Research has shown that the average woman has 36 negative thoughts about her body every day. To see if it was true, we asked writer LUCY CAVENDISH, who should feel good about herself having lost three stone in the past year, to keep a diary...
Negative thoughts: Lucy Cavendish
7am: The first thing I do when I wake up is sleepily feel my hips with my hands. For years I was fat and after four pregnancies I found it almost impossible to lose weight. Yet over the past year, I have lost more than three stone with WeightWatchers. But I find it hard to get used to the new me. Every night, I dream I have put the weight back on. I have nightmares about it, so every morning I have to check. Can I feel my hips? Or have I eaten 20 cream teas unwittingly in my sleep and piled it all back on? Oh God, how much would I love to eat a cream tea.
7.15am: I get up and wander to the bathroom. I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I haven't eaten that cream tea, but God, when did I start to look so old? I stare at myself blearily. I have bags under my eyes and my skin looks saggy. I pull my skin back. This is how I looked in my 20s - taut and lean. Now, I look like a sack of potatoes. It's all downhill from here, I think.
7.30am: I put on my usual country uniform of jeans (baggy, ancient) and jumper (moth-eaten). Scrag my hair up in to a tight bunch. Is my hair getting thinner? Start worrying about my age even more. 8am: The night before, I read an article about how having your teeth whitened can make you look years younger. Wonder if I should get it done.
8.20am: Take the kids to school. Try to hide in the car. Why does every other mother look amazing and I don't? Most of them have make-up on. How on earth do they find the time to do that at this time in the morning? I barely have time, when getting four children out of the house, to brush my hair. In fact, it occurs to me I haven't brushed my hair for ages. It is all sticking out all over the place. At the school gates, a particularly nice and attractive, young school mother stops to talk to me. I notice how white her teeth are. Has she had them done?
8.25am: Get back in the car and grimace at myself in the mirror. My teeth are nowhere near as white as hers. Decide then and there to get my teeth bleached. I don't even care that my best friend Bridget told me it was horribly painful.
8.40am: Get home and brush hair. It is drizzling outside and my hair has gone like a bog brush - it is now out at wild angles. I try to tame it with some hair serum, but it looks as if I have stood under an oil slick.
8.45am: Man comes round to sort out my septic tank. I answer the door with the serum in my hair and he looks horrified. Trim older woman from next door walks past. How can anyone over 60 look that good?
9.15am: Look at all the clothes in my wardrobe. Sixty-plus lady was in jeans, shirt and a gilet. She looked effortlessly stylish. I try to find a shirt. I decide my boobs are too big to carry off a shirt. Why do I have such big boobs?
9.20am: Start wondering why I have such big thighs as well as boobs. Now I'm obsessively thinking about my size. What did I have for breakfast? Finished off the children's cereals. Ate two slices of toast. Start panicking that I'm getting fat again.
10am: Go to my weekly yoga class. I don't know why I do this. I am not at all bendy despite doing yoga once a week for the past year. I can't decide whether or not to wear my tight yoga pants - I have a pang of 'Does my bum look big in this?' worry - or my looser ones.
10.30am: Am standing in 'tree' - well, my version of tree - watching the very thin and beautiful girl opposite me close her eyes while balancing on one leg.
'I barely have time, when getting four children out of the house, to brush my hair.'
10.45am: Fall out of my tree pose while trying not to look at myself in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors in the yoga studio that are relatively unavoidable. I think I must suffer from some sort of body dysmorphia. Every time I see myself in a mirror I think: 'Who is that old, ugly, large woman?'
11.30am: Decide to look at the shops on my way back from yoga. Bad idea. Why do shops have such terrible lighting in them? Noon: The first shop I go into is a disaster. I take a skirt to the changing room and then have to see myself in the mirror. I look terrible. I run out of the shop and decide to avoid everyone. 1pm: Have a problem deciding what to eat for lunch. I should have a grilled-chicken salad, but what I really want is the packet of Minstrels that I hid in the back of the grocery cupboard yesterday. Minstrels. Salad. Minstrels. Salad. The chocolate is calling me. I give in.
1.30pm: Resist the temptation to weigh myself. I am convinced those Minstrels will have made me put on half a stone. Lie on bed, close eyes and will myself to stop feeling guilty about the chocolate-eating thing.
1.45pm: Remember I have to go to the physiotherapist. I took up running a year ago, but have had painful knees, hips and pretty much everything else since I started.
1.50pm: As I drive there, it occurs to me that I don't like going to see the physio. He works out of a health club, which is full of preposterously fit and pretty yummy mummies. I am not one of them. It worries me.
1.55pm: I then also remember that the physio keeps telling me I am physically very 'weak', as he puts it. This makes me feel depressed and angry at the same time.
2pm: I get to the health club. It sends me off into a spiral of negativity. Who are these women with their neat figures and equally neat gym gear? How do they look so good?
2.10pm: Physio tells me that part of my problem is to do with the fact that I am 'ageing'. Ageing? Of course I'm ageing. We're all ageing.
2.11pm: I ask him what he means exactly. He goes into a long explanation of what happens to our gluteus maximus, or more specifically what's happened to my gluteus maximus. 'In short,' he says, 'your muscles are not strong enough and your bottom has drooped.' I have a droopy bottom. It's official.
3pm: Pull up outside the school gates worrying about my bottom. Start looking at all the other women's bottoms. No one else's seems to be that droopy.
3.15pm: Outside the school, I notice one woman who always looks amazing. She doesn't work, but she is always immaculately dressed and made up. I resolve to sharpen up my act.
No comments:
Post a Comment