When it comes to our bodies, the accepted wisdom is that women really, really hate themselves. Survey after survey tells us that women are at war with their hips, their thighs, and that paunch that sometimes emerges between bra and underarm. Very thin women appear on TV talking about how fat they feel, how depressed they are when they look in the mirror. And this unhappiness is clearly real. There really are size-6 women who perceive their thighs as gargantuan meaty sausages.
So I feel slightly ashamed to admit that I've always had almost entirely the opposite problem. Actually, opposite is the wrong word. It's not that I've spent my life skipping around, crowing about how taut and toned I am. But whether I've been 11st or 17st, I've always thought that I looked, you know, all right. And weirder than that, however high my weight has gone, whenever I've peered in the mirror I've always looked exactly the same as I did when I was at my thinnest. I genuinely haven't been able to tell the difference.
This delusion has persisted despite powerful evidence that everyone else has noticed a change in my face and body shape: the comment of an acquaintance, for instance, (well, a close relative) that I was looking especially large, and could I possibly be pregnant? Even when people started standing up for me on the tube, the delusion persisted. The first time this happened, I declined the offer, then puzzled over why it had been made. The second time, I realised that my ample tummy was to blame, and while I declined again, I'll admit that a small, evil part of my brain was rubbing its hands together and planning to exploit this unlikely power the next time I boarded the tube with sore legs.
The reasons for my delusion can be boiled down to a few key factors. One is the power of my "mirror-face". Now, personally, I don't think that I pull a specific face each time I look in the mirror, but everyone else tells me that I do. In fact, my mirror-face is apparently such a triumph of sucked-in cheeks, pouting mouth and coquettishly tipped chin that it renders me unrecognisable to everyone but myself. And I have to admit that photographs attest to the yawning gulch between what I see in the mirror and reality - for instance, until one particular snapshot last year, I had no idea that it was possible to get cellulite on your face.
Another factor has probably been the lack of full-length mirrors in my house, and also a certain subconscious pragmatism, which recognises that if you're not going to address something, there's no point in worrying about it. When it comes to my appearance, I've always been lo-fi - I've been to a hair salon once in my life, only to be bored witless by the repeated suggestion that I start straightening my already straight locks, made by a stylist whose hair had apparently spent several decades trapped in a Corby trouser press. I realised then that I wasn't willing to expend this much time on my coiffure - a trim by whoever was to hand would suffice. And my attitude to my body has been much the same. For all the years that I couldn't be bothered to lose weight, there was no point in feeling anything but vaguely content.
The only problem now is that I can't tell whether I'm losing weight or not. As I said in the last column, people keep telling me I look thinner, but I don't know whether it's true. The answer would be to start weighing myself, but I'm worried that I'll be pitched headfirst into the hell of excitement at each pound lost; horror at each pound gained. This holds particularly true since my weight loss, while hopefully adhering to a general downward trend, is subject to the blips that come with a sustainable approach to dieting - one that allows for occasional hungover carbo-loading, for example.
The only answer, I would guess, is to start having my photograph taken each week. While my mirror-face may fool me, the camera never lies.
