Gosh, that sounds a bit academic article titley, doesn’t it? What a worrying start.

Anyway, whatever the inauspicious title, I’ve been thinking a lot about self-image in the last few months. Well, probably the last two years, if we’re honest, since I was pregnant. The thing is, I really hate having my photograph taken, probably because most of the pictures I see of myself are utterly abysmal, and I see, rather than the person I hope I am, outwardly, a knackered-looking woman with dubious hair and a clear love of chocolate which manifests in the physical world as hips the size of Australia and a hint of second or third chins from certain angles, none of which is particularly flattering.

Of course, there are also photos which I consider acceptable (and rest assured that those are both firmly in the minority, and the only ones I post here!); yes, I still look knackered and my hair is obviously in need of urgent attention, but normally these photos don’t, at least to my mind, show the fat bird I am so worried to be the truthful representation. Now, I know, rationally, that the weight I am is not my ideal, in terms of longevity and whatnot. I also know, however, that I am not horribly unfit, and nor am I the size of a house, despite some photographic suggestions that such is the case (we’ll say it was a combination of an unfortunate angle and the deeply unflattering sweaters I used to think made me look slimmer, ironically. Oh, ignorance was bliss!).

But still, when I see myself in the mirror, I am not happy with what I see, mostly. I am happy to have what can only be described as a Junoesque figure – I have always had reasonably large breasts, and hips which look ideally suited to producing broods of small, dungaree-clad infants with blonde hair before carrying said infants about perched on one side or the other – but the stomach? The stomach I am less happy about. I am also less happy about the general… weightiness of myself. Mostly, I am unhappy about the fact that when I see myself in the mirror, I am reminded of the years I spent reassuring my mother that she wasn’t fat, and that she looked nice in such-and-such, and so on. My mother spent most of her adult life worrying that she was too heavy, and, indeed, being too heavy. I don’t know what the risk percentages are, but I do know that extra weight is no good thing when it comes to breast cancer; as fatty tissue may produce extra oestrogen, the less tissue you have which is fatty, the better, it seems. (I don’t know if the breast cancer which killed my mother at 53 is genetic, but I do know that her mother died at 39, and that the two breast cancer genes identified thus far [for which I have tested negative] are not necessarily the only ones, so in the meantime, I’m thinking bet-hedging is the way forward.) Anyway, yes – there she was, worrying that she was overweight, and yes, sometimes, and indeed prior to her initial diagnosis with breast cancer, she was too heavy. And there I was, at the time pretty slim, reassuring her.

(Aside: I look very like my mother. The small girl looks very like me. Genetically, it’s as if our genes didn’t even notice the paternal whatsits floating about, so weak and pathetic were they when compared with our own mighty, er, persistence.)

I suppose it’s at least partly from our parents that we learn our eating habits as adults. Yes, some of it is choice, but it seems reasonable to think that some of it is learned behaviour from our childhoods. I am fortunate in that I like pretty much all sorts of vegetables and fruit; I am less fortunate in that, like many, I seem to equate food with security and happiness. If I am tired, or sad, or depressed, or just a bit low, it is all too easy to reach out my increasingly porky trotter and waffle down some cake. Likewise, one of the best ways to improve my mood is to bake. Both traits inherited, if not learned, from my own mother, and not helpful, see, when combined with a ridiculously sweet tooth and the willpower of… a very unwilled thing indeed. (Although somewhere in there I must have some backbone – I quit smoking when I was nineteen and have never gone back to it, and I did, eventually, finish that sodding PhD.) (Aside: hmm. Maybe I used up all the willpower I had? Maybe that’s my quota gone…?)

And so I find myself, at the age of thirty-one, thinking that this time, I’ve got to stop pissing about and actually drop some weight. I think that a stone would make a big difference. I am a size fourteen, in English sizing (which I think works out at a ten in the US), and I think I weigh about twelve stone.

God.

When I write that, it does not feel good. But see again the point re stopping pissing about. I don’t think I eat terribly; rather, the problem is that I simply eat too much of everything, and I don’t get enough exercise to justify doing so. When I lived on my own as a bid to make myself get over my mother’s death and start actively living, rather than simply existing, again, I joined a gym, controlled what I ate, and lost over a stone relatively easily. I can’t really join a gym these days, partly because I think my arms would take on a life of their own and repeatedly punch me in the face until I realised the extent to which I had betrayed them, and partly because I am skint enough to consider buying coffee a lavish extravagance, and then again partly because I have the perfect accessory for doing bench-presses: a nineteen-month walking talking infant. So, I can’t be completely control-freak about this, in the way that I was when I had only myself to please, and only myself to consider when I went to bed hungry – but quite smug – each night. How, then, to proceed? Well, first up, I think I need to just cut down on everything, a little bit. I don’t drink, really, and I must stop baking, I fear, for the next month, just to see if that helps. (Of course it doesn’t help that Quercus, who isn’t overweight and can eat like a bull, gets very tired in the afternoons and often perks up when presented with cake; neglectful wife charges in the offing, courtesy of none other than my own brain, see?) And after managing a three-mile walk with the small girl in the sling yesterday, I think I must also manage this more than once in a blue moon, because It Is Important, and should not always be put to the bottom of the list.

Oh, if I could only just start with a clean slate, rather than having to slim down the sodding slate I’ve developed, as it were.

All of which brings me to my second point: self-image. Essentially, in emotional terms, what’s made me really think about all this is that I don’t want the small girl to spend her life watching her mother feeling crap about the way she looks. Yes, I embrace the idea of people being different sizes, and different shapes, and just… different. I love having a feminine-shaped figure, and am not interested in losing lots of weight. But I’m not happy, and I don’t want to put that on her, if that makes sense. From a practical point of view, I find myself thinking with increasing frequency that if I really love my girl – and I do; oh, I do! – then I must do everything I can to ensure that she doesn’t become the third generation in my family to lose her mother at an unusually early age. My mother was 15 when it happened to her, and I was 22 when it happened to me. (In amongst all this thinking I’ve been doing, I note also that there are relatively few photographs of my mother; I think this is partly because she experienced the ol’ self-loathing I often feel when faced with photographic representations of ‘oh, one more slice won’t hurt’. I make myself appear in pictures, and in videos, with the small girl partly because I know that, while I may love the pictures of her as a small child, when she is older, she may want to see her parents too, and images of our lives together, rather than isolated snapshots of her sitting on worktops or something similar. Yack, it’s hard, though.)

So, here is to new beginnings. I shall try not to witter on about this to so long and so navel-gazing an extent again, but also, I would appreciate it if any regular readers – or those who lurk and would like an excuse to pick on me – could pop out of the woodwork with chirpy little ‘so, lardarse, lost the excess yet?’-like comments from time to time, just to ensure I stay on the straight and, hopefully, increasingly narrow path to losing that stone, preferably in about twelve weeks.

Let’s see, shall we?