Iseldelth

Thinscrimination It was unprovoked. I had never harmed this girl, I barely even knew her, yet she flounced up to my tiny frame, looked me dead in the eye and announced, ‘My mum says girls like you die.’ I was seven. Look back through my family tree and you’ll find generations of thin-wristed beanpoles and generations of weight based ridicule.  The term ‘starvation on stilts’ was used to characterise my family for the best part of the 20th century. In the Sixties strangers would stop my grandmother in the streets to express their disgust at my mother’s thinness. Gran was told that she needed to ‘feed