The first time I remember being told I was too fat, I was six years old. "You were starting to get a waist," my grandad told me, "but you're getting a bit porky now." I think he meant well, but that comment would stick with me for the rest of my life.
I had a complicated relationship with my family and food. My grandparents would feed me huge meals and then blithely point out how chubby I was looking - on one memorable occasion, my grandma took me out to a restaurant and emotionally blackmailed me into eating both my own meal and half of hers, then spent the rest of the day pointing out the "lovely figure" of any woman we saw thinner than me. Meanwhile, my mum, the tireless, tired feminist, would tell me whenever she could how gorgeous I was, that I didn't need to diet and should ignore my grandparents - all the while, looking at herself in the mirror with hatred in her eyes, telling me how fat she was and which diet was next on the list.
By the time I was about twelve, I was acutely aware that I was Too Fat, and this was a Bad Thing. I was not alone: many of my friends started obsessing about their weight at roughly the same age. Self-hatred became normal - as puberty took control of our bodies, we learned that becoming a woman meant being in a state of constant embarrassed apology: of never forgetting that you just aren't quite good enough.
Last week, Giles Coren decided to devote 1,000 words to calling his son a "fat little bastard" whose jaw he'd "best get ... wired". Perhaps he thought, as he included Adele - one of the most successful and idolised women in the world - and Diane Abbot - the first black woman MP in the UK - on his list of "ostensibly successful, yes, but laughable" people, that this would be the article that finally vindicated him for buying himself that "No. 1 Dad" mug. For me, it brought back memories of all those moments I was taught - be it by family members thinking they were doing the best for me, David in year 8 who just wanted to make me cry, or my friend Lottie telling me I'd "be pretty, you know, if you just lost some weight and wore a little makeup" - that the things you do - who you are - none of it actually matters unless you are nice to look at.
Maybe Giles would be surprised to learn that words like his might have such an effect on me. After all, as he reminds us, "there are uses for a fat woman". Maybe knowing her dad will still be able to nobly reduce her to a sex object even if she's fat will save his daughter from the cycle of starvation and self-punishment I was an old hand at by my mid-teens.
Mine is not the kind of dramatic story you see splashed across magazines - of girls starving themselves into comas or being hospitalised at five stone - it's just the boring, everyday experience of being constantly chipped away at until you simply cannot love yourself any more. Mine is the story of the girl whose friends told her she was 'too fat', and so she stopped eating. The girl whose family made fun of her 'puppy fat' until she feared visiting them, and would starve herself for 48 hours before an unavoidable reunion.
All in all, between the ages of about twelve and eighteen, I lost around three stone and every last atom of self-confidence. I'm only glad, looking back, that social media wasn't as big a thing back then as it is now: for all its shortcomings, I love Twitter, but my god is it relentless. Abuse is casual, almost routine - as if we've forgotten how much words can really hurt us. And, knowing how bad some throwaway insult from a stranger behind an @ symbol can feel when it catches you off-guard, I feel terrible for Sam Coren, who will, without a doubt, see that article one day. The internet, and Giles's naked contempt for his son's wellbeing, is forever.
The world is harsh - we don't need to make it harsher. I don't hate my family for thinking that my weight was more important than my happiness; they thought they were helping me. But what I needed - what we all need in this world - was just a little reassurance that we are more than what we look like - that parental love will not be rationed by BMI.