The Battle of the Bulge
Their views on food and body image could not be more different: Susannah Jowitt is the author of Fat, So?, which celebrates larger women. Candida Crewe wrote Eating Myself about her battle with anorexia and bulimia.
So what happened when they met?
Susannah Jowitt, 38, is 5ft 7in, weighs 14 stone and is a size 16 to 18.
She lives in West London with her husband Anthony and children Adelaide, five, and Winston, three. Susannah says: When I was 14, I nicked two pieces of bread from the middle of a new loaf of Hovis, then carefully re-sealed the bag with that fiddly piece of sticky yellow tape to escape detection.
Such extraordinary attention to detail was all in vain. My mother had counted the number of slices in the loaf and confronted me with my crime.
It was at that moment that I should have realised all was not well in our family’s Garden of Eating. How many parents count the slices in a loaf?
Such elaborate surveillance was necessary because I was, apparently, a Fat Child and needed to diet. My brother, on the other hand, was a Thin Child, so he was allowed sweets after tea (that’s how I remember it, anyway).
My parents yo-yoed between being people who loved their food (my mother was a truly great cook) and people who paid for their love of food by eating grapefruit. I inherited their greediness but, to my mother’s frustration, I missed out on the guilt gene.
Looking back at photos of myself as an adolescent, I wasn’t even particularly big - sturdy, yes, and with the same frame as my mum, who, by that time, was fat - but certainly nothing to worry about. But worry she did.
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“I am all curves and flesh, not skin and bone. Boys, who would you rather snuggle up to?”
