Happily Ever Bafta

So I had to switch handbags at the 11th hour (evening bags are so not designed to hold mobile and blackberry) and forgot my carefully packed portion of cashews. Not good.

But my Bafta (eating) experience could have been a whole lot worse. OK, so I had champagne at the pre-awards drinks (I’d planned to drink sparkling water in the five hours until dinner was served). And I practically inhaled my dinner – dessert and all – when it finally appeared. And then I had some Bafta-mask-shaped chocolates and a chocolate-dipped strawberry and some madeleines after that, in a decision I feared was dangerously close to a binge. (Everyone else had left the table to head to the afterparty and it was just me hunting for my other opera glove. But I really was hunting, not pretending to hunt as a pretext to stay near the food – something I’ve certainly done before.)

I was angry with myself for the post-dessert eating. But that day I’d done a hard Pilates workout, and I didn’t totally give in and give up at dinner: I left over the mashed potatoes and didn’t butter my roll (it sounds crazy, I know, but buttering bread is a sure sign for me of an impending binge. Another crazy sign: When I go days and days without straightening my hair. It’s a sign that I’ve given up and don’t care.) And when I got home, I didn’t continue eating. I hung up my gown (something I likely would not have done had I been bingeing – even small things are too much effort), washed my face and went to bed. This morning, I was straight back on track.

* * *

I spent last night thinking alternately about how being thinner has made dealing with a job I hate both easier and more difficult.

It is more difficult because being thinner – and really, not bingeing so often – means I have energy to deal with things in my life I don’t like. If there’s a problem in my flat, I call the landlord. (If you think bingeing has nothing to do with this, see “wouldn’t have hung up gown,” above.) If I don’t get an answer, I call again. Stripping away the food has made me painfully aware of how much I used it to deal with my job. But it’s true: Eating is not going to make the unpleasant tasks any easier, or make them go away.

At the same time, being thinner has made certain parts of the job easier to bear. A last-minute invitation to the Baftas – which this was – would have caused untold amounts of clothing angst 70 pounds ago, plus an entire evening of feeling hugely (and I mean hugely in all senses) self conscious. But yesterday – confident I was at least as slim if not slimmer than when I bought it -- I plucked out of my closet a vintage Courreges gown I bought in Madrid in November, grabbed some shoes and red lipstick and Grandma’s jewelry and was good to go. I was a bit self conscious about my (so-huge-they're-the-size-of-people's-thighs) arms, but I didn’t feel like the elephant in the middle of the room. It’s amazing how much easier it is to speak to people you don’t know when your head isn’t full of self-loathing thoughts.