Hello, is that The Priory?

I think I may be the opposite of anorexic. I don't know the word for that. It's not 'fat', it's something else. I shall call the condition 'Denialemia'. I know I'm not the world's slimmest girl and I'm pretty sure I don't need to have my stomach stapled - I think I'm somewhere in the middle: when I look in the mirror I normally think something like, 'Yeah, I could lose a few pounds, but I still look fairly OK.'

So it was a shock and a severe disappointment when I went online today to look at the newly-uploaded professional photographs that were taken at the Finsbury Park run on Sunday. I was by no means imagining some Anneka-Rice-in-Treasure-Hunt-catsuit stunner to appear wearing my running number, but I did think that it would require some slimness of thigh and firmness of calf to pound 10 kilometers of a September morn. How wrong I was.

Here, for your amusement, is the better of the two photos. I haven't spent £7 on the professional version, because I would consider that an appalling use of my wages. So it's bad quality and has PREVIEW written over it. Naughty me. I have blurred my face and cropped me at the waist to hide my legs and feet - but just to help you envisage, my legs, normally about half the length of my 5 feet and 8 and a half inches, appear to have been crushed by the impact of the run. In the photograph, they seem to be approximately the length of my head, but several times as wide. They are encased in shiny black lycra running trousers that I thought made me look sporty but, I now realise, make me look like a SlimFast 'Before' picture. Livid.

Sadly, the other photo was far worse. You know those breeches that the men wear in Jane Austen costume dramas, which are pretty skintight from the ankle up, but at about mid-thigh level, suddenly flare out, nipping in at the waist, leaving a strange pocket of unfilled fabric? I looked like I was wearing a black pair of those - but the strange pockets on both sides were filled with my fat. I genuinely appear deformed. I showed Laura and after she'd stopped laughing, she admitted that there was something odd about it - her assurances that I don't normally look like that weren't much comfort.

How much of what we see in the mirror is self-imposed rubbish, I wonder? I heard recently that people make their opinions about your appearance in the first ten seconds that they meet you, and from that point on they never reevaluate them, i.e., if they thought you were beautiful on first glance, you could look like a mangey tramp and they'd still see the good points. I think I may have decided a while ago that I'm a six out of ten - and while I have some excellent days where my score skyrockets up to a 6.5, there are also days when I should probably stay indoors to protect the innocents outside from a shock. I need to know the truth. But either way, I'm burning the lycra.