Custard Cream Biscuits and crisp apple streudels, Doughballs and SnowBalls and curried Pot Noodles

In the spirit of Lent, what with me working in a Catholic church environment, I have decided to jump on the bandwagon for the first time in about oh, eighteen years, and give up something for Lent. My vice? Or to narrow that down, my Lenten Vice? Junk food. Woman vs No Junk Food. Do you reckon HBO would take up the gauntlet of that show? Doubtful, so for now, I shall have to bring you this through the medium of the internet. Unpaid I may add.  Why that fat bastard gets to parade around the US eating fo - Anyway...
     If it were possible, I could happily live on junk food. Crisps, chocolate, jellies, chocolate covered stuff, croissants topped with almonds, savoury snacks whatever you care to list under junk food, I could and most probably have eaten it. A typical day, in fantasy junk food land, would be croissants with butter and blackcurrant jam in the morning, chocolate covered brazil nuts for snack, massive bag of cheese Doritos with dip for lunch, followed by Kinder Bueno (as this is fantasy land, it would be both the Bueno Negro and the Bueno Blanco varieties) with more crisps for afternoon snack and so on and so on, you can see where this is going. Put a big leafy, deliciously dressed salad in front of me, with an order of seabass and yeah, I would look at it and savour the smell and enjoy what I was seeing. Put a bowl of Sweet Chilli and Sour Cream Kettle Chips sans dressing beside my gourmet meal, and I would be flicking stolen glances at the crisps, in the manner of secretly checking out that other guy or girl when you are out and about with your partner. How easy is it to be sitting at your desk with a bag of chocolate nibbles, dipping in every time your left hand leaves the key board? That answer, if you work where I work, is very easy.
     Most offices have the sweetie press, bog standard, totally fine. Our office, has a weekly Sainsbury's shop delivered each week, complete with an amazing house keeper who keeps an eye on what we enjoy most and orders them for us by the bag load. I both love her and hate her in equal measures. On top of an upstairs sweetie press, we have the downstairs table in our meeting room, normally laden with chocolates, and nuts, and crisps and more chocolates. Throw in some lovely patrons of the office who like to bring us cakes and M&S biscuits and more boxes of chocolates, and you can imagine what we are dealing with here. What could be not much of an issue for a larger office, whereby the nibbles brought in can stretch to about thirty employees, is actually quite a major issue for us, as there are only seven of us, house keeper included. Enough for thirty, but consumed by seven.
       And even though it's only just a week into my forty day and forty night odyssey of going cold junk food turkey, it seems I am being harassed by sweets. The office is abound with all butter Shortbread biscuits, mini chocolate chip cookies (mini things are always so much more delicious) profiteroles with chunks of chocolate sauce drizzled generously over the pastry, Bailey's chocolates, snack sized Kit-Kats, a small cupboard full of crisps, it's wall to wall junk.  There seems to be chocolate appearing as if from no where. I go to make my porridge in the morning, opening the cereal press also opens the flood gates to the Narnia of Sweeties, they both cohabit the same building. Opening the fridge to get the milk, there are Ginsters microwaveable slices winking at me and glinting under the light of the fridge. Go to take tea break, turn your back for a moment and when you go to lift the mug to your lips, you will find that a Kit-Kat or a Terry's All Gold chocolate left haphazardly beside you.
     It's not even just in the office, but it is where I spend most of my time. Only this evening, standing in the supermarket looking for tea, I found myself in a familiar aisle, that of the one which contains all of my favourite things. To the left, jostling for space on the shelf were the entire family of Haribo, including Uncle Tangfastic, Granny StarMix and that cousin that you secretly fancy, Golden Bears. Gossiping up top were the Terry family, both milk and dark chocolate options looking down their fancy wrapped noses at the own brand chocolate covered raisins and peanuts. The crisps were there too, all onion rings and ridged Kettle Chips and Sensations and multi pack Doritos practically flinging themselves into my basket. Jelly Bean jellies committing Hari Kari to get a place in my shopping, Pringles...well they can stay there, maybe I should have given up Pringles for Lent. Fearing the worst, and knowing my penchant for all things junk, I knew I had to get out of there before I staged a sit in in the sweetie aisle. But to my horror, swinging away from the crisps giving off that crisp whiff, I turned only to come face to face with the delicious pastries on the opposite shelves. I ran my finger along the prices of each yummy sugared item, imagining what it would be like to sit and eat a donut when I get home. I only came in for tea!
     I will let you in on a secret though. I did break and eat some chocolate over the weekend. I am a homosapienette, and in being one, there will be a week of each month that certain hormonal fluctuations will result in both pain of epic proportions and an all consuming craving for sweets. I needed to have them, and due to what I was going through, I think I deserved it. So about 2am, drinking some tea, I ate the eight squared chocolate bar that was in my fridge. Did I feel guilty? Yes, yes I did. Ashamed almost, but then the endorphins that you get from scratching that annoying itch kicked in and I'm not sorry to say that the guilt left me. Still, a mere blip on the radar, akin to the electricity cutting out and waiting for the back up energy generator to start up. But sure whats a square of chocolate between friends.

No hips? Rear of the bus please.

   


     Are you vampishly curvy, with a nipped in waist, large pendulum hips and a bust line to make the boys blush? Are you athletic, like Gisele, straight up and down with the merest whiff of a waist line? Or are you like most people, average? Neither curvy nor straight up and down, just normal. Bit of a waist here, throw in perhaps a little too large a hip there and a bust line you wish could be perkier but you just don't know how to do it? Well you know what, it's high time we put an end to this nonsense, it doesn't matter if you are fat, thin, curvy, athletic, slim, podgy, whatever you are and whatever shape, make and form you come in, stop caring about it!
     I for one, am sick of every second paper and magazine I pick up telling me that curves are back and how skinny girls can eat s*** because curves have triumphed over skinniness. I have just spotted an article in the Daily Mail (I know, I know, I'm sorry, don't hold it against me) which had a headline blaring "Bad luck Skinny Girls! Marilyn Monroe is crowned best beach body of all time". My mouse cursor hovering over the article, I was about to click on it, when something clicked in my head instead. This exercise of pitting body types against each other for global domination is all a bit KKK hunting down black people for reasons of superiority. OK, maybe not as extreme as people being killed and treated like second class citizens for being a different colour but it's up there folks, with the same hate tag line as racism has. Write an article lambasting someone for their race or colour, and you will and should rightly be pegged as a racist. Write an article about socking it to possibly naturally skinny women and you are credited as an actual journalist. What if I were a journalist, and decided that white skinned women are the best in the world, took a poll backing up my claim and then published an article in a widely read newspaper saying "Bad Luck Black/Hispanic/Latina/Asian girls! Whites are voted best yadda yadda yadda..." I would be strung up by the neck and so say all of us. How can people get away with this? And why do we let them?
     It infers that skinny people are deemed uglier or inferior to so called curvy people. How awful of a sentiment is that? If you had a child, would you teach it this twisted and warped view of the world and how we see people? Comparing this type of judgement to racism may seem harsh, but judging people like that and side-lining people who might not have Marilyn Monroe proportions is just plain wrong and shouldn't be encouraged. But it is, every single day when someone like you or me clicks on a link and reads it, or picks up a magazine and gives Heat their hard earned £1.95 to dissect what someone looks like on the beach. We, as humans, are programmed to judge on appearance, it's genetic and we are all designed to think that way. So true, we may not be able to change nature in that respect, but we can stop the daily barrage of being told that skinny equals bad and curves equals good, skinny to be admonished and curves to be celebrated. How about people equals bad and people equals good? Or, maybe judging on actions rather than say, oh I don't know, waist size?
     Some are fat, some are skinny, some are slim, some are plump, some are obese, some are anorexic, but at the heart of it all, some are always people, and that's how they should be treated, celebrated, maligned whatever you want to do with them. To tell a section of people that they're out of luck and only a certain section is superior because of how they look echoes dark racist times in the Deep South of 50's and 60's America. And while we may have moved on in terms of race, it seems the media world is never going to grow up and move on from trumping one section over another, lauding plus size models one day, and then giving them literary death sentences the next for having a "muffin top". How would you feel if you, as a naturally skinny person, you were told point blank that the way you look is bad luck, and that a particular group over there is prettier, more attractive to the opposite sex and more en vogue that you will ever be because they have curves and you Skinny Minny don't. Think about it. Think about it from the other side, if you were particularly plump say, or in fact just fat, how would you feel to see a headline that said "Bad luck Fatso" etc etc You would, you would feel awful. Why do we tolerate this bullying attitude of what a few people sitting at computers think the ideal and the norm should be? Why do we go one step further and maybe even believe their claims?
     I've always loved the celeb magazines, I freely admit it, but lately, in fact the last year or so, I have cut down, to the point of buying one every few months when I am in the mood for fish food for the brain. From seeing this article's headline, it has prompted me to not want to look at the Daily Mail website ever again. However, I cannot in all good conscious do that, the Femail.co.uk section of the Daily Mail provides me with much mirth making entertainment that it will continue to be part of my day. I won't however, be purchasing a Heat, Now, OK!, Hello! or any women aimed magazine for the rest of the year. I'm not going to entertain or acknowledge an article or publication that seems to hate women and objectify people on their looks and looks alone.I know I cannot radically overhaul the way I think as nature will out, but I'm going to do my best to stop judging people on how they look and first appearances. I wasn't alive in the Good Ol Racist days to take a stand against it, but I am alive and kicking in these sad times, so here's my contribution.


p.s. To read a far superior take on this issues, please follow this link to this amazing lady:

http://dazedandbemusedmusic.blogspot.com/2011/10/amy-winehouse-she-walks-away-sun-goes.html