Piglet ...felt so Foolish and Uncomfortable that he had almost decided to run away to Sea and be a Sailor...
Start Date: Tuesday 19th July 2016
Starting weight: 15st
Goal weight: 9st 7lbs
Ideal weight range according to my height: 8-10st
Starting health problems:
- Clinical Depression & Generalised Anxiety Disorder (diagnosed 8 years)
- Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) (diagnosed 3 years)
- Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (diagnosed 1 year)
The short term why
I only decided to keep the appointment because I’d already arranged the time with work and I’m hopeless at making appointments when I need to so I thought I’d better not waste it. I’ve had an endless list of things I meant to talk to a doctor about for like a year: PCOS, medication for depression, fatigue, agonising pain in my ankles, wheezing when I laugh, poor sleep… (Have you noticed that ALL those problems are at least potentially related to being overweight? I hadn’t. Or rather I had but was deep in denial.)
Because of my cocktail of meds, docs always check my blood pressure; “Your blood pressure’s slightly raised. We should keep an eye on it.” Not be a death sentence on its own but I had never been told that in my life. I’ve been increasingly overweight since childhood, but my BP has always been ‘fine’. Then, horrors, he wanted to check my weight.
I knew it would be foul. I’d been 93kg the last time I was weighed at the doctor’s, at the same appointment as I received my diagnosis of N-AFLD, and had solemnly promised that I would try to get down to 68kg (about 10.5 st). I had tried (a little bit, for a couple of weeks - walking to the station instead of taking the bus or the tram a few more times a week) and lost a few pounds but it quickly petered out and the pounds returned like work emails when you've been on leave.
So I stepped onto the scales. I’d forgotten my glasses and couldn’t read the numbers. The doc read them out for me. “95 kilograms.” I felt sick. That was definitely the heaviest I’d ever been. And then he started calculating my BMI aloud. My heart sank further. “32? 33?” I guessed, wincing. 35. Oh god, 35?? The words ‘morbidly obese?’ waddled heavily through my brain. I felt so sick. The real kick in the wobbly, over-filled gut was this: the doctor told me I should speak to the nurse as I now qualified for a free subscription to Weight Watchers. Then and there, I wanted to die. My weight was now considered such a potential economic burden to the NHS that they would pay Weight Watchers to stop it being their problem.
I walked from the surgery in a haze, and not only because it was 30 degrees outside and I was wearing the usual hefty, baggy t-shirt. I did not talk to the nurse. I went home and slumped on the sofa and cried. On one ten minute walk, all the lies collapsed. My clothes weren’t stiff from the wash, I was expanding out of them. My wheezing was nothing to do with pollution and everything to do with how massively unfit I was. And I wasn’t refusing to give a crap about my appearance because I hated the unthinking social acceptance of unrealistic standards of beauty (although I absolutely do); I was doing it because, if I allowed myself to care for more than the occasional vulnerable second about my appearance, suicidal despair was the only possible result. But even so, I was killing myself, one take-away at a time. I resisted exercise at every opportunity. I had a score of health problems that could be at least partially attributed to my weight. My fiance is and my late father was both diabetic (the latter died of a totally unexpected heart attack when I was 16) - I knew what was in my future if I didn’t change my ways but I had refused to really acknowledge it. As a long standing quitter of everything I started and harbinger of suicidal impulses, my first thought was that that was it. Dieting was a vile experience. It was going to be impossible. I might as well end it all right then. I didn’t, as you might be able to tell, for the same reasons I haven’t before: the people who would be left behind, combined with my own fear of death and basic tendency towards apathy rather than action. I bemoaned the problem to my mother, friends and my fiance. Then I signed up for Weight Watchers again.
That night I kicked my new diet off with about four days' worth of calories in the form of a Chinese take-away because that was the only way I knew of to make myself feel better. If that miserable emptiness couldn't be filled with unhealthy food, as I knew it couldn't, it could at least be temporarily eclipsed by it. And as PowerPuff (you'll be staggered to hear this is not her real name), my latest therapist so loved to point out, there's little my brain doesn't think it can solve by sabotaging me from the start.
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