I was a very athletic youth and ran cross country for five years. As a teenager I ate like a horse. I’d have huge portions and kept that eating habit up but let the exercise habit decline. I struggled to maintain my weight for a long time. When my first daughter was born I weighed 13 ½ stone but I just couldn’t hold back after that. I’d gain 3 stones, lose 2 and then put on 4 until I ratcheted up to 23 stones. I felt so unhappy with myself. My mobility was severely compromised.
Once I became a fat person, I became addicted to what I now regard as “a fat way of life”. I would think about food all day long, I needed a “fix” every two hours and getting the fix became the focus of the day. My routine would be to have breakfast of orange juice, cereal and lots of toast during the week with a serious fry-up at weekends. As I wasn’t working on Saturdays and Sundays I would just carry on eating all day. This constant desire to eat drove my weight gain.
Six years ago, I could barely walk; even a hundred yards was agony, my weight had just crushed my knee joints and I had to have an operation to replace my left knee. The anaesthetist refused to give me a general anaesthetic because I was so heavy so consequently I had to endure the operation with just an epidural – a very unpleasant experience.
The trigger to tackle my weight came four years later when helping my daughter to move. I was weeping with pain from the other knee. If I had an operation on this knee, I knew it would take me another two years to recover. I had to do something about my weight. I started to do some research and went to visit a competitor of Healthier Weight’s but I didn’t get a good feeling about them. When I rang Healthier Weight I spoke to Emma and was reassured to attend a consultation.
