Real living: Fat and happy at last

Imagine a world where beauty means big and thin girls envy outsize ones. Shelley Bovey spends a day in a parallel universe

Seven am on an early spring morning and the sunrise is pink in the gaps between the rooftops. The woman stretches and smiles, coming languidly awake as her clock radio greets her with a nostalgic ballad from the Nineties.

She turns on to her back and runs her hands over the curves of her body under the nightshirt. Her hips are wide and soft, made for swaying and for dancing, for love and for childbirth, for the rhythms of life. There is no sharp jut of pelvic bones. Her belly rises making a mound under the quilt, full as it once was with child but soft now, not taut as it had been then. She circles it with her arms, lifting it, enjoying its fluid movement. Her breasts are a law unto themselves; they lie where they will, not standing pert and upright like those of a thin woman. They follow the laws of gravity.

She dresses, choosing her clothes for spring, for celebration.

She spends a lot on them, she knows, but how can she resist when what is available is so glorious? When colours and fabrics and fashions of all kinds call her from store after store? Fashion victim, she chides herself, laughing.

Downstairs she makes her breakfast. Muesli, rich with fruit and nuts and honey. Creamy yoghurt to top it and then apricot toast with butter. There had been a time when she was younger when her breakfast had consisted of a small glass of fruit juice and one very thin slice of bread with a scraping of vile-tasting spread out of a plastic box. They didn't make that now. It was supposed to help people keep slim but some said it had contained carcinogenic trans-fats. Thank goodness the days of deprivation were over. She used to be hungry, tired, obsessed with food, forever on a yo-yo between weight loss and gain. She was glad her own daughter had grown up in an era when so-called reducing diets were an anachronism.

It is time to drive to the station to catch the London train. She had taken delivery of her new car the day before and is looking forward to trying it out. The man at the garage had taken a lot of care in adjusting the position of the steering wheel so that it did not dig into her stomach. This facility was standard on all cars, as was the choice of seat-belt length. After all, people came in all shapes and sizes; they were not all expected to fit the same dimensions. Time was, she remembered, when she could not do up a car-seat belt without it cutting into her throat because it was too short to reach over the swell of her belly and breasts. Should an accident occur, she would have had to choose between the prospect of death by strangulation as the seat belt locked, or by grave injury from being precipitated through the windscreen.

The new design trains are a pleasure to travel on. Seats are much larger and there are far fewer than on the old-style trains. Aisles are wider, comfort is greater all round. She chooses a large, single seat and settles herself for the journey. It was not always like this: she is old enough to remember years past when there were tables only a few inches from the seats and they were not easy to negotiate, even for thin people. She used to face a journey with hot dread, pulling in as much of herself as she could, pushing her body into the seat, jammed for a few agonising moments as her stomach caught on the hard rim of the table. She never went to the buffet car on a long journey; she could not bear to repeat the performance. In those days, others were not kind to people like her and any manoeuvre was watched with harsh judgment, with annoyance, sniggers or hateful remarks.

At the London terminus she heads for the underground. Slipping easily through a turnstile, she dashes for the train she can hear approaching. As she runs, moving with grace and ease, she attracts admiring glances. She recognises them for what they are: she has no false modesty and she smiles in return. The Tube trains of this century have also undergone transformation; here, too, seats are broad and comfortable, and although strap-hanging is not allowed, it is not needed for there are plenty of trains.

She chats with her neighbour, remembering the time when she would sit, desperately trying not to take up more than her share of the space available, wrapping her arms around herself to pull her shoulders in, squeezing her legs together tightly, trying not to spill over into her neighbour's seat. People would glare and make remarks about her size that were often audible and which brought tears of humiliation to her eyes. Living in the 20th century had not been quite the nightmare Orwell had portrayed in 1984, but for fat people it was just as much of a dystopia.

She arrives at her office in the heart of London: she is the travel editor of a popular mainstream women's magazine. Most of her colleagues are women and as usual the talk turns to looks. She despairs of this preoccupation but is resigned: it was ever thus. Gaia, her assistant, is depressed. She is in the fourth week of yet another diet and it doesn't seem to be working. She is generically predisposed to be thin, so increasing her intake of food just won't do the trick. "You're so lucky," Gaia moans. "I'd give anything for a figure like yours."

She tries to reassure her unhappy colleague but knows it will be of little help: women hell-bent on dieting have tunnel vision. "You are beautiful as you are," she tells Gaia. "Look at all the icons of the 20th century - Kate Moss, Joanna Lumley, Princess Diana. They were all thin. Besides, isn't it what's inside that really counts?'

"It should be," agrees Gaia, with a sigh. "But social pressure is so great and it's even worse working in the media as we do. It's hard to believe that women actually used to starve themselves to lose weight." She sympathises with Gaia, remembering how it was when she was outcast for being fat, before the cultural tide turned. Gaia tells her that her doctor has prescribed a diet pill called Wate-Gain. There are risky side effects but she says she feels desperate. "I want to wear decent clothes," she says. "But there's nothing stylish below a size 14."

Later she has lunch with the editor and two of the magazine's writers. Mealtimes are important social occasions where the sharing of delicious, health-giving food is a symbol and a celebration of common humanity, of life, of abundance. People do not pick at their food unless they are ill but eat with a sensuality and gusto that used to be untypical of the British. There is no shame or guilt around eating, and the consequences of this are that people are in touch with all their appetites, at home with their sexual natures which are so closely allied to the enjoyment of food and of flesh. She learned, long ago, that to feed herself with enough goodness, enough delights, caused the body to regulate itself. When deprivation is not a constantly lurking self-inflicted punishment, the craving for excess does not occur. She relishes the combination of good food and good company and the lunch is an enjoyable satisfaction of all the senses.

When she was a young woman, just starting her career, she had not dared to order anything but "diet" food at working lunches, aware of the censorious eyes of her editor. One day she had been particularly hungry and unable to resist salmon en croute. The magazine editor, staring at her disdainfully while eating her own small salad, had not commented on her choice of "sinful" food. Instead she had suggested a diet feature, a before-and-after makeover piece. "We could do a lot with you," she had said. "Such a pretty face, it's a shame you're so overweight." A direct hit, one that hurt. She does not return to the office for the afternoon. She has a hospital appointment for a Well Woman check. Despite the advances of medical science, a number of things can go wrong at her age, some years post-menopause, and regular checks are a wise precaution.

She is asked to undress and to put on a gown. She recalls the hospital appointments of her youth, of her childbearing years, humiliating obstetrical examinations of a time when medical staff were unstintingly rude to women of her size. They had threatened her with everything from refusals to perform operations to the certainty of poor health and early death. She remembers the embarrassment of standing in X-ray departments, half-naked under gowns that would not meet round her body, trying in vain to hold on to her dignity. Thin may not be fashionable now, and thin women have long since fallen out of favour as cultural icons, but they are not persecuted as once the fat had been.

Now she selects a roomy robe from a number of different sizes and makes her way to an examination room. A doctor and a nurse perform a full-body scan, a routine and safe procedure that has replaced the inelegant mammograms and uncomfortable smear tests of the past. It takes very little time and they are able to tell her at once that she is in excellent health. Nowadays a scan can measure all the body's functions, obviating the necessity of old-style ECGs or blood pressure readings. A written analysis of the scan will follow to confirm the findings.

There are questions she wants to ask. Because she is over 60 and because she has never quite shaken off the painful experiences of the anti-fat indoctrination of her youth, she wants to know the health implications of her size. "Your fitness level is superb," the doctor tells her. "Why the concern about your weight?"

"Won't there come a point," she asks a little anxiously, "when it will put a strain on my heart?"

The doctor understands. "That's what they told you when you were much younger? They believed then that high weight inevitably led to all manner of disease and death, but research has long since proved that was a complete fallacy." She knows this, of course. She's read the research, but a little reassurance does not go amiss.

"The trouble was that the late 20th- century lifestyle was pretty unhealthy," the doctor continues. "High- fat food and not enough exercise did enormous harm. They made fat people scapegoats because the medical profession was particularly prejudiced. We know now that good lifestyle factors and a stable weight are predictors of longevity. You are absolutely fine and I would be surprised if you didn't make it to 95."

Before she goes home she spends an enjoyable and relaxing hour in the swimming pool in the centre of her office complex. She shops for ingredients for supper, lingering over succulent organic fruit and vegetables, fresh fish, lean meat and scrumptious pastries. She has friends coming for supper and cooking is a joy.

She dozes in her comfortable seat on the train home, looking forward to the next day... and the next, and the next.

Life as good for a fat woman in the first half of the 21st century.

This extract, `A Life In A Day', is included in `The Female Odyssey: Visions for the 21st Century', edited by Helen Windrath and Charlotte Cole (The Women's Press) and is published on 28 January.