Losing weight is not enough, friends have to gain weight at same time

The end result was a unique fashion look: decorated compost barrel on stilts

IT seemed such a good idea, six weeks ago. Most of us in the office made a resolution. We would lose weight during the summer, sustained by mutual support (of which, as you know, there is none among women). We’d have a ritual weigh-in at the beginning, with everybody watching, followed by weekly weigh-ins thereafter. On the starting day, we’d each put €50 in a kitty, to be scooped up by the one who lost most by the end of August. She’d have nearly five hundred smackers with which to buy herself a garment befitting her new fragility of person.

It wasn’t just us girls. One of the lads involved himself, too — and almost immediately found a completely laddish way to get out of the deal. He got himself tackled so violently in the course of a weekend football game that he almost lost a leg. In some ways, it would have been simpler if he HAD lost a leg. The drama surrounding his still-attached leg made the excitement around that plane that sprang a big hole in mid-flight look kind of routine. For a few hours after the tackle, he was sore, but high as a kite on the adrenalin of his own heroism. Then the appendage — sorry, leg — swelled to three times its size and took on an appearance that made the VHI Swiftcare people raise their hands in surrender: “Go to A&E. You’ll really like it. They’ll like you, too. Trust us.”

He came back to us looking like a war hero. Now, when a man is on crutches and drugs and holding small private viewings of his nether regions, you really can’t insist he steps on the scales. So he got out early and we let him off the €50. One of the problems was the scale itself. It’s one of those yokes that not only tells you your weight, but gives you feedouts on your muscle-to-fat ratio, your morals and how long you’re going to live. We think. The owner of the scale has lost the instruction booklet, so all we can do is guess at the dire significance of the data it presents after it depresses us about the amount of lard we haven’t lost.

We all had total freedom about the manner of our weight loss approach. One of the girls — the one who carried her pregnancy straight out in front of her like a road sign for an upcoming T-junction — bought powdered cement in her local pharmacy. It came with its own sippy-cup and an allegation that it was strawberry-flavoured which was definitively a lie. It wooed the purchaser by selling itself only in the pharmacy, and by caveats including a bar on buying it if you were not fat enough to need it. So our colleague started with high hopes. By Day 2, she was snappier than a turtle. The exclusive ingestion of pink cement powder creates a desperation fearsome to behold.

Then she went on her holidays. She came back minus sippy-cup and with a face on her that made it clear anybody suggesting she do a public weigh-in was going to lose their lungs and possibly liver.

“Amanda developed a phobia, while we were away,” she announced. “Guess what she was afraid of?”

“Ice cream,” someone suggested. (When you’re on a diet, food is the first answer to every question.)

The young mother shook her head.

“Hotels?”

Another headshake.

“Swimming pools?”

A long silence.

“Sand?”

She nodded, grimly. They’d taken Amanda to a location in Northern Ireland famous for its vast, curving golden beach. Not a tiny foot would Amanda put on it. So horrified was she by this strange new flooring that when her father carried her on his shoulders, she was so upset that, due south of her, HIS feet were touching it that she endangered his stability.

“I’m surprised you couldn’t hear her yelling down here,” her mother said, before announcing the pink cement was a failure and she was moving to the personal trainer option.

THE one whose penchant for cutely-arranged neck scarves makes her look like BA cabin crew, has a waist you could span with two hands and must own what my grandmother used to call “heavy bones,” (or else hid lead weights about her person at the first weigh in so she could win the money in the kitty later on) decided to do WeightWatchers. Now, THAT’S a scales too far. Two weigh-ins a week. I’d rather be dead. Not to mention trying to keep count of points, rather than calories. She brought in branded crisps, which rivalled the pink cement powder in their astonishing awfulness. Completely lacking in any flavour, they evaporated in the mouth into an instant slimy tooth-coating.

The little one who looks as if she’s twelve and a half and auditioning to play Alice in Wonderland refused to tell us what she was doing. We noticed the pockets of her trousers lay flatter against her hips after a fortnight, but that her eyelids were fatter. This was because her usual insomnia had been stimulated by starvation so that sleep was a distant memory for her.

I realised, early on, that while the rest of them just thought it might be good to lose maybe eight pounds over the summer, for me, it was an imperative. I was eating iced caramels in the middle of the night. I was eating nuts on the basis that they were healthy and then eating pasta because you can eat too much healthy stuff, you know? I was just one notch short of stopping at the McDonalds drive in on the way home.

I’d got to the stage of elasticated waists, edge-to-edge jackets and raucous necklaces designed to distract from the horror lower down, those necklaces matched at the other end by extra-high heels in the attempt to look tall enough to be this fat. The end result was a unique fashion look: decorated compost barrel on stilts.

It deceived nobody and constantly endangered my ankles. The managing director, who happened to be halfway down the stairs one day when I lost my footing and who, by simply standing solid, like the Colossus of Rhodes, prevented me cartwheeling to the ground floor, suggested I talk to the Health and Safety officer about introducing a bare-feet policy for stair-climbing. I couldn’t tell him that in bare feet, I’m so short, I should only weigh as much as Amy Winehouse, not counting her hair.

Everybody outside our group of dieters seemed determined to wreck the project. Friends invited us to barbeques, weddings and hen parties. Clients sent bottles of wine and — in one case — a wicker basket bigger than my car loaded with everything Butlers Irish Chocolates ever produced. We fought each other for the contents, but then tried to persuade each other to take the bigger boxes of truffles.

Because losing weight is not enough. Your friends have to gain weight at the same time.