Blubber and all that crap!

Weight loss. What a subject and how long can the average female ramble on about it (without pausing, repetition or deviation!). It is an eternal conundrum that the vast majority of ladies that I know, in spite of being well educated and sensible, spend more time talking about, starting and finishing and considering diets than anything else. Rare are the women (and I admit that they exist albeit in very small numbers) that I know for whom food and drink is not an eternal and fine balancing act between pleasure and torture.

Since knocking the booze on the head I have slowly and steadily lost about half a stone. In addition, I have been good about food, I admit, and have exercised as much as inclination and the weather allows. I have also experienced a loss of appetite, at least as I knew it before, so am now doing just one significant thing: skipping breakfast.

Aaagggghhh! Every nutritionist in the land is screaming at me but, for the first time ever, I don’t care. In my head, it’s really bloody simple. I was not brought up to eat breakfast. If my mother was sending children to school today, she’d be vilified and have her home pelted with eggs; by the teachers. She broke the rules big time and didn’t insist that me nor my brother ate before school. We always had a good and relatively healthy packed lunch so her philosophy was that we wouldn’t starve and if we weren’t wanting food at 8am, so what? We could eat at breaktime if we were hungry and then we’d be home by 4pm, at which point a visit to the biscuit barrel was a pre-requisite. Understandably, she lost no sleep over this decision and there was always bread and cereal around if we really wanted it.

By university, however, I was snacking on toast in the mornings – not out of hunger but from being in a house share for the first time and doing the same as everyone else – and I piled on the pounds. In my early 20s I was skipping it again, as I was out partying until the early hours and hadn’t got time before work and was, in many people’s opinions, at my thinnest ever. My first serious relationship saw me piling the weight back on, as I joined my partner in having something before work (usually stodge!!) and thereafter I religiously followed nutritionists’ advice to always have something to wake your metabolism.

Well I have finally decided to ignore their pleas and have been going without for the last 3 weeks. I’m not hungry first thing, it’s a simple fact and if that’s down to my upbringing, then so be it. The way I see it, if it’s a habit that formed back then, my metabolism learnt to wake itself up a long time ago – ha ha!!! In the mornings I have more than enough energy to keep me going and by lunch time I am really looking forward to my well-balanced and perfectly healthy meal: soup or salad, oatcakes and an Activia yoghurt (all good). I’ve stopped snacking, or even the urge to do it, but by evening I can cook and eat a proper meal with my other half, of meat and 2 veg or a stir fry and I’m done. I don’t go out for dinner and moan about there being no salads on the menu, no-one even needs to be bothered by my not eating breakfast and I can treat myself to a little fat, some cream maybe or some cheese with my evening meal, without feeling like I‘ve over-indulged.

My conclusion? Throw away the diet books, forget the plans and write your own one based on simple, good old-fashioned common sense. What works for me may well be useless for someone else so who cares? If dieting was left to the individual, if harassment about eating certain things, guilty feelings of being naughty and all the other baggage we carry around was removed, everyone would surely settle into their own rhythm eventually? If the waistband was an indicator of weight gain and not the scales, we’d all know when it was too tight and therefore time to cut back a bit.

Years ago, in my mid teens, I read some advice in Cosmo. It suggested tying a string around your waist so that you didn’t over eat. I quite clearly remember trying it and that, I think, was the start of a long and boring relationship with diets! The more someone is told not to have/do something the more they want it. If the media wasn’t saturated (like my favourite fats!) with weight loss articles, tips and photos of slightly rotund people being lambasted for putting on a few pounds, we’d all think about the subject much, much less.

Anyway, am stepping off my soapbox as I have to share with you what never fails to make me laugh about my own personal weight loss style. Whenever I’ve managed a diet for any length of time, it literally drops off me from top to bottom! It starts with the face, then the shoulders, followed by rib cage and waist. All pretty rapid then a long, slow and very tedious wait for the middle area to reduce. This is when I usually get bored and give up so I need willpower this time around. I need to lose (as someone recently described it in a blog) my ‘flesh-coloured bum bag’ which neatly sums up the spare bit below my waist and above my thighs - ha ha!! The thighs, ahhh the thighs. Thunderous (of course) but I really do have ickle legs!! Then my bulbous calves which give me Queen Anne style pins, which would look lovely on a table but less so on little old me!! If ever I spot the calves reducing in size (thus enabling me to finally pull on some knee high boots, much to K’s delight!), then I know I’m doing well. I’ve yet to see the fat reduce on my tootsies and still have honking great size 6 feet all the same, but if my shoes start to feel roomy then I will know that I have finally gone too far – ha ha!