A year has melted away since I left Singapore for England; with it, so has almost 50 lbs. I am still a plump girl. My underarms wobble, my tummy divides in an unsightly manner at the waist, and my thighs are too thick to be fashionable – but I am indubitably slimmer, at least, enough to have men ask for my number, or my relatives not to recognize me at family gatherings. When I last flew home for Christmas, my own mother, whilst slipping in the seat next to mine, asked my sister to introduce us.

Now would be an excellent opportunity for me to slap a ‘Before’ picture of myself next to an ‘After’: me with a big grin on my face and an old pair of jeans in an expansive puddle around my waist, perhaps. Then I could write a cute little pink book on how I lost x lbs in y days and how you can do it too, and how much more everyone will love you afterwards, thus finally allowing you to start loving yourself too.

I don’t think I will, though.

Two months ago, Brian James blogged about the documentary America is Beautiful, and how, when asked, only 2 in 200 American women told filmmaker Darryl Roberts that they felt attractive. I am not American, but I entirely empathize.

It is a strange girl who glances at me from the shop window as I pass by on a busy street. She is an unfamiliar young woman, slightly self-conscious, a tension in her shoulders, and fear in her step. I realize that, 50 lbs lighter or nay, nothing has changed at a fundamental level. I am still not at home in my own skin. Instead of seeing me in my reflection, I see a distant body filtered through critical eyes. A body that is closer to, but not quite, ‘attractive’.

The moral liberalization and media pervasiveness of the past century has enabled billboards, magazines and pornographers everywhere to have a field day with the human body in open view. Everywhere we look there are naked bodies, surgically-enhanced bodies, Photoshopped bodies, strange bodies to hold ourselves up to. What can we do but rejoice when we shed those pounds? How can we help but feel more attractive, and hence more valuable and loved – when everything we have ever known has taught us to peg our self-worth to the lipids beneath our skin?

Our families are not always as supportive as they are well-meaning. As a girl growing up in an Asian family, I had to deal with my parents’ matter-of-fact explanation that unless I were to lose weight, I would remain unwanted by any man, save for ones who were fat, foreign or old. I was urged by my brother to marry my first boyfriend, as surely no one else would be attracted to me. When I answered my mother’s rapid-fire questions of “Fat or thin? Fat or thin? Fat or thin?!” with the revelation that the man I was dating was, in fact, rather skinny, she first expressed disbelief, then immediately rejoined that fat and thin must attract each other – being as she was completely unable to fathom that attraction might be a comprise of other more important factors than the circumference of one’s thighs. The blunt, nosy and heavy handed Asian family may be the caricature, but the discrimination, subtle and otherwise, I believe is worldwide.

I trust that my body is my property; but even as I make that statement, I am compelled to recognize the reasons behind the necessity of such a statement in the first place. It is imperative to claim ownership to one’s body because of the clamor of voices who would appropriate it for their own. They would tell you how it should look, how it should behave, how it should be used. They would take your body and market it, airbrush it, mimic it with inflatable plastic. Hence, the insistence that the body is one’s own property is inherently a defensive stance, made under the political pressure of different agents who all seek to appropriate it for their own tastes and purposes. Male or female, we are all subject to this assault. But I believe that women in particular may feel disproportionately targeted with these impositions, such that our being dispossessed of our own flesh is a wound far from healing in the present age.

I am honest enough to admit that I am happy to have lost the weight. I am happy that I can now fit those pretty clothes off the rack that I never had the courage to contemplate before. But I am not quite at ease with the reasons behind my happiness. A nagging sense remains that I am happy only because I now bear a closer resemblance to the strange bodies, foreign bodies that loomed their shadow over my childhood self-esteem. To revel my weight loss like those women in the magazines and self “help” books, then, becomes a concession to the marginalization that I experienced in my youth – a legitimization of the sneering and the jibes. In short: thumbs-up with a dorky grin and big pants around my waist = joining ranks with the wankers.

No, thanks.