145 pounds at last!

In February this year I had a meeting with Roma, one of the impressively slender instructors at the gym in Highbury, to review my exercise programme. She said she thought I was doing stuff rather aimlessly at the gym and I needed A Goal. My impulse was to shrug this aside: I've stopped doing Goals since I left the BFI and feel much better for it. But she insisted, so I said rather off-handedly that what I'd really like to do some time when I felt up to it would be to lose a stone (14 pounds). I'd always thought this rather vaguely - I knew I was a bit overweight and it was annoying how tight some of my clothes were, but I just figured you get fatter when you're older and that's that. But Roma seized on this and said "Yes that's a great Goal to have: what date shall we set for you to reach it?" Thinking fast, I looked well ahead and suggested my birthday, 29th May. So then Roma weighed me in at 81kg (178 pounds or 12 stone 7) and I was locked into the process.

No diets for me: I'd done several and I know they're all rubbish as far as serious long-term weight loss is concerned. If I was to lose weight permanently I'd have to get used to eating what I would be eating for the rest of my life, so there'd be no point in trying something outlandish. I also knew - or thought I did - that with a bit of self-awareness about alcohol, nibbles before dinner, snacks in the morning and afternoon, smaller helpings and no second helpings, I'd lose weight and all I needed to do was keep going. So I lost maybe four or five pounds in the first month, but then it all slowed down and got boring.

This was, of course, Roma's big moment. She ordered me to write down everything I ate for a week, count the calories, and report back to her. Tsk! So boring and old-fashioned, calorie counting. But I only had to count a few items before I realised I was simply eating as much or more calories as I burned. With my regular diet in front of me, I was able to decide which bits to cut: half my Birchermuesli in the mornings, and as much fat as possible ie no marge on bread and no cheese - so, effectively, hardly any bread either - and, very sadly, no more little morning treat of a gloop of cream in my coffee.

Keeping up the gym, swimming, twin care and allotment work took care of the energy expenditure, and having resigned as the Chair of the MEA my time in front of the computer diminished considerably. Crucially, TAS joined in and we began to lose weight together. I lost a stone by the agreed date, but then thought, why stop now? Why not another stone? This was not an eating disorder: I felt thinner than I looked, rather than looking thinner than I felt. Now and then I'd pick up a six-kilo weight and think: I'm not carrying that around any more! I didn't actually look that much thinner: it was only by September when I had lost another half stone that people started to comment on how much better I looked (or put it another way, remind me what a fat pig I'd looked a few months earlier, I guess). And it was later still that I started to notice it: I could feel bones I'd forgotten I had, and some of my clothes suddenly became unbearably huge. I've had to buy new bras and alter all my trousers, and I can put on socks and tie my shoelaces without groaning.

Now when I try to pick up a 15-kilo weight at the gym - I don't actually USE a 15-kilo weight because I can barely get it off the ground - I think: was I actually carrying all that around, and wondering why I got sore feet and problems with my knees and felt puffed out running upstairs? What was I thinking of? How did I manage to go on considering myself "a bit overweight"? Why didn't anybody - not even the doctor - tell me I was fat? The reason of course is that I wasn't THAT fat: a size 16 is not much to worry about compared to the really vast people you see every day - so my mere 32 pounds of extra flab didn't put me on anybody's Urgent list.

TAS has lost about the same amount, and we're more or less grinding to a halt on the serious weight loss idea. Our current weights seem about right: they're about the same as they were when we first met, 40 years ago. We have to keep an eye on it though: we weigh ourselves every morning (that being the most comfortingly lightweight moment of the day) and notice when too many of those little indulgences have made their presence felt. Two days in the Netherlands notched up four pounds on the scales and last night's little binge at the IoE graduate reception accounted for a pound and a half.

But the interesting thing is how quickly the weight goes again as soon as we get back to eating what we can now truthfully say is "normally". Of course, "my weight" is a flexible concept: everyone seems to gain 3 or 4 pounds during the day, and loses it again by the following morning. Eating early in the evening will make for a lower weight in the morning. So ideally (after Christmas, maybe) it would be good to lose maybe 2 or 3 more pounds so I'd know I'd always be less than ten and a half stone. But it's no big deal: essentially we've pretty much got to the stage where we both know what we can and can't eat if we want to maintain it, and more to the point, know that it's not hard for us to do that. What's probably going to be harder now is to stop ourselves becoming body fascists and casting disdainful glances at everyone who's bigger than us. Is that another things the ads don't tell you: the thinner you get, the nastier you are?