I decide to start counting again.

Many many years ago I passed the entrance exam to a Rather Good Public School and got a place there. I got permanently excluded three years later, so don’t be getting too excited. And I was really miserable there anyway. No no, stay with me, there’s a point to this. It was a bit of a coup for my junior school, which was a middling state school, and naturally as soon as I passed my head swelled to fourteen times its normal size and I wandered about looking smug and generally acting like an unbearable twat.

But then my mother, who is Very Wise, took me aside and said: “Don’t be thinking that you can stop working now. You might have been top of the class at junior school, but now you’re going to a school where everyone was top of the class at junior school.”

“This,” she concluded, “is where you have to really start working.”

That’s good advice. I think it’s the best advice I’ve ever been given. Unlike - I think - the other Porketeers, I have been through this once already. I lost about five stone almost three years ago, using Weight Watchers. As you know, I’ve regained quite a lot of it.

Not all of it - and in that sense I’ve beaten the system, because the vast majority of people who diet to lose weight regain all that they lost and more besides. But enough of it to feel very disappointed in myself. I forgot the golden rule.

Losing weight is just like going to public school: the real work starts when you’ve lost the weight. I’m not saying that it’s easy to lose weight, but it’s all about momentum. For me, I found it hard to really, properly make the initial decision - to feel that little click in my head, that shift into true first gear. But I lost 8lb after my first week on Weight Watchers and that was a huge boost. It slowed down to 1-2lb a week after the first couple of weeks, which is actually pretty good going.

Once I started to gain some momentum I went down the hill pretty fast. After the first stone people started commenting on how healthy I looked. Half a stone later people started asking me if I’d had my hair done.  Half a stone after that my trousers fell down in a car park in Watford. I was thrilled.

I was a convert. I was an evangelist. I had never thought I’d be able to control my eating before. It didn’t feel like control. I felt great, I was slim, I was happy. I couldn’t understand how I had ever got fat in the first place because everything seemed so easy. I’m not going to say I never went off the plan, but either I planned for it in advance or I just picked myself up, dusted myself down, got back on the horse and kept going. I felt… normal. I mean, as if I was eating like a normal person. And it wasn’t hard, and I knew I’d never ever ever ever ever ever EVER get fat again. But apparently some people did. I used to read the Weight Watchers online forum and quite a few of the heavier people there had lost large amounts of weight before - some people had lost ten or eleven stone on Weight Watchers before, which they had gained back and then some.

I couldn’t understand it. The fools! I knew I’d never undo MY good work.

Ha.

I had set my goal weight at the top of the healthy BMI range for my height, because that’s how Weight Watchers works. As I got to within about 2 stone of it, I started to struggle and my weight loss slowed. My daily Points allowance, which at the start had been so high that I had often struggled to eat everything that I was supposed to, suddenly wasn’t cutting it. I began to feel hungry. And deprived.

I should have been prepared for this. A couple of years before I started Weight Watchers, in one of my more bizarre dietary adventures, I was referred to a dietician, a very nice man in Harley Street who put me on a diet involving lean meat, citrus and tiny green pills (post to follow; for the moment I will simply say that I don’t recommend it). What he told me, though, was that the BMI calculator is bollocks not a particularly accurate calculator of ideal weight, for a number of reasons (post to follow on that too). He thought that I should get down to within 2 stone of the top of the BMI range for my height and then decide how much further I wanted to reduce, if at all; he suspected I wouldn’t need to.

So really I should have quit whilst I was ahead. Diets don’t work if you feel hungry (and by that I mean genuinely hungry, not only-cake-will-mend-my-broken-heart hungry, which happens to everyone and is a fact of life). I should have started maintaining, which means adding 6 points to your daily Points allowance. The truth is I was perfectly happy with the way I looked, and I felt fantastic. I was a size 14, which is very respectable for someone of my height and meant that I could buy clothes for normal people in normal shops. My calves fitted into knee-length boots and if you can get into a pair of those you’re probably a pretty healthy weight. And if I’d wanted I could probably have gone down another size by exercising. But I had become fixated on my goal weight. I had an Objective. Instead of listening to my body, and accepting that I wasn’t going to be able to get much further, I tried to carry on, and for the stupidest possible reason: I wanted to see a particular number on the scales, regardless of whether it was right for my body or not.

I struggled down another half stone and then lost it. I started to slip. I’d start out pointing my food, and then I’d get myself a brownie or take a slice of cake from a co-worker, and then I’d decide to write off the rest of the day and start pointing afresh tomorrow, except that I never managed to get through a whole day without writing it off. Then I decided that the problem was that I was bored with counting. So I decided that I’d take a break, and stop pointing my food, but just “eat healthily” for a couple of weeks. I’d keep weighing in, though, and start pointing again if I gained weight. Which I did - not much, just a couple of pounds. I resolved to point for the next week, but I didn’t. Because I could feel that I had gained, I didn’t weigh myself either. I promised myself that I would point the next week and THEN weigh in. But I didn’t point the week, and then I decided not to weigh in again. And before I knew it I was eating everything that wasn’t nailed down and I hadn’t weighed myself in months but I knew things weren’t good because the clothes sizes were starting to drift upward again.

Why? Because I had lost more than it was good for me to lose. I’d come to the end of the line and I’d ignored all the warning signals. I was on the equivalent of 1000-1200 calories a day, which is ridiculously low for someone of my height and build.

In short: I was HUNGRY. All the time.

So here I am. And the point of this post (”AT LAST!” I hear you wail) is that the real work starts when you’ve arrived at your goal weight - when the compliments have tapered off, not because you don’t look good, but because this is just how you look now.

It doesn’t do to underestimate the task ahead. It’s hard. You don’t just magically turn into one of those people who eats and eats and never gains weight. The work doesn’t stop. But what I’ve recently realised is that you, or rather I, can go too far the other way. For the last three or four weeks I’ve been resisting going back to counting points, even though it worked really well for me. The reason is that I am genuinely shaken by how easy it was to regain all that weight. I know how it happened. I’m not going to kid myself that I just sort of magically drifted back up there. I ate too much. That’s the long and the short of it. I’m not going to go into detail but I ate far too much of the wrong thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a fascist about food. I do believe that some people are born to be bigger than others and I also support 100% anyone’s right to choose to eat what they want, when they want it; to exercise or not to exercise; to be fat or thin. I don’t believe that being fat means being ugly or sexually unattractive, either. I don’t expect that I’ll ever get into the BMI “normal” range, for example - I think I look fine a couple of stone above it. And I do think that when you feel good about yourself you treat yourself better, and so it’s important to like yourself before you start to lose weight if you’re going to succeed.

I read a lot of Fat Acceptance blogs, because - as I said in the comments to Wendy’s post below - I think it’s a truly worthwhile cause. I think that some people are born to be bigger, and I am sure it’s true that some very big people eat the same as thin people yet can’t lose weight. And beauty isn’t about size, and more importantly nor is health; if you’re fat, but you don’t smoke, you eat good food and you exercise regularly, you’re much better off than a thin chainsmoker who eats ready meals three times a day seven days a week. BUT. I don’t think I was made to be this big. I wasn’t made to be a size 10, or even a size 12, but I know that when I follow the Weight Watchers plan I don’t feel hungry and I lose weight without struggling. And I don’t just follow the Weight Watchers plan to be thin - there are quicker ways to get there if you’re prepared to compromise your health to do it (post to follow on THAT too. Oh Katy where ARE all these alleged following posts?). I do it because for the most part I’m happier on the plan. I eat healthily, I’m not hungry and I feel better both physically and mentally. I just need to remember that my body will tell me when to stop, not the scales.

But still. I’m worried this time round. I’m not worried that I won’t lose the weight, I’m worried that I’ll put it all back on again. I don’t feel nearly as complacent now. I’ve been dithering over starting to count again, as I say, but I’ve decided that I’ve got to bite the bullet and lose the weight again.

(And actually that’s the real real point of this post.)