I haven’t always been fat. In fact, up until my third baby I was a bit of a looker! She laughs at this as she relaxes into telling me about her life. I had a normal childhood whatever that may be, 2 girls and 1 boy and always lots of food about. It was different back then though we had snacks but not like today. There wasn’t any convenience food as such that was later. The only crisps we had came with a blue bag of salt. We were active kids and none of us were big. My mum was a good cook and we ate all home-cooked meals, always at lunchtime then we had bread and butter with cake for tea! Imagine that now giving kids some bread and butter!! got married and had three babies quickly. This was in the 1980s when convenience food was starting and they were easier, I had 3 kids and a house to run, I hated cooking! So, to me, they were a godsend, we got a chest freezer for the shed and my husband would take me to Bejam on a Friday night.
We got the freezer from there too! I still cooked ordinary food, but we had a lot of quick meals, never ready meals like today. Actually, you couldn’t get many I remember a stew you had to boil in a saucepan for ages. Frozen chips were new, but you still had to cook them in a chip pan none of your oven chips. After my third girl I didn’t lose the baby weight like I did with the other two, I just got bigger and bigger. The horrible clothes I had to wear; you couldn’t get nice clothes in big sizes like you can today because there weren’t many fat people about. We were a rare breed back then! I thought l had finished having kids but was surprised with my boy! I was huge that pregnancy I can tell you. I was busier then ever then barely having time to have a cuppa let alone food. I would eat the kids’ leftovers and mid-morning | would have a milky coffee and a whole pack of biscuits! Eventually, I decided I needed to do something and me and some friends joined Slimming World, god it was awful getting on those scales for the first time I was 18 stone!
It was hard not eating what I wanted and back then you had green days which were mainly carbs and red days which was mainly protein. I did all right on that although me and my friends would go to the weigh in and then have fish and chips as we had a whole week to lose it! I lost 6 stone and thought I had cracked it. Didn’t get to my target weight but thought I could do it on my own, boy was I wrong, I put it all back on and more. This was a start of trying all the diets you could think off. Me and my mate even went to a private Dr to get slimming pills, they were awful, I couldn’t sit still and didn’t sleep. They made me do weird things like I took a tray out of the oven without using a tea towel.
Turns out they were speed!
My health started to suffer, first I got high blood pressure, then diabetes. I tried to not eat sugary things but it was so hard. I had started to snore really bad and eventually went to my GP about it, of course, he blamed my weight but he referred me to the hospital where they found out I had sleep apnea. I have to wear this bloody mask at night my husband said it was like sleeping next to Darth Vader! Ive never lost the weight, I have had two knee replacements and I’m not very mobile. My eyesight is bad due to the diabetes. All my own fault of course. I interrupted Anne at this point and explained about how now it is recognized that it is a chronic disease and the many factors that research has shown. She was surprised and said so it’s not all my fault?
I reassured her that it wasn’t. She seemed relieved as we said goodbye.