Flabberdabberdoooo!!! Two fat ladies: they ate and they ate…or is it 88…? It matters not, because the point is, it isn’t just plus size ladies who are cursed with the dreaded bingo wings. I can remember as a teenager, prodding and poking at my underarm flab and thinking, hell, this doesn’t bode well for the future. Then when I did my personal training course, I learned that a bent arm relaxes the tricep and thus, in order to get a true gauge of how bad things are getting underneath, one had to straighten the arm. Step 2: tricep dip and straight arm kickback like your life depends on it. Burn baby burn! And shit will you burn, because although there are three of the little buggers – the clue is in the name – the tricep muscles hurt like fuck after quite a short time. Five dips and you may well be calling time, while the lycra clad lady on your dvd will be happily telling you to pump out 20 at a pop, (at the same time as smiling and pretending you are enjoying yourself). There are probably wails of: mumeeeeee, coming from the room where you locked them, aherm I mean left them happily playing with their lego, which just adds to the stress of honing and toning. Working your triceps makes you very quickly want to lose the will and just put up with a little flab. Then the sun comes out again and you’re trying to shove your side boobs under your spaghetti straps and as you are in the process of doing that, you notice your bingo wings and the memory of the burn comes flooding back. So you turn to step 3: diet, as the solution. Of course you are fully aware that you can’t spot reduce fat. If you could, us personal trainers would be raking it in, with punters queuing up for our expert knowledge and advice. The truth is that the only thing we can say is: stop eating cake! and then we all just get depressed again, because cake makes us happy and tricep dips don’t.
So where the hell do we all go from here? Scrub ’em with a pan scritcher in a hot shower, otherwise known as: exfoliation. But who the hell has the time to exfoliate?! Exfoliation is something you do on a Spa day for your 50th birthday. Until then, you just look at those little red dots on your underarm and chuck a bit of moisturiser at them every now and again. I once told a beauty therapist that those little raised dots that had invaded my arms over the years were genetic. She looked at me with complete scorn and derision and said in no uncertain terms that it was a simple case of bad circulation. You see – this is why I have to tend to my own bush – these women are scary!
If all else has failed and in my case it has, the last resort is a tan: fake or real. Spray, rub, soak it up. A tan covers up a multitude of sins and unless you get it from a dodgy source, it won’t burn.