Joan Collins is right. Any woman who wants to stay beautiful needs to diet every day of her life

For the love of everything I am not saying the above is true because I think it is complete and utter tosh!  Nor can I credit myself with finding this gem of title for a post or the article that followed it in the newspaper – that is thanks to one of my friends who along with every one of her friends that saw it was more than a tad annoyed after reading it.

I have linked to the full article here – I will wait a while for you to go and read it, rant to yourself either in your head or out loud (although if the latter be in a secluded space when you do for fear of being carted away in a white van screaming “I am sane, I promise” safe in the knowledge that truly only nutty people say that in which case you are doomed to a life in a mental institute – which incidentally is where the deluded woman who wrote this article belongs).

Have you read it?  Now breathe and calm down. 

I am not saying I am right, in fact, I very rarely am and I am sure she is not the only woman that feels the way she does in some way but is it just me that thinks this woman has severe emotional issues?

Let’s set aside the fact that she thinks that if you are “fat” you can only be lazy and doomed to a life of achieving nothing, never having a boyfriend or someone that loves you, or happy for a moment because that doesn’t just annoy me and make me want to stamp on her head a teeny weeny bit but I think there are more important underlying issues.

In what world is it normal for a woman to think that being married to a man who would divorce you because you put weight on is acceptable?  Whatever happened to ‘til death us do part, in sickness and health…’ and all of everything else you promise to each other when you take your vows or make the decision to spend your lives together? 

Yes, maybe you are considered to be more attractive when you are thinner, in fact you may (like me) feel more comfortable with your body image when thinner and let it affect your mood when you do put weight on but that can be argued to be superficial (and changeable) and only part of what is, after all, a very complex make-up of what your husband or partner fell in love with?

How sad it must be to live with someone who loves you but would willingly leave you if you put weight on.  In fact is that really love?  Because it certainly isn’t my understanding of what unconditional love is and surely that is what marriage and a lifetime commitment means?

What about when this woman gets old and wrinkles start to appear – is that acceptable to her husband or will he leave her for that too?  Why would you want to be loved for something which is superficial and can be changed?  She may argue that being overweight is not superficial, for some (and I will admit me) there are fundamental reasons for putting on weight whether that be comfort, laziness, stress, hang-ups carried on from childhood and rarely health reasons and maybe it is for those underlying reasons that he would leave her.

Everyone is different, I of all people know that because I am more different than most and I am sure that my work colleagues think me very strange whereas my friends don’t because they have taken the time to get to know me and realise that I am not completely mental, nor do I truly believe I have aliens in my head – these are after all, a metaphorical description of how my mind works when I am buzzing around and happy. 

Even taking into account that as humans we are fundamentally all different, what I find amazing is that this woman has sought out boyfriends and now a husband that would leave her if she put on weight!  Whilst she may not, therefore, experience the feelings of rejection, fear, and need to be thin to be desired/loved that I most certainly would it begs the question – does she have a fundamental underlying and far greater issue; that her sense of what it means to be truly loved and desired is skewed?

Her comment that ‘any woman with a modicum of self-respect should watcher her figure with the same vigour’ as Joan Collins and that ‘any self-respecting woman wants to be thin’ are laughable at best.  She may consider she needs this to respect herself but how much of that is wrapped up in her belief that it is being thin that makes you beautiful (to men). 

For a start, I don’t live to be beautiful to men and my life is worth something with or without a man.  I have self-respect because of the way I live, the way I instilled a work ethic in my daughter and for the way I treat other people.  I do not need a man to have self-respect.  The fact that I have one adds to my life, I will admit but only because he loves me for who I am whether I am fat, thin or in-between.

I am sure that I would NOT want a ‘weight-loss’ coach for a boyfriend – how much fun would that be?!  Her first love reminded her that you cannot be too rich or too thin and maybe this is where she gets some of her issues from but for whatever reason she has taken this to an extreme.  She certainly appears to have an obsessive nature and her belief system is most certainly skewed by the people she surrounds herself with who seems to cement this belief system.

Her comment that male bosses will always give a role to a thin person because they appear to be more in control has some merit bearing in mind that there is still some sexism in the workplace but is the role being given for the appearance of control or just the appearance overall. 

This woman likes hunger pangs because it reminds her that she is not eating pizzas – surely she has her eyes for that and the fact that she eats less than a 1000 calories a day is shocking.  Drinking coffee for breakfast with enough caffeine in to make her tremble is shocking and renting homes without kitchens and denying food seems to have bought ‘rewards to make it worthwhile.’  Eating such a low calorie diet 4 times a year to result in insufficient mental or physical ability to work is shocking.

I read the latter part of the article wondering what the ‘rewards to make it worthwhile’ were; all I can see is a skewed understanding of love, self-respect, shallow friends and colleagues coupled with denial, an diet almost as unhealthy as mine on occasion and starvation at times.  If that is what gets a person rewards I will happily live as I am.

I am overweight at the moment having gotten lazy since my marriage last year however; I am lucky enough to be far richer than this poor woman will ever be.  I have a husband who adores me and will continue to love me no matter how thin, fat or in-between and a daughter who knows how to treat family, friends, herself and others with empathy, respect and love.  She will love unconditionally as I have taught her to do and knows what qualities to look for in a husband.  She certainly would not settle for a man who would leave her just because she put on weight as she has more self-worth in her little finger than this woman appears to have in her whole body.

I only hope three things; that this woman wakes up and smells the roses before she is led on her deathbed wondering why she denied herself all her life, that she finds unconditional love and that she does not have a child that she is bringing up with the same belief system.