At A Glance
Author	InkKing
Contact	[email protected]
IAM	strawberry
When	It just happened

It's taken me years of painful struggles to come to this conclusion, but because news this big need celebration, here I am, quite eager to share it with everybody else who may benefit from it.

Body modification, at least for me, do not only include piercing, tattoos, and other hard and softcore practises we go through -with some sort of pleasure, I add : dieting and weight loss are other modifications that many of us undertake to modify our bodies and, ultimately, ourselves. In a bid to appear beautiful, successful and strong many women (and men, too) starve themselves, if not to death, at least to a certain degree of pain. I am not going to promote a campain against thinness, this is not my point here. I am the very first to diet, and starve and crave and wish, I love to touch my bones and see my veins. I am a former anorexic and bulimic. I have an obsessive compulsive disorder and an unhealthy attitude towards food that's been with me ever since I was a little kid. I have always been a troubled child, very precocious and bright. I am now entering the academic world so to speak, with its people and its dinners, its brains and its controversies. And I do want to talk about one of those dinners, because there was when everything started.

Going out for dinner, when you are expected to sit, consume food and drink wine for about three hours -real wine, and food with oil, carbs and sugar in it, actual food- is something whose thought makes me cringe. How am I going to manage not to eat? I usually go for the easy way out and just don't turn up. This time it was different, because I did have to meet some professors and that was the best way to do it. Instead of being worried for the impression I would have made -after all, so much depends on dinner and my academic career did depend on that particular dinner- I was in a state of panic for the food I'd be somehow forced to eat.

I arrived at the restaurant and entered a room packed with fat cats from various universities and a number of writers, professors and artists. I was introduced to some of them, avoided champagne and ever-fattening canapes and had to sit, eventually, at one table. It was a lucky score: next to me was the woman whose presence overwhelmed me and whose help I needed so desperately for my career. I'd been told it was her, but when I heard about it I didn't believe it. I'd expected an insect-thin creature, with long black hair and turtle-framed glasses, possibly in stilettos and possibly in a suit. After all, she was a world-famous writer, an amazing psycologist and a respected academic personality: don't they all look thin and dark, these powerful people. Actually, she couldn't be more different. Short,wearing just sandals and linen trousers, her hair a mess and, if you wanted to be kind, you could have described her as "scruffy". And, oh my, she was not just chubby, but fat, larger than most in the room. Probably she was the person whose power and fame were the biggest, too.

So I watcher her drink her Chardonnay and eat lasagne, and she helped herself to the roast potatoes, twice. I spoke to her and she was kind and helpful. Yes, she did want to help me, she said, and yes, she had received my CV and appreciated it. I could go home more than satisfied, she said, because there was so much she could do for me.

And happy and content indeed, I did go home. My career was safe. But what I had understood, learned -if you can ever learn such things- is that size matters. The bigger the better, in a way, because you do not need to be a pencil to be respected and you do not require to fit in a black suit to be powerful and be great, strong and smart. All it takes is confidence and the right attitude, no matter what size you enjoy being, far from deprivation and fear of losing control. Nobody seemed more in control than that woman when she had her lasagne.

I am far from being cured and even further from being healthy, but I am recovering. A body modification can even mean letting yourself go, after years of trying to restrain yourself. And this is a great modification indeed, be yourself, with the body and the needs that come with it, with its voices that you listen to, instead of just denying them.

This is the reason why I have talked about my experience, which I do hope I can share with you. There is more to life than calories and more to a woman than the size of her ass. We are who we are, regardless of our cellulitis, we really do. And, at the end of the day, instead of trying to violate our bodies through starvation and hate, we should just nourish it with respect and care. Oh, and home-made lasagne, of course.