Cakes, calories, compliments

Box of Delights from The Sweet Reason Company at Yumbles

Grace over at A Confederacy of Spinsters wrote a great post today about the American attitude to people losing weight (which holds true here in the UK, too), about weight loss being celebrated.  In Grace's words: "Successful weight loss, especially on a grand scale, is treated with more reverence than a presidential motorcade.""  

With two young daughters, one soon to enter her teenage years, I'm very conscious of any talk of diets, weight loss, being slim going on around them.  I am not skinny, but I'm comfortable with my size and I like cooking and eating too much to be any other than womanly.  Or as my youngest puts it, cushiony.    We talk about not eating too many sweet things or fried things because they're bad for your health.  We talk about grandma having diabetes and how sugar is bad for her.  We talk about superfoods now and then, and how some of them may or may not help me manage certain conditions (I have CFS or ME or whatever new name it now has).  But we don't ever talk about weight loss.

Sadly, that's not true of the wider world.  I hear it in the playground when I collect the children, whether it's a direct compliment to someone who's lost weight or a muttered comment about someone gaining weight.  Wow.  So judgemental, on both counts.  

I guess that must mean that, in my small circle of friends, I'm 'the fat one'.  I'm okay with that.  It shows I bake a mean loaf of bread, an even meaner cake and cookies that are requested for all the cake stalls.  And it means my children can rest their heads on my cushiony lap.  Can't argue with that.