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LOUISE KEAN
The Perfect 10
For my sister Amy, withlove … remembering LarryMize, and his quiet village.
‘No one can make you feel inferior
without your consent.’
Eleanor Roosevelt
Contents
Three: The Monkey Nut Miracle Marvel Man
Six: Killing Love and Sex Over Dinner
Nine: A Nipple-flicking Road Trip!
Epilogue: The Soles of My Feet are on Fire!
The colour of my eyes is dependent on how much I weigh today. They are either the silver grey of a morning mist across a Canadian lake as the sun rises and catches the cold gleaming water. Or they are the colour of dishwater, greasy and thick with grime, dirty with all of the family’s Sunday roasting pans, and forks and knives, and casserole dishes and baking trays – murky and grimy and ugly.
Depending on what I weigh, my hair might be the browns and caramels of a thick chocolate bar that melts and shines and drips promise by the fire. Or the flat brown of a library carpet, laid in 1972, and trampled on by cheap shoes and schoolchildren every day since – tired and thin and lifeless …
Depending on how much I weigh today, my breasts may be round and full, reminiscent of a Russ Meyer vixen, ready to be grasped, voluminous and juicy. Or they are veiny and sagging, the skin at the top indented and ravaged by stretched tears, sitting lazily on my ribcage, flattened and blotchy, and dry.
I will love or hate myself, depending on how much I weigh today.
Here’s what they don’t tell you when you lose seven stones in weight.
They don’t mention the loose skin. They forget to tell you that you’ll end up with a rice cake-grey stomach that wrinkles and crumples beneath pinched fingers like tissue paper. They don’t divulge that on the upper inside of freshly toned thighs two flabby folds of stretched skin will stand guard over your pelvis, like a pair of spitefully unskinned chicken breasts, with a Stalinist determination not to budge. They don’t let on about the pubic pouch that they guard so angrily, that refuses to deflate in line with the rest of you, lending your naked profile a hermaphrodite edge.
They make believe your life will be a series of ketchup-red headlines yelling, ‘Now Sunny Can Wear a Swimsuit and Feel Fabulous!’ or, ‘Sunny Buzzes With So Much New-Found Energy She Could Burst!’
The truth is that the energy reserves alone can be spiteful. Some days I’m woken at dawn by the sun streaming in through the cracks in my curtains, and I’ll roll over in bed, hug my pillow, and determine to drift in and out of sleep until it’s too hot to stay under the duvet any longer. My new ‘healthy lifestyle’ denies me this simple pleasure. As soon as I open my eyes I am buzzing. I can no longer spend an entire Sunday in front of the television with the papers strewn out before me, carelessly picking at the foreign news, munching on Maltesers. My metabolism is so wired I wake up feeling like I’ve been drip-fed crack in my sleep. My body wants to run everywhere: to the train station, down supermarket aisles, from my bed to my wardrobe in the morning. It disconcerts people. They assume I am running from something, and maybe I am. They don’t tell you that some days you will fall so violently off the diet wagon that you will consume a family-sized tub of salted peanuts in twenty-five minutes – your hand dipping rhythmically in and out, passing nuts to lips without thought or care, and that it won’t matter an ounce if you run to the gym the next day. The perception is that anybody who loses a lot of weight has an iron will, and this is simply not true: you are mostly good, and occasionally bad. Detoxing is for monks, or freaks. A rogue band of particularly freakish monks actually invented the concept. They had remarkably clear skin, but they were still mad.
