Apparently, I’ve left it too late to diet. Not just for Christmas party svelte but – as they say in the classics – 4EVA. Well, not quite too late, but I learned this week that if you want to lose weight before you get “old” … 60-70 … all effort should be made during your 40s. Oops.
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My first diet was the Complete Scarsdale Medical diet. I was 20 in 1978 and a size 10, weighing in at a whopping 8 stone 7 pounds, or 52kg in new money. Isn’t that absurd?
Each day I ate so much pastrami, celery and lettuce, that my body started eating itself by producing ketones …which I hear are back in diet/health/lunatic fashion.
The Scarsdale diet’s inventor, Dr Herman Tarnower, was murdered by a jilted lover, and didn’t die, as I hoped, of a pastrami overdose. Anyhow, I dropped down to 50kg until age 23 and the birth of my first daughter, when I reached a whopping 61kg, joined Weight Watchers (three times) and by age 45, three kids later I weighed 75kg. These days, I vacillate between 82 and 85kg … or a bit less than Gary Ablett Jnr … 87kg.
I’m the same height as Oprah and a few kilos heavier, and learned last week that my BMI is just under obese. Crack the champagne; raison de célébrer.
I figured I would diet off a few kilos to get well below obese until I learned what my body has always known – that a healthy size 16 at 60 is arguably better than being a “skinny Minnie” at 57kg, as my husband so thoughtfully refers to hot older women like the wife of French president Emanuel Macron, Brigitte, 57kg at 64 (you can Google anything). I’ve missed the skinny boat. The weight loss ship has sailed without me, and I will never have skinny arms or tidy tits. What I will have is a strong frame, healthy appetite, a lifelong passion for bread, cheese, chocolate and red wine and a healthy respect for this magnificent 59-year-old body I call home.
PS: Re-read feminist Naomi Wolf’s Beauty Myth to remind yourself of the absurdity of western body image.
On another matter
I’ve missed the skinny boat. The weight loss ship has sailed without me.
How awesome is our weather? Aka, did you put your heating back on last week?
Here, we live on this tiny speck of an island. Here is a place where it can snow and blizzard on the second day of summer, no more than 48 hours after the same place recorded temperatures more than 30 degrees Celsius.
When I looked at a few seconds of footage taken last Sunday of snow storming onto the perilous Jacob’s Ladder, Ben Lomond, I felt great peace.
Perfect weather for decorating a Christmas tree and eating fruit cake with hot tea.
The peace also came from knowing I live in a perfectly imperfect place.
Where weather can turn summer to winter overnight, blowing up from Antarctica and forcing us to wear socks to bed in December. Because we are such a tiny speck of an island, none of this weather ever sits with us too long. I believe our variable weather is a positive influencer on our unique Tasmanian disposition.
You can pick us at any airport these Christmas holidays. The same way mainland Canadians can pick Greenlanders or the Scandi can pick Icelandic people, likewise Americans can pick residents of their most isolated state, Alaska.
No matter how hipster we think we are, our daggy, isolated islander selves are lurking nearby reminding us that we don’t wear the mainland uniform of conformity. We’re Tasmanian islanders, and we tend to live by our own rules.
