WEIGHT LOSS:Writer Sarra Manning, who once weighed more than 25 stone, talks to ANNA CAREYabout prevailing myths, stereotypes, losing weight – and the shocking level of prejudice surrounding obesity
EVERYONE LOVES A makeover story. From Cinderellato the Ugly Duckling, from Cluelessto Operation Transformation, popular culture is full of stories of men and women (usually women) who go from awkward or overweight to gorgeous and glamorous and then live happily ever after. But British novelist Sarra Manning knows that things are much more complicated than that.
“There’s this narrative that if you can get your body right, everything in your life will fall into place,” she says, when we meet for lunch in a Bloomsbury gastro-pub that retains its 1930s decor. “You know it doesn’t but you still hope that it will. When I read books and the heroine’s been really large it never seems convincing. Either she’s fat and still gets an amazing guy or she gets slim and everything is great. But I know that when you lose that much weight it colours everything in your life.”
Today, Manning weighs 12 and a half stone. Just six years ago, however, she was much heavier. “I wasn’t just overweight,” she says. “I was 25 and a half stone. I was the fat person you stare at in the street.”
She had been overweight since early childhood and, as she grew older and embarked on a successful career – first as a journalist for music magazine Melody Maker, then as a writer and editor at several high-profile teenage and women's glossies, as well as a bestselling author of teenage and adult fiction – her weight increased.
Contrary to the bitchy stereotypes associated with glossy magazines, Manning says being overweight wasn’t a problem in her career. “Everyone was always really nice. Although,” she says dryly, “maybe they just thought, ‘well, she’s not going to beg for [clothing] samples.” She says she probably missed out when going for some editorships. “But you have to be realistic. If you’re the editor of a fashion magazine, you’re a brand ambassador and you can’t really have someone who is 25 stone for that.”
Manning was “in denial” about her weight. Then, shortly before she turned 30, her mother died, partly due to complications from type-two diabetes. Her father had also developed the condition. Something had to change. “When a cornerstone of your life is gone, it makes you readdress everything,” she says. “So I had to admit I was really, really miserable and that had a lot to do with my weight.”
She had gone on diets before, but they’d never lasted long. This time, however, it would be different. An initially low-carb diet was accompanied by steady, serious exercise. Gradually her weight went down. And stayed down. She has now lost her sweet tooth and, having always hated exercise, she was surprised by how much she grew to love working out. “I’m lucky because I’m one of those people who does get an exercise high. It wasn’t that I’d go to the gym and it was awful but I’d grit my teeth. After ten minutes my endorphins would kick in.”
The weight loss has transformed her daily life. “It’s a relief to look normal,” she says. “If people give me an odd look, it’s just because I’ve got a ridiculous vintage dress on or I’m wearing red lipstick. That invisibility when you walk down the street is quite liberating. You’re on the bus when schools are coming out and you don’t have that metallic taste of fear in back of your mouth anymore. It’s something I’ll never take for granted.”
For years, Manning was abused in the street by strangers who felt they had the right to comment on her appearance. “Every single day I’d go out and know that someone would call me a fat f***ing bitch,” she says. “There was always something shouted at me from a van window.” Her weight was used against her constantly. “There were times I’d go to the doctor with a sore throat and they’d say it was because I was fat. Your arm could be hanging off and it’d be because you’re overweight.”
Being slimmer doesn’t mean everything’s perfect. Reactions from those around her to her dramatic weight loss have been mixed, and she’s experienced negative comments from people who are overweight themselves. “Their reactions can be hurtful but I understand,” she says, “My weight loss makes them confront things they’re not ready to confront. They can be hostile, but I have to appreciate where it’s coming from.” She’s also been appalled by the things slim people suddenly feel comfortable saying in front of her.
“Friends will bang on about obesity, and I think, ‘Hang on, is this what you thought about me?’,” she says. “It’s like people separate what you used to look like then from what you look like now, as though you were another person then. After I lost about five stone I went to a fashion magazine party and I was still twice the size of everyone there. Someone I worked with said, ‘You look really good. We used to talk about how you were such a great girl but you let yourself down with the way you looked.’ She meant well, but how is saying that acceptable?”
As Manning points out, belittling fat people is still a socially acceptable prejudice. “Unlike gender, sexuality or race, it’s inferred that if you’re fat it’s your own fault,” she says. “People think you must be lazy, that you have no self control.” They also make assumptions about socio-economic class.
Manning recalls a visit to an optician where she couldn’t fit herself into the device that tests for glaucoma. “I was humiliated, and the optician was horrible and had a go at me. She said, ‘You’re getting a free sight test,’ and when I said I wasn’t she said, ‘Well, aren’t you on income support?’. I didn’t think much about this at the time because I was too busy crying, but it’s shocking.”
She believes the issues surrounding obesity are much more complex than most people think. “What people don’t appreciate is that if you’re morbidly obese you have an eating disorder. You don’t get there just from having bigger portions.” But rather than examine the roots of binge eating, the media is more keen to express disgust at fat people. “Every society needs its demons,” says Manning. “And at the moment it’s people who are overweight.”
One of the most persistent stereotypes about the very overweight is that they’re food-obsessed. But Manning says that, before her weight-loss, she just ate mindlessly. She’s far more concerned with food now; in fact, she’s always planning what she’ll eat, how she’ll balance her meals. But, she says, this is better than what she used to have to plan in advance. “Thinking about what I’m going to eat later is nicer than thinking, ‘I’m going out to the cinema tonight but I can’t go to the Odeon because I don’t fit in the seats, and I don’t want to meet in that pub because it’s really crowded and I don’t want to squeeze between seats’. It’s a good swap.”
Some people change their lives and then condemn people who haven’t managed to make the same changes. Manning hasn’t gone down that road. Although she’s sceptical of the claims made by some in the fat acceptance movement that one can be fit at any size (“You can be healthy at a lot of sizes, but there is a cut-off point. I was in the danger group for diabetes and polycystic ovary syndrome”), she supports the movement in general.
“I understand better than anybody that size isn’t because of sheer wilfulness. There are always other things going on,” she says. “And changing takes more than a bit of willpower. Even though I lost weight, I would still identify as someone who is fat, because I was fat pretty much all my life. You can’t turn that off because you can fit in a size 14.”
For years, Manning was reluctant to publicly discuss her experiences. "When I started to lose weight, because I was working in the media people were always saying I should write about it. But I never felt comfortable doing that because it was all so personal." Eventually she decided she could tackle the subject in fiction. The result is her new book for adults, You Don't Have To Say You Love Me.
It’s a smart, funny and insightful novel whose heroine, Neve, has lost a lot of weight but discovered that life is just as complicated now she’s slimmer. Manning found writing the book helped her to pin down her complex feelings about weight loss. “I got a chance to give my head a deep clean and, in writing about Neve, I made sense of things that hadn’t made sense.”
At one stage in the book, Neve’s sort-of-boyfriend Max tells her that “even if you starved yourself down to a size zero, you’re always going to be a fat girl. You don’t know how to be anything else”. Manning says that writing that line was “a light bulb moment. I wrote it on auto-pilot and realised that was exactly how I felt.”
She doesn’t know how to be someone who is a “normal” weight. “It will always feel like a novelty,” she says. “I was never really a normal size, so to me the way I look now feels like an anomaly. I feel like a fat woman in a size 14 body. And it’s taken a lot of soul searching to feel comfortable with that. But that’s how I feel, and that’s okay.”
You Don't Have To Say You Love Me, by Sarra Manning, is published by Corgi, £6.99
