Fat versus flirty

In Charla Krupp's book How Never to Look Fat Again, she details certain things that a girl should avoid if she doesn't want to look as big as a bus. Bright colours and skirts with volume are two of her 'Don'ts', so she'd have been well ashamed of me at the weekend.

The thing is, dressed in my screaming magenta cotton frock with big skirt (including - shock horror - pleats at the waist), I may indeed have looked two feet tall, but I got plenty of male attention. Lots of looks, lots of smiles, lots of heads turning (often looking quite sheepish when they saw I had the DH in tow). When it comes down to it, there is a great big fat difference between dressing to look thin and dressing to look sexually appealing.

I've been fat and I've been thin, so I know that men like women in all sizes and can cope perfectly well with a bit of cellulite - what they don't go for is wallflowers, hunched shoulders and women who dress like little brown mice.

The thing is, too, on Saturday I felt absolutely rubbish. I had an upset stomach and nausea, and a bloated tummy (those pleats were very welcome) and I would really rather have stayed at home. So teamed with the magenta dress went stiletto-heeled boots, a tight little black cardigan, a fitted pink tweed coat and a lilac ostrich-finish handbag. Also, a full face of slap, including blusher and bright lipstick to give me the colour that nature had so thoughtlessly removed.

And after a couple of hours of trolling round town and picking up admiring male glances, I felt a hell of a lot better. I am no spring chicken, and not by any means a skinny chick, but clearly I'm not quite dead yet, either.