Everyone has their price and everyone has their limit. I just reached my limit. It's time for a change.
I've never been a skinny girl - even as a child I carried a fair amount of chub. My weight has bounced up and down for almost two decades, each time increasing a little bit more on the up swing and not quite shrinking back as far on the downward plunge. It's never really been a conscious effort on my part to lose weight, except when I was pregnant with Dom and put on the low-carb, practically no sugar gestational diabetes diet. I just seem to slowly reach a point at which I start losing, closely followed by another gain, like a tranquil seesaw on a spring evening.
Except now I'm sick of it. Now I've gone past "curvy," skipped over "voluptuous," bypassed "buxom" and side-stepped "rounded". I'm less pleasingly plump than depressingly dumpy, and I've had enough.
I'm sick of worrying about how I'll cover up on the beach this summer. I'm tired of planning my outfits around what they hide. I hate that the only clothes I feel sexy in are my boots, and the only clothes I feel comfortable in are my pyjamas. I don't want to lose yet another pair of jeans to the dreaded thigh-hole that appears when even denim, that most hardy and robust of materials, gives up against the constant pressure of one leg against another. God knows, it takes long enough to find a pair of jeans that looks good and feels good and doesn't turn into an elaborate strangulation device after being washed. I don't have time to try on six different tops every night before work, and I'm already bored to death with covering up with the same black cardigan. I get more marks on my skin from a bra than I did from an entire pregnancy. The season of less clothes, more flesh is almost upon us and I refuse to spend it in Spanx, which I wear not to hold me in, but to stop the torture of thighs rubbing together on a sticky summer's day. I want to just smile in a photo instead of manoeuvering myself to the angle that shows, not my best side, but my least bad side. I almost wore my "old faithful" black trousers for work, despite them being scruffy as hell, because nothing else fits - but they didn't fit. I AM FUCKING DONE.
So it's time for a few changes around here. I'm not going to kid myself that I'm going to start running 5 miles a day and replacing all the biscuits with kale and quinoa. I'm not deluded enough to believe that I can be a size 8, nor is my attitude to my body unhealthy enough to want this. My frame is not a size 8 frame, my bones are not size 8 bones, and I am not a prepubescent girl. I don't want to look like one. I'm of hefty Northern stock and I like that - my aim is healthy, not skinny. I'm not going to set myself up for failure by denying myself the pleasure of some less than healthy food now and again - in fact, I'll probably still be eating more "bad" food than some people who aren't working on changing their habits. All I'm planning is a bit of a shift in how I manage my weekly food intake, and a bit more movement whenever I can fit it in. Of the 14 non-breakfast meals I have a week, even replacing 7 of them with a salad or fish and vegetables or similar will make a difference, slowly and sensibly. I don't have to tell myself that a takeaway on a Saturday night or a Sunday brunch of croissants and coffee is off the cards. I don't have to stop taking sugar in my tea (because that's not going to happen. If an Englishman's home is his castle, an Englishwoman's tea is her treasure, and how she takes it should be respected), as long as I'm not making EVERY choice an unhealthy one. It's time. I've got the wedding of the century to attend in July and I want to be, or at least feel like, the third most gorgeous woman there after the brides.
I've hit rock bottom and I need to stop eating so I can pull myself up.
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