Taking a deep breath, I clicked on the box labelled “slim” under the body description section. It was only a dating website. Nobody told the truth, did they? I would have felt that I was lying even more if I had clicked the token “curvy” box. Yes, I was curvy, but not in terms of breasts and hips; more like my stomach and bottom. In fact, most of the time I felt like one humongous curve. Men would presume I had big boobs and curvaceous hips if I would have opted for that.
Then it came time to upload a picture. What the hell was I going to do? All my pictures showed that I was far from slim. One stood out. It showed me looking almost seductively at the camera, blue eyes twinkling, lip gloss shimmering, hair verging on painfully straight and, most importantly, I was thin. Well, thinner. This photo was of me at the somewhat tender age of sixteen. Now, positively old at twenty-one, and seven stone heavier, this was far from truthful. Throwing caution to the wind, I thought, it’s not as if anybody is going to be interested anyway.
Without giving it a second thought, I hit the submit button and sat back to wait for “local singles” to get in touch. I was more than sceptical, but verging on desperate. All my friends managed to have boyfriends; some even had more than one. Greedy, that’s what I call it!
Granted, my last relationship had been a complete disaster. Not that I want to make light of it, but the man couldn’t keep his fists, or his penis, to himself. I’d spent the last two years dating and deliberating about what on earth was wrong with me that the only man I could keep was one that didn’t want to be kept. This is when I’d put my weight on. I was eating myself happy, as annoyingly thin people say. Being twenty-one and nineteen stone was hard. Harder than any thin person could ever fathom; I can promise you that. Anyway, I’m not looking for sympathy; I’m just looking to give thin people a different perspective and bigger people something to relate to.
