Once upon lived a girl whose weight went of the scale, literally. When I was 24 I probably weighed about 24 stone! I wore a size 32 in clothes and for a little girl of only 5ft 1 - I was very big.
A mystery illness, which I never got to the bottom of was the push I needed to loose weight. It caused me to shed a stone and despite not feeling wonderful due to my mystery illness the loss of weight spurned me off to move my back side and loose some more. Over the course of 12 months I shed several stone/kgs/llbs what ever you like to call them. I ate healthily, I joined a gym and the result, almost a year a later, was me becoming a size 18.
Doctors and Nurses I have spoken to more recently say this probably saved my life - because if I hadn't lost that weight then today I would either dead or being fitted for gastric band.
However, getting to that size would have urged most people to carry on until they became a size eight - not me! It gave me false confidence that I was now normal! that I was a normal size and that if I could buy clothes in a normal shop then at last I was normal.
The feeling of normality was almost like license to eat. Old habits returned and soon enough I was a size 20 again and then a 22. For some reason I vowed never to be more than that and for the last 6 years now I have remained a size 22 - and whilst part of my head thought a size 22 was more acceptable then a 32 what I forgot was, that for me and my body, this its not a healthy weight to be at - not at 5ft 1.
I am not an eater who eats all the pies, I don't even eat sweets every day, of drink fizzy drinks I dont crave Mcdonalds or pizza or KFC but I do eat the wrong things at the wrong times. For example I would happily eat hunks of bread smeared with full fat cream cheese at 2am.....in fact my entire relationship with bread and cheese/dairy I think is for another post.
Last year my brothers wedding was a turning point, when the pictures came back, I was still so much fatter, so much bigger than everyone else. I refuse to watch the wedding video in all its glory because I know how fat I will look.
Feeling like this gave me to urge to at least,if I couldn't loose weight, to get fit. I took part in a couple of charity walks last summer and never felt better for getting the exercise. I decided to invest in a treadmill and although I wasn't loosing much weight I felt happier. I lost a few pounds although how many I do not know because to me at that time weighing scales where like garlic to a vampire!.
I was one of those fat people who believed that being fat was my destiny in life and that no matter how much I tried I would always be fat..albeit a slightly thinner fat person then I once was but still fat! And I kept telling myself that to justify why I was still obese.
Towards the end of last year I really felt like I was on the road to nowhere with my weight. I know that I have lost a good amount of weight and I should be proud of that but for a long time my weight had not moved and I wanted it to. I decided that my only option was to face my greatest fear! Medical help!
Like most fat people I avoided trips to my doctor. I have had horrible experiences with Doctors and Nurses throughout my childhood and adulthood to extent where I felt that they didn't want to help me - they wanted to put me down.
I had recently changed doctors and with a chest infection that made me sound like an 80 year old I went to see my new doctor. But I knew I wanted to talk to my doctor about more than just my horrible chest infection - I wanted to bite the bullet and do the one thing I had put off for so many years and that was to GET HELP with my weight. As this was before the food feast that it Christmas I declared to myself I was clearly mad *smiles*
Over the years I have watched former fatties I know loose weight in a manner of ways be it from going to slimming clubs to gastric bands to diet pills. I wanted to start with a calorie controlled diet. I was interested in how this could work for me because it wasnt a solution or answer for long term healthy eating but it could be a potential kick start to me loosing weight.
At my appointment, after having wheezed for the doctor I decided to bite the bullet and I asked for help with my weight. The Doctor was great andurged me to start a calorie controlled diet firstly and told me that if I could loose 2kgs in a month then they would agree to support me through my weight loss with regular check ups. This was about and a week half before Christmas and in all honestly i just was not sure that I would be able to loose that much. But I decided to try...I stopped the sneaky crisps, chocolate bars and hot chocolate drinks.
Two weeks later I was back at the Doctors to talk to the Nurse about giving up smoking and also about the possibility of checking me for type 2 diabetes. At the end of the session I asked out of curiosity for her to weigh me. She was more than happy to and there is was I was 2 kilos lighter... from 117kg to 115kgs in two weeks...
Four weeks into making changes to my diet that are healthy - even creating and cooking healthy meals for my self and now weighing at 111 kgs.
This is just the start!
