Help! I'm losing weight!

And before you close your browser window in disgust at what appears to be a brazen bout of weight-related boasting, I’d like to make two things clear. Firstly, I am not one of those forcefully proclaiming big-is-beautiful girls who would secretly love to drop twenty kilos and look like Kate Moss (nor do I possess the booties of J.Lo or Beyoncé, who are like the only women in the celebrity spotlight actually getting away with the big-is-beautiful shtick, let’s face it…). Secondly, I am not ACTUALLY Kate Moss, for whom weight loss would be seriously worrying because it would mean that she’d begin to literally disappear when standing side-on. No, by all accounts and calculations, I’m of average height and a healthy weight, with perhaps wider hips than personally preferred, but no major horrible weight issues, and am not averse to dropping a few kilos in heady anticipation of summer at all. So why, faithful readers, am I so worried about losing weight? Well, it’s not the losing weight itself, per se; it’s the fact that I’m losing weight… asymmetrically.

You see, I have these pair of gorgeous little Levis that was an absolute bargain I unearthed, hanging all alone and uncherished on the clearance rack of the vintage shop in the subway below the city train station. But unlike all of my other jeans constructed from stretch denim/cotton – utterly more forgiving after a stuporous weekend inhaling Cadbury Dairy Milk blocks and midmorning movies – these jeans are an uncompromisingly rigid denim blend, which were, in actual fact, about half a size too small for me at their time of purchase. (That was during a fat phase, after getting five stitches to the foot after a mountain bike accident and staying completely sedentary for a whole week after – hence the ensuing gain of three and a half kilos. Gosh, when I say ‘mountain bike accident’ it makes me sound like some hardcore sports nut with a recurring injury, when in fact it was merely due to my spectacular lack of coordination, toppling face first over a protruding tree root at my last school camp…) So those jeans have become my ultimate weight gauge – getting a little wider around the thighs and they become the buttock equivalent of foot-binding, and dropping a few kilos leaves me free as the wind (okay, not REALLY, because they are, after all, jeans as opposed to a kilt and NO ONE wants to see that, but as ‘free as the wind’ as you can possibly manage in two solid tubes of dark blue denim).

But lately when I’ve been slipping into these little denim cylinders of joy, I’m beginning to find that they have all of a sudden become a whole lot looser – but only in the left leg. A quick sortie to the scales affirms that I have, in fact, dropped about two kilos in the last month or so (very possibly due to stress and lack of sleep and generally freaking out about the impending doom of exams…). What the scales don’t tell me is where I’ve lost that weight – on closer examination, and I’m pretty sure it’s not just some delusion of my hyperactive imagination, my right leg is starting to look seriously larger than my left. What the hell?! What is wrong with my retarded body?! Am I going to turn into the Amazing Lopsided Woman, Nicole Ritchie on one side and America Ferrara on the other, condemned to spend the rest of my life as a carnival sideshow, at whom small children will heave all manners of insalubrious projectiles, including rotting tomatoes and old shoes? Will I develop a cheekbone sharp enough to cut ice, set above a concave hollow of a cheek, while the other side of my face becomes enfolded in layers of saggy skin and a turkey neck? WHY? WHY?