The Food Confessional

Posted by Paola

It’s the 200th day of my diet and I thought it’d be a good time to collect some thoughts about my diet and the future.

I need to confess

I need to keep using the Food Confessional in order to lose weight.

A few months in, I thought I could manage without it and even without counting calories. However, even as recently as a few weeks ago, I still get surprised by the number of calories in things. And I still have bad habits to break when it comes to eating.

Keeping a public food diary keeps me in control.

What I will be able to do

I hadn’t given it much thought of these things before but sometimes I realise what old and new things I will be able to do.

Play table tennis

I used to be a league player and was ranked in my county in the under 17s category. I continued playing at university but stopped when I became embarrassed about how much I was sweating. I’d love to start playing again.

Go skiing

I last went skiing 30 years ago – even then I was overweight and I lied to the guy who was fitting my boots about my weight. As a consequence, the boots kept coming off. I haven’t been skiing since, because I didn’t think I’d get any ski clothes to fit me.

Wear high heels

I wear flat shoes and boots now but I bought these lovely boots some years ago and, even though they don’t have a big heel, I couldn’t wear them. I’d wore them to Guy and Sue’s wedding; at the end of the day part of my foot was numb. I figured that the slight incline was still enough to force my weight onto my foot and squeeze a nerve. It took a year for me to regain sensation in my foot.

Wear vintage dresses

I’ve thrown lots of ‘thin’ clothes out over the years but have hung onto two evening dresses from the 1950s. I could never get into one and my seamstress mother had started to alter it to make it bigger.

(In the 1970s and 1980s, there were a lot of 1950s clothes in charity shops – I suspect that old clothes are much harder to find nowadays.)

Wear nice lingerie

I bought this bra from eBay this week. I have been buying £10 jeans and £4 t-shirts but finally had to do something about my bras which are very annoyingly riding up at the back. I was too young when I was last slim to have lovely underwear – it’s something I can look forward to very soon!

(Oh, and I have enjoyed wearing my new size 16 jeans and will get some more in size 14 for the future!)

What won’t happen

I realised, rather belatedly, that losing weight won’t make me a happier person in a fundamental sense. I don’t think it’ll Change My Life in making each day being joyous with singing and dancing. Instead I realise that I will still carry the other problems around in my head and don’t expect miracles, such as I expect one imagines when one wins the lottery.

That said, there HAVE been positive changes this year.

How I must change

I realised that I will have to think about how and what I say. Being fat is – actually – a way of being invisible. As a consequence, I can be very brash and abrupt. It’s like there are some things you can get away with when you’re fat, as if what I say doesn’t really count.

I often think about next Christmas, when it’ll have been a year since I last saw my brother. Although I will LOOK different, I think it will be odd that I will behave the same – critical, serious, sulky (along with funny) – because I was down on myself, because I was fat. I think it’ll take time for my self-attitude and, thus, my way of dealing with people, to catch up with my new body shape.

Thank you

Thank you for listening. I couldn’t have done this without you.