FAT CHANCE

Here's a short story I wrote for anyone who has put on weight due to accident, illness, babies or just because Mother Nature can be damn harsh on us women!

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As she got thinner, she only felt more invisible.  Three months of calorie-counting and taking the stairs had shorn the flesh from her hide quicker than a souffle rises. 

'Results!'  Screamed her Weightwatcher mentor with hysterical envy.  'Look at those results!'

Yet, Beau felt no elation.  She went home and choked down strips of beef jerky, visualising her fat cells spontaneously combusting with each salty chew.  Her shoulders slumped, her lungs deflated and her face sagged.

Her face.  Her once cherubic cheeks had lost their youthful plump.  Now her reflection contained traces of Roxy, the exercise-pumped PA at work.  Roxy was mean-looking and mean-spirited.  Beau knew the men at work liked that lean, hungry look.  They wanted Roxy to consume them with ravenous gusto.  Beau knew this would never happen; Roxy was preoccupied with the backs of packets and protein shakes.  And as for Beau...she had been contented up until now.  She'd savoured the way her thighs had that closeness, her stomach that womanliness.  Three months on and she was filled with air instead of life.

It wasn't Beau's idea to go on a diet and lose precious parts of herself.  It was Gerard's.

'It's unhealthy Beau,' he reprimanded her, prising the Pinot from her clenched fingers.  'And you said so yourself, you don't want to be a fat bride.'

It was the way he held 'fat' in his mouth like an unpleasant oyster that ruffled her feathers.  She began to waver over that extra slice of pizza, hesitating over the chocolate box.  Then one day she decided to just get it over with.  She signed up to losing Wednesday evenings and a portion of her dignity.  Weekly weigh-ins vanished any last vestige of sexy that Beau had. 

Now as she sized up her diminishing bottom and surveyed her once-luscious breasts, she reconsidered her options.  Gerard was no God, that was certain.  He drank beer on Fridays and Saturdays and it had accumulated centrally.  His hair had taken a step back.  As she looked slimmer, he looked comparatively worse.  'A bulbous toad!'  She thought defiantly, swigging straight out of the bottle-neck.  While she was at it she turned on the hob and voila!  The new meal plans fluttered to the tiles in a flambé of charcoal.  'Cooked!'  She giggled, appreciating how her tummy jiggled with mirth.

Grabbing the Dairy Milk and a magazine she sacked off the gym for her comfortable chair, tucking the blanket around herself, neatly.  She flicked fabulously through the glossy pages.  Let Gerard come home and find her in a chocolate coma with nutty evidence in her creases!  She'd find herself a new man, she mused.  An Italian!  Someone who appreciated real women.  And as for ever returning to that counting, nibbling, jogging way of life?  'Fat chance!'  Beau thought.