Waist disposal
Petronella Wyatt
Where have all the waists gone? According to the National Sizing Survey (sounds titillating, doesn't it?), the first study of female body measurements since 1951, women are bigger and fatter in every department than they were 50 years ago.
The average 1950s woman was 5ft 3 inches tall, had a 37-inch bust, a 27.5-inch waist and weighed 9 stone 11 lbs. Today, the same woman is 10 stone 3 lbs, yet only 1.5 inches taller and 1.5 inches larger around the bosom.
The disproportionate increase in weight is, apparently, due to waist sizes, Our middles have expanded by 6,5 inches to 34 inches. The wasp waist is dead. Welcome, instead, the bluebottle waist — that is, no waist at all. The hourglass figure has run out, to be replaced by a pint glass.
The government attributes this to better diets, its standard euphemism for pigging out. The 1950s woman was subject to postwar rationing, and junk food had yet to be invented. Thus the era produced curvy but slim-waisted lovelies such as Ava Gardner, Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor (before she embraced Richard Burton and binge-eating).
The survey also has something to say on the subject of exercise, Apparently, the lack of it has as much to do with our burgeoning stomachs as does McDonald's. But this is where the survey and I differ. The idea that 1950s women exercised (except in the bedroom) is an improbable one, Ava Gardner lived her life without seeing the inside of a gym — by her own admission she saw only the inside of a bottle of gin. Sophia Loren, who had a 22-inch waist, had never heard of a sit-up. Perhaps fewer people owned cars and thus walked instead of drove, but not Hollywood film stars. Can you see Elizabeth Taylor or Audrey Hepburn tottering into Burbank on foot?
No. I believe the principal culprit today is too much exercise. Allegedly, women start putting on weight after they are 25. This is usually when they begin to visit the gym, increasing the hours they spend there until sit-ups, crunches, weight-lifting and so forth become an obsession. Yet the paradox is that the more you build muscle the thicker you become.
Let me quote an expert's opinion. A friend of mine teaches yoga. One evening she came to my house and found me doing sit-ups. 'How many do you do a day?' she asked. I replied that I tried to do 100. She
threw up her hands like a woman in an Arno cartoon. (It wasn't only Bateman who drew those sorts of things.) 'Are you crazy? Your waist will thicken by at least two or three inches.' I gaped at her like another woman in an Arno cartoon. 'How is that possible? I'm losing weight.' 'No, you're not,' she rejoined. 'You're adding bulk muscle.' She then pointed out that my sit-ups were wonky anyway. She made me look in the mirror and I saw to my horror that one side of my waist had become thicker than the other. I resembled a squashed can of Coke.
Since then, no sit-ups for me. Just gentle stretching. Yesterday I measured my waist. It was down to 26 inches. Hooray! No exercise had transformed me into an oldfashioned icon — well, from my bust to my hips. I won't disclose my other measurements. They are rather shaming. Still, looking at recent pictures of Madonna, I would rather have my unexercised arms than her biceps. Of course one doesn't want things to deteriorate too far. I should not like it if my upper arms looked like sacks of dead rats. But surely there is a happy medium between the latter and things that resemble and feel like speed bumps?
According to some female commentators. 90 per cent of women apparently aspire to a figure like Madonna's. Are they mad? Quite apart from most men not wishing to lie on something as hard as a wooden cupboard, the muscle-woman look plain ugly. H.L. Mencken remarked that most women look like drunken dollar signs, but the gymecl-out female can look horribly like an orang-utan. I now know why Madonna's arms are nearly always bare. She is unable to stuff those biceps into sleeves. What a waste. And she has exercised that away, too. Let me finish with a piece of advice. I have a chum who is 37, deliciously pretty and in possession of the tiniest waist I have ever seen. She has never done a day's exercise in her life. Cut out the sugar, girls, but cut out the gym as well. It won't fix it.
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