Weight

I have always been bigger. Not 'bigger' bigger, but never less than a size 14. Never more than a big size 14, verging on a 16, but never,ever less. Until I moved to Paris in September last year, I didn't think this bothered me. Yes, it was sometimes annoying not being able to ever borrow clothes off my friends, but, if I say so myself, I dress pretty well, and yes, I was oddly obsessed with weight loss programmes, but I never ever ever thought I would reach a point where I could take a deep breath and say 'I want to lose weight'. I was always the curvy one - curvy being used here literally and not as a euphemism. I have an hourglass shape with a tiny waist, which is different and pretty cool. Some boys, not oodles of them, but enough of them, thought it was great. I went running, sometimes, and I ate whatever I wanted when i wanted. I was busy being 'me', and being curvy was an intrinsic part of that. But gradually, over the last two years, somehow, being bigger had become something I felt the need to defend - an essential part of me which wasn't allowed to change because it defined me. I was fun, happy, slightly nervy, popular and Joan Holloway. Just to be clear - never ever have I had to defend my weight to my peers or friends. This was strictly between me and, er, me. They are wonderful, supportive, complimentary and usually jealous of my boobs.

However, suddenly, last summer, on a trip round the greek islands with C, H and another C, something changed. I hated being seen in my bikini. I sucked it up, and put it on anyway, but I was not happy. I carried on. I 'rationalized'. I told myself I would be betraying who I was if I dared think that losing weight might make me happier, or more successful. I was 'me', and I could not be me if I was thinner. It just wouldn't work.

And then I came to Paris. Working in an office job from 930-630 meant never eating apart from breakfast, lunch and supper. It is a 15 minute walk to the metro from my office, and I did it morning and evening. My father brought out a car full of things 'I couldn't live without' just two weeks after I had moved there, and his first comment was "you've shrunk a bit!". Suddenly, I realised I had. My double chin was disappearing and i felt lighter. I hadn't even meant to, but there had been no bingeing, no emotional eating, no thought of what was being eaten or not eaten, and it showed. I began to think. For the first time in forever, I wasn't with a group of people that knew me - I was completely without context, in a foreign city, with alot of time to spend alone, contemplating my navel, my future and my life. Browsing Amazon one day, I was suddenly overwhelmed with urges to buy diet books. Just to look. So buy I did. I bought alot. I've read them all. Some are very very good (If I ever meet India Knight or Neris Thomas I know something lame like 'Your chapter on emotional eating and 'good' and 'bad' food is the most succint, well written, wise, warm, funny, eye opening thing I have ever read.' will escape my mouth and I will clasp them to my bosom, and probably weep), and some, inevitably, were complete tripe ('French women dont get fat', im talking about you. You are a pile of patronising tacky stereotyped shit).

Finally, 6 months on, I am ready to say it. I want to lose weight. Not because I don't love my body, because I do. I love my tiny waist. My boobs are the best of anyone I know. My bum may be large but it is firm and beyoncé-shaped. All this is great and good and all very well, but what would it look like if I were a healthy weight. Tehcnically, according to the Wii fit 12 months agao, I am halfway between healthy and obese. I want to see what 'healthy weight' feels like. I want to see how it feels to be able to go up a size in Topshop, to want to be seen in a swimming costume by my male friends, and to not be besieged by irrational fears as to the correlation of my social standing to my weight. (SHALLOW and BAD but sadly ALL TOO TRUE). Most importantly, I want to achieve something, all by myself, to prove to myself that I can.

I don't want to become jaw-droppingly beuatiful with men hanging on my every word (one, though, would be nice), I am not doing it to feel 'normal' or 'included', and I am not doing this out of self loathing. I am doing it because I want to look the best I can, because I owe myself that much. It will be bum out if some of my clothes (beloved Vivienne Westwood 21st dress, I'm looking at you!) no longer fit, but there is ebay, and that is life. It is also a fucking shit bollocks excuse.

On saturday, I'm buying some scales, weighing myself for the first time in a year, and signing up to weightwatchers online. I've done the research, I've done a lot of thinking, and I am ready and excited to go. In a way, I can't wait. I eat very healthily anyway, but feel I need a structure to force me into cementing the good habits I seem to have accidentally fallen into. It feels weird, and I have only told my mother (who, annoyingly, had seen it coming, done her own research and agrees RE weightwatchers) and L, who was amazing, interested and supportive. I'm not telling anyone else because this is between me and me alone. The aim is to be a size 12 (ideally 10, but lets see what weightwatchers say about it all before we go too far..) by September. I'll keep you posted...Xx

Lent

I missed the new year's resolutions boat this year, and have decided to hijack Lent to kickstart some of my goals instead. I am going to see if I can live without three things which, whilst they are intensely pleasureable, will be even more so if I did them less often and with more restraint. If I type them here, i have to give them up, because the INTERNET DOES NOT FORGIVE, so, without further ado...

1. No more pasta or gnocchi. Because without them my skin and stomach seem far happier.
2. No more meals out. I can sit in a restaurant while friends eat, but I cannot eat in the restaurant. the one exception to this rule is a meal with lil bro and his girlfriend when they visit in late March.
3.No buying of clothes of any kind. No vintage, no H and M, no Zara, no ASOS, no nothing. Nothing, nothing nothing. Which will allow me to save up for this -


(Jigsaw, 149 pounds)... As well as pretty much everything from Toast this season.

In order to make it all a bit more positive, and not just about deprivation, I also resolve to -

1. Join weightwatchers and take this diet thing seriously. It has taken me a long time to get here, but now that I am finally in a place where I can look myself in the eye and admit that I am deeply unhappy about my weight, I really should do something about it.
2. Start running, because I really enjoy the way in makes me feel - strong, amazonian and, er, empowered.
3. Crack on with reading for next year / catch up on all the books I didn't read last year.

Wish me luck!
XxX

Meet the gang

Right. My best friends. They will come up alot, because they are my world, so you should probably meet them. The nulbering is convenience, rather than preference.

1. H. The bestest of them all. I have known her since I was 9, when I was a speccy weirdo and she was a lanky one. We played imaginary ponies, then got real ponies. We grew up and went to different senior schools. I came back one holiday to find that she had suddenly shot up and become the most jaw-droppingly languid beauty. I trailed in her wake, feeling miserable, fat and squat. She sat, listened, understood, never judged, gently pushed me in the right direction when I wouldn't listen to anyone else, made me kiss boys who I was sure didn't want to kiss me (they did), held my head, and never ever left my side. (Mentally.physically she obviously did.) We will end our days in some rambling country house, surrounded by dogs, pigs, chickens and ponies. She is the love of my life. My father says he pities the fool who marries one of us before the other one. So beautiful she silenced the college rugby team when she walked through the quad of my Oxford college. So great that we can sit in silence watching ANTM and eating rockies for hours on end. So weird that she totally understands my sense of humour. Just the best.

2. R. Ginger, looks like an actual 50s movie starlet. Has the kind of face that people stop in the street and say 'Wow, you are so beautiful! I LOVE your hair'. Also has the kind of personality which you cannot not like. Everyone who has ever met her loves her, from my parents to the meanest girl I know. She has a gift with people. This would make me jealous, only I think that it is quite possibly the most awe-inspiring thing ever.We bicker like sisters, and she makes me a better person, pushes me to do things I don't want to do. She bequeaths brilliant vintage dresses to me, ones I would never have the courage to buy on my own, which I then wear to death. We knew each other for ages through mutual friends, and then she came to 6th form college in the year below me, we starred in a Winchester College production of 'Oh! What a Lovely War!', and the rest is history. I still remember the director's speech at the after party, where he thanked everyone else individually, yet siad to us 'And you two, you two... Thank you for being so wonderfully vibrant and sexy.' It is one of my favourite things anyone has ever said. Well read, erudite, witty, creative, beautiful and stylish, and yet more than happy to spend a week in the Scottish wilds clubbing fish to death and scrambling over rocks. Purrr.

3. C. A leg-shaking, jameson-swilling lanky bundle of fun. Wonderful. Met her at H's 14th birthday party and one of us opened with the line 'You're my new best friend'. I say it was her, she says it was me. It doesn't matter. We have never been to school together yet she's right up there. Kind and compassionate to the point of self sabotage, vegetarian, teetering on the brink of alcoholism, relentlessly energetic and immense. Favourite travelling companion.

4. K. We met at interview, which I don't remember and she does. I told her I had 35 cardigans and she hated me as a consequence. Fair enough. We both got in to Oxford, and slowly formed an inseparable bond helped by the catalyst of the scariest french grammar teacher ever and utterly abysmal marks. She is matter-of-fact, very good at cutting through my bullshit, and amazing with boys. She has also had the hardest two years of her life and come through it in one dignified and balanced piece, which I could never tell her because she will not be pitied. She has made the worst parts of my year abroad bearable because she is going through them too, and to top it all she has excellent taste in trashy cards.

5. A. A leetle crazy, but I still love her with all my heart. Wonderfully warm hearted. Again, beautiful.

6. L. Home to me. Just wonderful little ball of energy who swooshes in at exactly the right moment and makes everything better. I will never see her enough again, as this is her last year in Oxford and we are both busy busy gals with different friendship groups, but this does not matter because she will always be there in some form somehow. I could not see her for 5 years (GOD forbid) and it would not change, within two seconds we would be yabbering away, skipping and singing show tunes. Great clothes, razor-sharp wit, inexhaustible knowledge of celebrity trivia, and so PRETTY.

7. R. Genius cheese-eating chemist. Funny funny funny. Annoyingly cool exterior which conceals her nerdy weirdness underneath. Brilliant.

Seeing the majority of them over the last few days in England has been cracking but completely exhausting. I can barely see straight.

Xx

Sleep

Before we go any further, I think you should all know that I am a bad sleeper. My mother says it in a concerned and worried manner to anyone who will listen - 'she has terrible trouble you know', and its true, i really really do. I go through phases where my brain simply won't shut up and let me sleep, where my body lies leaden and exhausted but my brain races from one infuriatingly pointless thought to the next and will not stop, gleefully rattling through the night like some kind of deranged poltergeist. I have learnt to accept it, but it always happens at the wrong time - now for example - after a hectic wonderful weekend of parents visiting and right before a 4 day trip to bristol and oxford. It is not that I am not tired - I am, itchy-scratchy-crabby-carby tired. Its just I can't sleep. I have developed strategies to combat this - counting latin verbs, yogic breathing, acceptance of my fate, but my body's capacity for self sabotage never ceases to amaze me.

I also cannot sleep if someone else is in the bed, particularly if they snore, move, speak, or are awake. I simply cannot. I refuse to sleep anywhere near one of my best friends, because she kicks, scrunches, slobbers and snores. The only person I will slumber soundly next to is my bestest friend in the whole wide world, because on top of all her other virtues, she is a silent and still sleeper.

All this insomnia is made worse by two things. Firstly, of course, I am awful without sleep. I hate myself, I hate everyone, I think everyone hates me. I talk to anyone and everyone about how I cannot sleep and tend to overdo the whole thing so that by the end of a conversation people throw nytol at me in a vain attempt to get me to shut up. Its embarassing and overdramatic but I cannot help myself. Sleep is a basic human need and instinct and I find it supremely unfair that my body simply does not want to get involved with something it so patently wants and needs. The second worse thing is that I am a sleep DIVA. Woe betide anyone who snores near me. I view it as a personal insult. HOW DARE YOU? I have bruised the aforementioned kicking-snoring-slobbering friend before in my violent rails against her nighttime habits. Of course, all this agression and attitude is actually just seething jealousy, the pent up frustration of sitting and staring at a bed-mate snoring away oblivious, ASLEEP when I so long to be. I still feel awful about other best friend's (sorry; continuous use of best friend - ill describe them all in my next post) visit to Paris, where her snoring annoyed me so much that I woke her up, told her off, and then went soundly to sleep, leaving her sitting, twitching, too scared to sleep for fear of 'waking the beast' (me) with a snore.

Its ugly. Its infuriating. Its one of my worst things. Everything goes out the window - health (hello unecessary and bloating croque madame at lunch, HI), sanity (emailing EVERYONE to make sure THEY ALL KNOW I AM RETURNING TO OXFORD NEXT WEEKEND, when they are all in the same friendship group and know already? ah but of course), any vestige of charm, which is awful in Paris - no one here knows me well enough for me to be able to get away with a mood without them being genuinely concerned that something is actually genuinely WRONG. Just for reassurance, nothing ever is. I have a wonderful life and am utterly blessed, bar for the lack of Michael Cera and being a 14 not a 12. My famous capability for drama and moods disappears in actual times of crises, and I in fact come over all English, frightfully stoical, weirdly balanced, and relentlessly determined to behave absoultely impeccably. However, in normal every day life, in times of fatigue and menstruation, I am perfectly capable of crying at a man who barges into me on a metro, and stropping because my best male friend (who, incidentally is ON THE COVER OF THE ABERCROMBIE LOOKBOOK.this is HILARIOUS. He has rope all around him and looks all brooding. In reality he is a sweet shy geography-studying rugby whiz-kid. I weed a bit when i saw it. I share this with you because I can't share it with anyone else, for fear of inflating his ego or simultaneously pissing him off. I am never quite sure how seriously he takes his modelling.) has NOT REPLIED TO MY FACEBOOK. I retain a healthy sense of my own ridiculousness thanks to my wonderful mother and friends but still equally an astonishing belief that I am entitled to behave like a 15 year old.

I fear my sleepless nights every 2 to 3 weeks will never stop - my acceptance of insomnia and everything that comes with it has helped me hugely, but not made the problem go away - and I pity the fool who has to live with me and this for the rest of my life. Oh boo hoo hoo.

Naughty

Oooh I am a bad blogger.

I just can't seem to get the hang of it. I don't know what to write about, or how to write. There is lots to write about, of course, from me finally sort of nearly getting the hang of 'grown up' life via a slightyl worrying addiction to amazon and diet books, to loving Paris, finally discovering 'Merci' and quartiers other than the Marais, the development of my style along with my sense of self (seeshhh, american/superficial much?) to how I feel about events, both big and small - from the funding slashed across university (i simply must win the euromillions and put the world to rights) to my best friends all graduating this year (when did we get so old?how come I still feel 18 most of the time?What is this?)

Paris. How have I not properly talked about Paris yet? Its gloomy, icy cold and snowing, and yet it is still beautiful. Every cliché rings true, every superlative seems inadequate. Its just so pretty, chic, stylish, rude, french, and brilliant. My favourite thing about it is the reaction from people when I say I live there 'Really? In Paris? Lucky you!'. Lucky indeed. It is the first real city I feel at home in, and I never want to leave. My Paris, according to my lovely pretentious moleskine notebook, consists thus far of the bridges over the Seine, Falafel from l'as de Falafel on Rue des Rosiers, reading turn-of-the-century women's novels in my tiny flat, Sex and the City in my tiny flat, Chez Camille, the friperies, Merci, Place des Vosges, glimpsing the Eiffel Tower from unexpected places and feeling ridiculously excited, crepes, and small dogs, notably pugs.

One of the things that msot fascinates me about the franco-english divide is the retention of stereotypes of the other party. In my office, my colleagues frequently ask me whether I go out in a skirt and strappy top in the snow (never ever ever,never mind the snow) and whether I drink deliberately (Not since moving here..). Similarly, when I go home, all people ask me is whether I can get drunk here (not without feeling like a complete twat) and whether everyone is as rude and snobby as rumours say. The rude and snobby thing gets me every time. On the one hand, yes, compared to the standard awkward default setting of polite neediness of any english exchange, the brusque honesty of any french exchange, with a casual acquaintance or in a shop, is a bit rude and arrogant, but on the other, I think it marks a real respect for the person you are interacting with. The completely shameless superfical door policies of most clubs is awful, and being rejected never ceases to infuriate, but if you do get in, at least you know you'll be in good company. That smacks of double standards, but the whole Parisian attitude smacks of them. Smack smack smack, from the waiter who is rude when you speak english to your friend, but suddenly becomes charming when you both order in well pronounced french, to the Zadig and Voltaire shop girl who tells you not to try on one of their shrunken cashmere strappy things, gesturing with disdain to your large chest, but points you in the direction of the perfect cashmere scarf, and spends 15 minutes helping you decide a colour. As a foreigner you have to prove something to Parisians - that you can speak french, that you can dress, that you can eat, and therefore that you deserve their respect. Yes, its snobby, but it really does make you pull your socks up. I have only made the mistake of wearing tracksuit bottoms in public once, and I was actively tutted and told off by three different women in the space of 10 minutes. Never, ever again. People here bring it. You should too. And once you do, you'll never stop. I swear its helped me work out where I'm going and how I'm getting there.

XxX

p.s. RIP Mcqueen.How sad and oddly affecting. Tragic.