On relosing weight

Losing weight is one of the great rollercoasters of life (another is financial security, but that’s another story). You work hard, you watch the pounds slowly go away, then poof- something disrupts your carefully built routine, takes you off the treadmill for a while, and the pounds pile back on. And bring their friends too.

This is normal. This is life. For the thousands, perhaps millions, of us who haven’t had a stable weight since their teens, this is also deep deep despair. Weight is a great discriminator, gathering all our fears, all our weaknesses into one single flabby point. It makes our features look old, but our actions look immature; it changes the way we fit into the world, from the width of an airline seat to the attitudes of employers and strangers. Weight shouts "lazy" even at the active amongst us; shouts careless except at those camouflaged with immaculate make-up (and the world is also full of larger women with perfect lipstick). We legislate on age, gender, colour (not that that always helps, but at least the framework is there), but fat, flabby, bulky, hefty all have their connotations and uses.

But it’s not all despair. And apparently strangely, one of the first steps in losing the weight again seems to be holding an acceptance in your heart of who you are now, what you are now; to love the person you are and the body you are in regardless of the extra pounds. Because one of the biggest enemies is indeed that despair. Because that’s the rot that stops us going out for a run ("it’ll never make a difference now I’m fat") or doesn’t stop us reaching for that biscuit ("it won’t make any difference, I’m already fat"). And that is indeed rot: there is no magical non-overlapping fat-you and thin-you; there is just you. And what you do now affects you, and what you put in and take out of your body affects your body. Every little bit. Every walk-to-the-next-bus-stop, every extra bag of crisps: it all makes a difference. And the good news is that you get to be in charge of this ‘you’ character. You are just you. The weight thing is ancillary. So if it makes you feel better to be thinner, then do that extra walk and say no to that biscuit.

Me, I lost a lot of weight (3 stones at the last count), but put a lot back on (holding steady at just over an extra stone). Yes, that’s depressing. Yes, it’s rough starting again every time. Except it’s not really starting again. Because each time I understand what’s happening, each time I learn a little more about what I need to do (or not do) to start pushing down that weight, I’m going to write it down here, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to follow, or if the food analogy is a bit too much, a carefully-knotted set of bedsheets to climb back into the size-12 window with. And hopefully, slowly, I won’t be starting again each time, but continuing at a place that I left off from earlier. With a bit more wisdom to beat down that despair with.

Someone I love very much is upset about their weight (in fact, two people I love very much had an almost-identical conversation about it with me this weekend). I need to lose weight, they need to lose weight; I miss being active. It’s a simple fix really: get out there and get proactive myself, and drag them along with me when I can. Stop bringing tempting foods with me so they don’t suffer afterwards too. Stop being a partner-in-crime and start being supportive instead. And ban the chips and chocolate. Full stop. Until we’re active enough to earn them (and even then, just share a small one). Onwards!