Does this pie make me look fat?

Have you ever opened the freezer and reached for that pint of Ben and Jerry's after dinner and your boyfriend gives you a withering look as if to say: are you seriously going to eat that? But you make love to the ice cream anyway…on the couch, pants half undone, while absorbing old Sex and the City reruns and absent mindedly texting a girlfriend. Who says men are better at multi-tasking?

The next morning you're squeezing into your pencil skirt before work and he has to help you get the zipper up. His ingrained masculine sense of bad timing causes him to say: maybe you should think twice about the Chunky Monkey next time Babe. Your immediate inclination is to turn and wrap your stockings tightly around his neck. Then you probably spend your coffee break fuming to a colleague about what an insensitive brute your boyfriend is: I mean can you believe he said that?

Recently the male partner of my Mother's friend was discussing relationship issues over tea. The subject of what he dubs, Male Fix It Syndrome, came up. According to him, when a couple first enters a relationship, the man usually spends time complimenting the woman on her beauty, sexy curves or her hot legs and, unless the woman is an ultra-confident sex bomb, she may have a hard time accepting it. Her response might be something like: Are you kidding? My legs look like two frankfurters wrapped in scrambled eggs…or, er, something along those lines.

The male brain backlogs these comments and thinks: how can I fix this? If the woman had complained of a broken cupboard door the man might take note and arrive with a screw driver next time he dropped by, but how can he fix a woman's poor body image?

If we look below the surface and consider the differences between the male and female psyche and how each sex solves problems it would appear, grudgingly, that men are not as insensitive on this subject as we may think. Their approach to a problem is simply logical: I tell her she's beautiful and she says she's fat. How can I help her feel better about herself? She's reaching for the ice cream. She's going to hate herself tomorrow. If I give her a stern look maybe she'll think twice...aaaand she's inhaling the ice cream anyway. Great. Now I'll have to deal with the "I'm fat" parade in the morning. Maybe if I call her on it she'll exercise some self-control next time.

We interpret their “fix” as a round-a-bout way of telling us we're fat. We perceive it as them validating every bad thing we already think about our bodies.

My boyfriend and I went through this exact issue a few years ago. It was a vortex of squabbling. I would complain about not fitting into my bikini and he would tell me I was gorgeous. I would request an ice cream at the beach an hour later and he would cringe, thus triggering me to bludgeon him with insults about what a mean and insensitive person he was. I would berate him for his stomach that remained perfectly flat even after he'd inhaled a mammoth bowl of spaghetti followed by giant servings of rocky road and blueberry crumble. How could he not understand how difficult it was for me when his boy metabolism meant he could eat one hundred Krispy Kreme donuts and not gain a Brazilian badonk-a-donk behind?

He would endure my blitzkrieg, let me pout and then comfort me. Eventually I saw through my haze of self-pity and realized that he wasn't trying to change me…he was trying to help me. We discussed the issue and realized that I had to cure my own diseased self-image, but slapping my hand for munching Tim Tams after a stressful day was giving the opposite result he desired. It was pushing our relationship to a precarious edge.

So where is my little tangent leading to?

How about some food for thought ladies? If you have body image issues and can't accept a compliment, you complain to your boyfriend, husband, fiancée, bus driver that you just can't bear your tuck shop arms anymore, but no sooner does the complaint leave your mouth and you're filling it with apple pie, here's some advice.

Put down the pie.

Until you can eat that pie without looking in the mirror in disgust then you don't deserve the pie.

If you love your body, cellulite and all; if, when waving goodbye, your arm wobbles and you laugh about it instead of sticking your finger down your throat...you deserve the pie. Eat the pie. Relish the pie. Love the pie and love yourself for loving the pie. Life and food go together. They are to be enjoyed together. Men adore us when we take delight in a meal and instead of degrading ourselves in the morning we go for a walk. We are sexier when we cherish food and ourselves.

For inspiration go and digest some 19th century French art. The women depicted aren't thin, but they are beautiful. Beauty is perception. Change your perception to that of Edgar Degas back in 1876 and you're on a roll woman.

Let them eat pie.