this;
themes
covered
are
emotional happiness, financial
stability
and
physical
contentment. Maor comments that
through “presenting the ‘thin’
protagonist
as
successful,
attractive, and popular and
the ‘fat’ protagonist as ugly,
miserable, and an outsider
implies that the fat body
should be replaced by the thin
body,” (2013, p.3). Anita and Gill
both conform to this trope,
exploring how they as the
protagonists have replaced not
only their ‘fat’ bodies with ‘thin’
ones, but also, in doing this,
how they have replaced their
“miserable... fat” lives with
their “thin... successful” life.
Falling in love
makes you fat
This line comes from Gill’s
interview in Weight Watchers,
in which she links meeting
her husband with “piling on
the pounds”. Anita too links
gaining weight with meeting
her partner, stating: “when I
met my husband Baz... and we
settled into a routine I can
only describe as comfortable...
we both gained weight.” The word
‘comfortable’
feels
awkward
in her account, as it is not a
word normally associated with
love; exciting, life-changing or
exhilarating perhaps, but not
‘comfortable’. The impression
this leaves is that Anita lived
her life in a catatonic state
whilst she was overweight; not
even something as incredible
as love could allow her to feel
what she later refers to as ‘real’.
Maor
states
that
often
magazines
claim
that
“in
order to be loved you need to
be thin” (2013, p.97), which is
something readers can infer
from Gill’s story. The figure
on page 33 (right) shows her
weight journey in three images,
all of which relate to her
relationship in some sense.
The ‘before’ here is represented
in the first two images: Gill
previously states that she was
slim when she met her future
husband, that she gained weight
after falling in love but
“slimmed down” for her wedding
day by going on an “extreme diet”
- the result being she looks
happy and content. Use of the
word “extreme” with reference
to dieting further extends the
motif that weight loss is a war,
an
all-encompassing
battle
that not even love can remove
women from. This is further
supported through the second
caption and photo of Gill, who
is forcing a smile. She confesses
that the weight she had lost
previously for her wedding
started “creeping” on again
“almost immediately” after the
couple exchanged their vows.
Gill states that when she
stopped watching her weight,
presumably
through
being
content in the early stages
32