Last week, I looked at some photographs of my 2024 summer holiday and I simply didn’t recognise myself. It was three months before I started the weight-loss drug Mounjaro. At 5ft 7in, I weighed just over 14st and, interestingly, I didn’t actually think I was fat at the time.
I wonder if I had a reverse form of body dysmorphia, where what was clearly flab – around my midriff, my upper arms, my bottom – somehow melted away when I looked in the mirror.
What’s certain is that I see it plainly now. Having lost 4st, I’m down to a healthy, svelte, frankly sexy size ten, and the truth is, those old pictures fill me with something approaching horror.
Not because I feel ashamed or disgusted with my size back then – I would never feel that about myself – but because now I know how differently the world treats slim women, I am full of regret for the life I might have led had I always been one.
All of this has come as a huge surprise to me. At a size 16, I was exercising, taking dance classes, doing yoga with all the yummy mummies. I tended to wear floaty, loose-fitting dresses but I took pride in my appearance. On holiday I happily stripped down to a swimsuit and, though I always wore a one-piece rather than a bikini, I don’t think that’s unusual for a 57-year-old mother of four.
None of my friends or children, aged 29, 22, 21 and 18, ever told me I was fat. Although I’ve spent much of my life anxious about my weight in one way or another, I didn’t honestly think of myself as big and had reached a point of accepting my size and eating more or less what I wanted.
Then I went to the GP for a minor complaint, and he told me I was ‘obese’. He was very tactful, but there was no getting away from that horrible word, nor his future predictions of ill health if I didn’t lose a stone or two.
The doctor recommended Mounjaro and, alarmed by talk of diabetes risk and fatty livers, I signed up.
None of my friends or children ever told me I was fat. Interestingly, I didn’t actually think I was fat at the time
I know how differently the world treats slim women, and I am full of regret for the life I might have led had I always been one
That was 18 months ago and I have now gone from 14st 1lb (89kg) to 10st 3lb (65kg). It is a huge amount of weight to have lost.
And I can tell you it has been an utter game-changer.
The (bathroom) scales have truly fallen from my eyes with regard to my size before. Not only was I risking obesity-related disease, but I actually looked like the back end of a bus. My tummy was rolling with fat. My arms were like hams. My face was a pudding. How could I not see it?
Well, all of it has gone and here’s something I now know – people like you more when you’re slim.
I am no different to the person I was before – I’m still exactly the same, I’m just in a smaller body – yet my relationships with others have completely changed.
Women crowd round me wanting to be my friend. When I go out, I can see I meet with people’s approval. You read their faces and can tell. I’ve never known this really: it feels unprecedented to me.
And rather than looking over my shoulder at the pub, or through me, everyone – everyone! – talks to me now. Those who knew me before want to comment on my weight; people who have just met me ask how I keep so trim, as if I’ve found the secret to the universe.
I went to a party in a red floor-length Jessica Rabbit dress that fitted me like a glove and everyone told me how amazing I looked. I genuinely turned heads, and felt a confidence I haven’t felt in years.
The fact is, I love this slender body of mine and I’m enjoying my life in a way that feels shiny and new.
But while that’s a wonderful gift at my age, it’s only natural that the ‘what ifs’ begin, too. The little discontented whispers of regret.
What would my past have been like – my youth, right up to my early 50s – if I hadn’t been so large for so much of it? What if I’d been one of the slender, smiley women in the yoga class I used to envy so much? What if I’d been the size I am now?
My problem with weight started early. As a girl of eight, I would get called ‘thunder thighs’ by my father and, though he didn’t mean to be mean, I internalised the shame of it.
By the time I was 11, I hated my body, and as a teenager threw food out of my bedroom window rather than eat it and get bigger.
After that, the pattern was set: I wasn’t naturally slim so I would eat and put on weight, and then mentally beat myself up for it. Desperate to be that yummy mummy, I’d try a new, often faddish, diet. But after some initial success, I’d fail miserably.
I have spent probably three-quarters of my life battling my weight this way. Food, and thinking about food and dieting, has taken up vast amounts of time and headspace. I’ve spent a fortune on it. I bought all the books, signed up to all the websites. I went to WeightWatchers, joined endless gyms.
It feels as if my entire life has been dominated by my body and what I put into it.
My weight curtailed my life. So what would it have been like had I not lived like that?
Clearly, I’d have wasted less time, but I honestly believe it would have been easier and perhaps happier. too.
I suspect I would not have accepted substandard relationships, for example, because I was so amazed that anybody wanted to go out with me.
I didn’t have what are now called ‘boundaries’, or at least not firm ones, because I wanted men to like me. I said yes when I should have said no. I accepted love from the wrong people because I wasn’t able to see an attractive woman staring back at me in the mirror.
And the reverse happened, too: men dated me because they took pity on me.
It feels as if my entire life has been dominated by my body and what I put into it
I’m no longer on the jabs, but my habits have changed so much: I don’t eat for comfort or boredom
As an older teenager, unable to keep refusing to eat, I began to pile on the weight, and, thanks to adolescent hormones, went from a netball-playing skinny girl to a curvaceous ‘woman’ overnight. I found the transition very difficult and ended up going out with inappropriate boys because I was so grateful to be asked. One boy racer, Paul, I distinctly remember as a terrible mistake; if I’d had more self-confidence I would have aimed for a boy my own age, less reckless, a better catch.
But now, men hit on me in a way that I’ve never been hit on before and, let’s face it, I’m nearly 60 and a divorcee so this is unexpected.
Over the past three months, I’ve been chatted up at social dos by five different men, more than I can count over three years at my old weight.
Men ask me for my number, and I have returned to the dating apps with a vengeance. On a date recently one man approvingly said: ‘You must have a long list of suitors.’ I had to bite my tongue not to reply: ‘Are you kidding?’
But the fact is, he’s right. I do.
And there are two conclusions to be drawn from this. One, that the old cliche is certainly true – the more confident you feel about yourself, the more attractive you become. And two, sadly, slim women simply do get more attention. You can be the funniest, cleverest person on the planet, but no one really hits on you until you are 3st lighter.
So how much attention have I missed?
It’s not just relationships – it’s work, too. When I look back at my career, I am sure every promotion came during those brief interludes when the diets worked and I was slim. Losing weight makes you look efficient and in control,
When I am slim, I feel that I belong. I am accepted into a world where people are normal-sized, and don’t have to try too hard to fit in.
I think when I was larger, I made myself amusing and clever in order to believe I was socially acceptable. At a regular size ten, I now don’t have to expand my personality to match my larger-than-life physical presence.
And had I been that size ten all my life, had I not had to distract from the fact that I wasn’t, by being someone I wasn’t, perhaps I’d have been taken more seriously, too.
I remember sitting next to an editor at a lunch party – I was probably piling my plate full of food – and he said: ‘I don’t really like overweight people. It shows a lack of self-control.’
Those words really stuck. I took it to mean that he – and many other people – believed that the larger people among us were somehow ‘substandard’, and therefore these people shouldn’t be trusted in high-level jobs.
I always put a lot of weight on when I was pregnant, and after I had children I looked very mumsy. I’m convinced this affected my career. Somehow you get put in a bracket of being potentially not committed to your job or having your focus elsewhere. Had I lost the mum weight and poured myself into a suit, I’m sure I’d have got further up the greasy pole.
More, I would have reacted differently to the people around me at work. too. Confidence makes you choosier and more assertive. When you value yourself more highly, you’re able to demand better treatment from others and call it out when you don’t get it.
And even more basic still, I honestly believe I’d have had more headspace. In the past I was always thinking about food, and whether I could fit into that skirt or look terrible, and would people like me, and would people notice that I was overweight?
It got so bad that I dieted for months before my wedding day so I could fit into the tiny-waisted dress I’d deliberately bought to make myself lose weight to walk down the aisle aged 50. I was 10st 7lb back then and briefly felt like the centre of the world.
What if I’d had the relationship with food I have now? I’m no longer on the jabs, but my habits have changed so much: I don’t eat for comfort or boredom. My exercise regime has completely changed, too. Now, I’m more agile and less bulky, I can do a lot more at the gym and on the yoga mat. For someone who has always had to push herself to move, it’s been a revelation.
The fact is I like the person I am now. I enjoy looking good. I love my body.
It feels as if a veil has been drawn back and I have been allowed to fully enter a club I’ve only ever dipped a toe into – the slim and beautiful club.
I wonder what it would have been like to have been a member of that in your 30s and 40s?
And then I tell myself not to let regrets get in the way of this new life I am living, the one I always wanted for myself.
At last I am that happy, healthy yoga lady, the one who never gets home from the class and washes down a packet of biscuits with a full-fat Coke. But someone who really looks the part. Finally, that’s really me.
