Oliver Twist, ‘please sir, can I have some more’, ‘MORE’!  It sounds truly awful but in our discussions, my sister and I, we have concluded that the real problem was that the parents were children in the war.  During that time there was real hardship and my mother often recounts how absolutely starving they were as children.  And cold.  There was such a shortage that she had never seen a banana until she was quite old and she still has a ‘thing’ about butter which she will never leave on her plate.  She will take another biscuit/bread in order to finish it up rather than waste it.  Waste was a key thing when we were children.  It was heavily frowned upon.  It wasn’t just food, it was things like paper, (don’t waste it), string, never cut it and (waste) it.  They save and hoard stuff rather than throw it away.  ‘That bit of material (the size of a stamp), might be useful for something’.  My Dad often passes on shirts to my elder son who is in fact usually very pleased with them.  But he also passes on sweatshirts which are way past their prime, woolen jumpers that have gone all tight and shrunken and the worst yet, a linen jacket which apparently one of our stylish relatives had her eye on in the eighties, which is now completely faded and sun damaged.  And he actually thought my teenager would like it.  Horror of horrors. They wouldn’t be seen dead in it and nor would a tramp.  Paradoxically, the parents would have a fit if my boys turned up looking as scruffy as that jacket would have looked had they ever worn it.  I couldn’t even give it to charity.   They themselves were so deprived by the war that it has coloured their thinking ever since.  Both my sister and I have inherited this ‘waste not want not’ attitude to a degree. But we have found a different way of dealing with it. Both of us will leave uneaten leftovers in the fridge until they go off before throwing them out.  We feel less guilty if we do that.  We pretend we ‘forgot’ about something, and ‘oh dear, it’s gone off, better throw it away’.  Silly I know. How wasteful!

When I was 17, I moved out of our childhood home and went to live in London.  And I went wild.  I would make myself peanut butter sandwiches, ‘in between meals’ and my flatmates would fill the fridge with all sorts of wicked things, like bought cakes.  I had never had a ‘bought’ cake.  My mother made everything, ‘bought’ was very frowned upon.  ‘Bought’ pastry was probably one of the biggest sins.  Apart from the obvious food issues, my mother would never sit down.  I think it was part of the ‘waste’ thing, in this case time.  You couldn’t just sit down, that would be wasting time, you must be occupied doing something ‘useful’.  So of course when I moved into my flat, completely unrestrained, free and far away, I sat around as much as I liked.  I’d sit and read a book with my peanut sandwich to hand.  God what a decadent person I was becoming. 

So does upbringing have a bearing on weight?  I think it does!

My one and only, trip to the gym can be seen here, (posted previously on Blogarama), in case you missed it there!