You could construct a good argument proving that children make you fat.
There’s the post-partum podge, which is legendarily hard to shift. Then a
few months during which you lie around snacking on biscuits whenever your
children have a nap, precisely because the post-partum podge is so hard to
shift, so you may as well give in gracefully. And then, once the children
are old enough to eat solid foods, there’s the picking. Pick, pick, pick, at
breakfast, lunch, tea, and any time in between. Outings are embellished with
snacks: oooh, the park — shall we have a Danish? The zoo? Here’s the nice
ice-cream man. Back at home, we can’t have fish fingers going to waste.
Toast and jam? Down it goes, into Mama’s waiting mouth. And on to Mama’s
waiting hips, stomach and backside.
At which point, one of two things happens. Either you weary of this scenario,
join a gym and learn self-control, or unconsciously give up by telling
yourself you will get round to it later. I took option B for well over a
decade (my eldest child is 14, his brother is 11 and my daughter is nearly
3). What happened then, unsurprisingly, was that I got fatter and fatter,
going from a reasonable — at 5ft 10in (1.78m) — size 14 all the way to the
point where a size 20 felt uncomfortably snug. More surprisingly, I didn’t
seem to be able to do anything about it. There was a part of me that thought
this kind of maternal weight gain went with the territory: I’d had my
photogenic youth, and now it was time to stop thinking so much about the way
I looked. There were schools to look round, children to bring up, houses to
decorate . . . and at every stage, there was sugary tea and biscuits.
Far from being demoralised about my weight, at this early stage, I thought —
insanely, in retrospect — that it was a positive indicator of my domestic
contentment. At least I wasn’t one of those neurotic loonies who push a
salad leaf around a plate and call it lunch. I made hot chocolate with
whipped cream to celebrate.
We all know what to do about losing weight, in theory if not in practice: you
eat less and move around more. I moved around a great deal but eating less
didn’t seem appealing. I was a stay-at-home mother at the time, and much of
my day centred around food — the food I prepared for my children three times
a day (and Hoovered up the debris of) and the big fat dinner I’d then cook
for my husband, and which we’d sometimes precede with crisps and a bottle of
wine.
Irritatingly, he remained whip-thin. I didn’t. And it certainly never occurred
to me at the time, or for over a decade later, that the kind of
comfort-eating I was indulging in was out of control. The marriage
eventually broke up eight years ago. The fat stayed put.
By the time I reached the stage when I thought “That’s enough”, 18 months ago,
I was 39 and a size 20-22. I wasn’t curvy or voluptuous, I was just really,
really fat. Realising this was like waking from a dream. Obviously, at one
level I’d known that I was becoming seriously overweight; I’d stopped buying
clothes in “normal” shops years before. But I was also in a weird sort of
denial about how extreme things had got. In my mind, before the epiphany, I
was merely “a bit podgy”. I thought I needed to lose a stone or two, and
that I would. Not tomorrow, obviously, because we had to go out to dinner,
and actually not next week, either, because it was half-term, and who starts
a diet during half-term? No, not then, but . . . you know, soon. At some
point.
Actually, I didn’t need to lose a stone or two. I’d let things get so out of
hand that I needed to lose five. Five stone; that’s half another person.
It’s a really serious amount of weight. But I did it, spurred to action by
the realisation, one summer afternoon in 2005, that a (hideous) size 20
dress in Selfridges was a bit on the cosy side. It took a year, from July
2005, though the diet is ongoing in the sense that it has evolved into a
whole new way of eating.
Since when I haven’t put an ounce back on, and quite frankly if I can do it,
then so can anyone. More to the point — crucially, for me — I did it while
still having a social life, and eating family meals.
:image:I think finding a way to balance weight loss and family life is what
flummoxes a great number of women in my situation. If you live alone, you
can diet all you like; it may not be any fun but it isn’t going to involve
cooking two different meals every night. You can stock your fridge with only
the foods you have to eat, and not come across temptation in the shape of
your teenage son’s Mars bar stash. And so on. Living en famille,
on the other hand, can make reasonably straightforward things such as
dieting feel Sisyphean. The kinds of food that lurk within most family
kitchens — pizza, cheesecake, biscuits, beer — is not diet-friendly.
I have to say that once I’d resolved to do something about my by-now monstrous
girth, I became, if anything, even more confused. I bought a pile of diet
books, all of which promised to work and all of which gave completely
conflicting advice. Now what? High carb or low carb? Wholefoods or
artificial sweeteners? Hay diet or Atkins? Gigantic amounts of fibre or
gigantic amounts of red meat? Should I become vegetarian? Vegan? Join
WeightWatchers? Exist on liquid meal substitutes for the morbidly obese?
(Please God, no!) If I hadn’t been so determined, I might very well have
given up there and then. But I am quite obstinate (as well as greedy) and
I’d decided never to buy a size 20 — or 22 — item of clothing again. So I
sat down and read all the sane-seeming diet books I’d bought cover to cover.
Not all of them were as sane as they looked, frankly, and, to my
astonishment, none of them addressed the emotional issues (there are too
many to go into here) that surround eating, particularly for women.
The thing about diets is this: they all work, pretty much. That isn’t the
problem. The problem is that unless you stick to them and genuinely change
your eating habits, the weight is going to pile back on the second you take
your eye off the ball. And the only way to change your eating habits is to
unravel the reasons why you overeat in the first place.
Since no books wanted to go there, I decided, with the help of a similarly
overweight girlfriend, Neris, to find out for myself. The girlfriend said:
“I am in a state of confusion. Just tell me what to do to lose weight and
I’ll do it.” So I studied the diet books, worked out the most do-able way of
eating — the high protein, low-carb method — and fiddled and tweaked until
it became, well, palatable. (As I’ve said, I am greedy. There was no way I
was going to exist on little hunks of cheese: I wanted to eat delicious
things.) Then, my girlfriend and I became our own guinea, er, pigs. And
that’s how we lost 5st each. We started off being size 20-22, and are now
size 14s, and we feel fantastic.
It worked so well we wrote a book about it. I’m not claiming it’s the only
diet that works, far from it. But it is the only diet tha has ever worked
for my friend, a diet veteran. And it allowed me to feed my family and me
really good food: the beauty of low-carb diets is that you have the roast
chicken, the gravy, the beans, the salad, and simply pass on the potatoes.
This doesn’t make you feel deprived.
Like many overweight people, I never much fancied the idea of the gym: why
surround myself with people at the peak of their physical shape other than
to really depress myself? Our diet books recommend walking — brisk walking,
not aimless strolling — until the bulk of the weight has been lost. At that
point, if you’ve lost a great deal of weight, you need to visit the gym, to
tone things up. But only then.
And my children? Watching me devour the kind of meal I’ve just described was,
I think, very good for them. I didn’t turn into an obsessive neurotic,
gnawing on seeds, but I did shrink before their eyes. They’ve become more
aware of nutrition as a result. And, kindly, they have moved their chocolate
stash out of the fridge.
Neris and India’s Idiot-Proof Diet (Penguin Fig Tree, £14.99) is available
at £13.49: 0870 1608080, timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
Ten top tips for losing weight
1. Set yourself manageable and realistic targets. If you’re a size 12 and want
to be a size 8, fine. If you’re a 24, you may be blissfully happy being a 16.
2. Don’t go overboard on the exercise front: most people can’t keep it up and
then feel discouraged. A brisk walk twice a day is plenty to be getting on
with.
3. Start from a place of self-love, not self-disgust. You may not like the way
you look, but you are dealing with it. Celebrate that.
4. Understand why you overeat. Nobody is starving 24 hours a day: the hunger
for food usually masks something else. Crack this, and you’re on your way.
This is crucial if you’re going to keep off the weight.
5. Drink two litres of water a day. Incredibly boring, but it really does
help.
6. Keep a journal. You don’t want to bore everyone else to death with your
feelings and insights about weight, but writing them down is cathartic and
useful.
7. Know that you’re fallible, and don’t let the odd lapse signify the end of
the diet. We all fall off the wagon every now and then. It doesn’t matter.
You’ll still get there in the end.
8. Dump the toxic friends, the ones who say: “But you’re lovely as you are at
size 20.” They don’t mean it. They mean they like you that size because it
makes them feel better about themselves.
9. Don’t bang on about being on a diet. Just do it. Don’t invite commentary or
analysis.
10. Be the right size for your shape. If you’re a woman with a bosom and hips,
that never means being a size 2.
