I have always felt big and fat. Looking back at childhood pictures of me, I wasn’t exactly a skinny kid and I have always loved nice big home cooked dinners, but I certainly wasn’t the monstrosity that I had built myself up to be.
I tried doing silly diets when I was 14 – even having my best friend at the time come into the bathroom with me whilst I downed salt water in an attempt to make myself sick because I’d eaten some twiglets.
Mostly I accepted that I was larger; aged 16 I was wearing size 16 skirts for school, but I didn’t think about it too much until I was 17.
It was November and I stayed the night at my friend’s house. We had an Indian takeaway, stayed up late drinking wine and watching videos. The next day we slept in late and had our breakfast of rice krispies at lunchtime. Later that day my Dad came to pick me up and in the evening I ate my tea of homemade cottage pie with veggies and went to bed.
The next day when I woke up I felt somehow lighter. It was a strange feeling that I hadn’t really felt before. I thought about the previous day and what had been different in the way I’d eaten. In having breakfast at lunch time I had effectively skipped lunch. I weighed myself – the number didn’t mean much to me and my parents scales were really old. I then decided to skip lunch all week, and see how much I weighed the following Monday.
It was a tough week. I knew nothing about the GI ratings of cereal, so if I’d had rice krispies or corn flakes for breakfast I was often starving by lunch time. It was a hungry week, but I stuck to it. Eating my breakfast, skipping my lunch, and eating whatever mum had cooked for tea in the evening.
Monday rolled around and I’d lost half a stone. In a week. I thought I had found the dieting secret of all time – I can have a large bowl of cereal and eat whatever mum has cooked in the evening – pies, chips, anything and still lose weight just by skipping lunch. I believed the weight I’d lost that week needed to be “consolidated” ; which meant to me I shouldn’t expect or want to lose any more for a few weeks, my body needed to adjust month by month. So I decided to just weigh myself every four weeks on the “breakfast/tea diet”.
I stuck to it all over Christmas and the following months. I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing and as a result it was always surprising if people said
“Have you lost weight?”
I wasn’t talking about losing weight to anyone so it was strange when people commented.
Eventually my steady half a stone a month began to come to a halt. My parents newspaper had featured an article about a couple following a low fat diet and how healthy and zippy they were. The article included a long list of the fat grams in common foods. So I continued with the breakfast/tea diet, but with a bigger focus on what I was eating for my tea – it now had to be low fat. I began to eat differently from my family at meal times. I’d shun mum’s home cooked food that I had no idea of the fat content of, in favour of calorie counted healthy choice frozen ready meals.
By the following November, a year into my breakfast/tea diet I was away from home attending university and had lost 3 and a half stone. Sometimes I saw the magical 9 stone something appear on the scales, but the numbers didn’t mean so much to me. I continued wearing size 16 clothes, sometimes submitting and believing I had got smaller, I’d buy a size 14. I liked baggy combat trousers and baggy band t-shirts bought from whichever recent gig I’d been to. So the weight loss did not encourage me to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe. Although I’d lost weight, I still believed I was meant to be a size 16 and my head would not catch up with the size my body actually was. I still believed I was fat and always would be. It was in my genes, the way I was built.
My weight stayed pretty steady throughout university. Thanks to some weight watchers leaflets and booklets my Nanna had given me, I started thinking about points and calories and did allow myself to have something low fat and low calorie at lunchtimes. Mainly soup or yoghurts. As long as it was liquid based it was allowed.
Finishing university and becoming prone to binges, after all the years of deprivation my body was starting to rebel, I put some weight on. Getting a boring office job with lots of diet-obsessed middle aged women I put more weight on and joined my first slimming club – Slimming World.
The first week I lost 5 pounds. I did the diet for a while, but binges were always lurking and getting harder to resist and control. So I’d have a massive binge, big weight gain, then chuck in the slimming club and go solo for a bit. Which would lead to a bit more weight gained, so I joined Weight Watchers, I knew all about points from my Nanna and even had a points calculator I’d got through the magazine at university that I’d used for a bit, following my own version of Weight Watchers.
So I did Weight Watchers for a bit, then stopped and went solo, put more weight on, went back to Slimming World, binged, gained weight, didn’t go back, joined another slimming club. This cycle continued for a couple of years, with my weight steadily increasing.
In summer 2003 I lost my job due to my mental health problems and began attending a Psychiatric Day Hospital 7 days a week to keep me stable and out of being admitted on to the in-patient ward. I was back at Weight Watchers and losing weight steadily at 2 pounds a week. It was a wonderful hot summer and I successfully reached my 10% goal and got my key ring, and really thought I’d cracked my weight problem.
Into the autumn of 2003 I was prescribed an anti-psychotic called Chlorpromazine and an anti depressant called Mirtazapine. I lost all concept of what feeling full felt like, I was CONSTANTLY hungry. All I could think about was my next meal. I was aware my weight was increasing, I’d stopped attending Weight Watchers, I complained to people about my increasing weight, but they would always say comments along the lines of it being better to be mentally healthy whilst carrying a few more pounds, than thin but being psychotic.
At the end of 2005 my psychiatrist left the hospital and the new psychiatrist that took her place took me off all my medication. She believed that my mental health condition of Borderline Personality Disorder, did not need to be treated with medication. I was angry – I’d believed from my previous psychiatrist that I NEEDED my meds to be well. I got a second opinion, but the psychiatrist conducting the second opinion consulted the psychiatrist I was challenging, so I was not prescribed any meds again.
When I calmed down from being taken off my medication I noticed that I was losing a bit of weight without really trying. What would happen if I did try?
So medication free, January 2006, I joined Weight Watchers again. By this point I was classed as Disabled because of my mental health problems and was totally unable to work. So all my time and focus could go on getting slim. I cooked from scratch everything, soups – point free, a different flavour for everyday of the week, and meals out of the Weight Watchers cookery books. The weight steadily fell off and I began to get my confidence back and feel good about myself.
By the summer 2006 things in my personal life had gone a bit crazy; in splitting from my violent, manipulative and alcoholic ex-partner, I had ended up homeless. There was an attempt to get me into the women’s refuge as I was escaping domestic violence, but when this all fell through I ended up temporarily housed in a bed and breakfast in a town ten miles away from my home town.
I led a very chaotic lifestyle and with living in the bed and breakfast and having to use my parents kitchen for meals I was cooking fairly simply so as to not make the kitchen a mess. Plus I was much more active, rather than flopping in front of the tv with wine after tea, I was having to get the bus back to the bed and breakfast, which involved a long walk to the bus stop after my evening meal. It was a scorching hot summer in 2006 so I just never felt very hungry and consequently just ended up just not eating very much and following a kind of low carbohydrate Atkins diet that I had fashioned.
By the time I moved in with TuT I was very slim – a size 10/12 and had lost 5 stone from the January until the September. However, my slim frame came at the cost of being borderline anorexic and I was not very healthy.
Now I have pretty much gained back all of the 5 stone I lost in 2006 due to a combination of taking the depo provera contraceptive injection, being back on anti psychotic and anti depressant medication, and getting a bit content living with TuT and not doing enough exercise.
I am now back at the Weight Watchers coalface and want to lose the weight permanently and end this long story of gaining and losing weight once and for all.
