UPPER TIERS BLOG: SIZE MATTERS NOT

A few of you in the comments have mentioned weight off the back of my post this morning, so I thought I’d talk about it a bit more.

I, like many of you, have had a complicated relationship with my size. Obviously it’s something I’ve mentioned in recent videos (or on the outtakes), because they were all filmed over the same two days. It’s rare for me to have any real insecurity around my appearance anymore, but I was feeling it when we were up in Cumbria.

Oddly, it does tend to happen more when I have a bad back. I hunch over, and that changes my centre of gravity, and so I feel more overweight than normal. As I said in the earlier post, I was feeling it because of a couple of comments I got from a friend the week before.

But… it was a half-hearted kind of insecure moment. It wasn’t the sort of full-throated “I’m SO fat and unlovable” kind of inner monologue I’d get in years past. It rarely is anymore.

It was more like a sigh… “I guess I should lose a bit of weight”…

I’m fine. You’re fine. We’re all fine. It’s society’s normalising of unrealistic body standards that’s wrong. 

We internalise that instead of rejecting it, and then it gets reinforced with rude comments. It’s a lie that you can’t be bigger than a rake and still be attractive. If someone’s size or shape is the only metric by which you measure attraction then god help you ever finding happiness.

If I look at risk of an imminent stroke by all means tell me, but if you’re just commenting on aesthetics, due to your own conditions of worth, then fuck off.

STICK MAN

I was pretty much a stick growing up; tall, thin, gangly. All arms and legs. Somebody once called me “lollopy”, which is the best description of teenage me as you’ll ever get.

I’ve never had a chest x-ray, so we don’t know exactly what’s going on inside my torso, but when I was born the doctors told my mum I either had two ribs fused together, or an extra one on my left hand side. That bottom side of my ribcage used to be really pronounced, and stuck out because until the age of 18 or so I didn’t have an ounce of fat on me.

I gradually started putting on weight once I went out to work. I could afford to reward myself with food – I still do! – and I suddenly had money to buy myself whatever I wanted for lunch. On payday, I once took myself to a Chinese restaurant in my lunch break and had a set meal for two.

For one.

It was awesome, and I regret nothing.

It was around when my first daughter was born that I really started packing it on. That was when people first commented about my weight. My ex… my boss… my former in-laws… I hadn’t even really noticed until they all said something.

I didn’t try to lose it though. So what if I was putting on weight? It honestly didn’t bother me back then. I was too busy loving being a dad.

It wasn’t until I started working at Teletext, when I was 21, that it dropped off a bit, mainly through the absurd length of the commute, and walking from the station to Teletext HQ and back every day.

When I started working from home the weight crept back up again, and I slowly got to the biggest I’ve ever been. Even then... I wasn't enormously overweight, though I'm sure some people thought I'd let myself go - whatever that means. It's a horrible phrase, that should result in people being forced off a cliff if they ever use it. It displays such a profound lack of empathy.

It was only in my late-20s that I began to feel insecure about my appearance in general. Miserable marriage. Didn’t feel loveable or attractive. Knock-on effect was that all my insecurities got cranked up.

Without really being aware that it’s what I was doing, I tried managing those insecurities, and that feeling of being unlovable, by dieting. I thought it’d make me happier than I was if I was slimmer. I thought it’d make me more loveable.

I mean, it didn’t, evidently, but I had a brief few years where I was slim. By the time I met Sanja in my late-thirties I was the slimmest I’d been my entire adult life.

SLIM JIM

It’s bizarre looking back at myself then. 

I really was – for me anyway – tiny. I look at photos and it doesn’t look like me, though. It just doesn’t. That isn't how I'm supposed to look.

I can see how sad I felt inside, and how I was trying to manage that sadness. The most miserable I’ve ever been. I wouldn’t swap looking like that for feeling like I do today, even if it does mean that being bigger gets me the odd comment here and there.

Since then, the weight has been creeping up – barring a brief period around the time of Digitiser The Show, where I lost some (intentionally) again. I’ve remained the happiest I’ve ever been. The occasional blip aside, I’ve finally made peace with my appearance, and my body, and - because she is an actual decent human being - Sanja has never stopped loving me or finding me attractive. 

I don’t come from a family of thinnies or fitness fanatics. We all loved our food. Our genes are all on the bigger side, and if I can love my family at whatever size and shape they are, then I can also love and not judge myself.

Partly, it’s also down to getting older, partly being on camera so much and able to see myself objectively, and partly it’s down to Sanja loving me for who I am. I still get told regularly I’m punching above my weight, or I’m compared unflatteringly to overweight celebrities, but it doesn’t really get to me like it once would have. I don’t have as many gaps in my armour anymore.

I can objectively look at myself and go… “Meh… you’re fine. You’re just a vaguely normal-looking sort of 50something…”. It has also helped that I can see myself ageing before my eyes. I’ve gone so grey in the last year… I’ve got all sorts of lumps and wrinkles and other signs of getting older that short of going under the knife, and getting the dye out, there’s nothing I can do. I don’t want to fight it, so I’m accepting of it.

So anyway. 

I guess what I’m saying is… if you don’t accept your size or body right now, then that’s not to say you never will. I got there eventually. Aside from anything else, if you think you're big, you're probably not as big as you think you are. And even if you are, providing you're otherwise healthy, so what? 

The world we live in is a funhouse mirror, and we all grew up with that distorted image of ourselves staring back at us. 

I know, because at the time of the photo above - taken on my 40th birthday - I thought I was enormous.