Downsizing.....

.....myself, not my craft room this time 😏 

I had to think long and hard about whether or not to talk about this publicly as it's a journey that I've attempted to make so many times over the last 50 years or so.  To be honest, I couldn't even begin to tell you how many times I've started a new weight-loss regime, none of which (obviously!) have lasted longer than a few weeks at most and with any weight I managed to lose rapidly piling back on again.  Actually, that's not entirely accurate in that I successfully lost about five stone back in around 2002.  However I got totally knocked off track and put all that weight back on again, plus a whole load more *sigh*

My health, though, over the past few years has not been good, with 2025 in particular seemingly being just one bloody thing after another 😒  It's become very apparent to me that each time I have a new health hiccup I'm just not "bouncing back", as it were, in quite the same way that I would have done when I was younger.  Now, I do realise that some of being rather less resilient than I might once have been will probably be down to getting older, but I'm also very aware that being so overweight really isn't helping my health situation in the slightest.

It's a bit sad, really, that I've allowed myself to just get bigger and bigger over these last 50-odd years, and I've often wondered if I would be as big as I am if I'd never actually tried to lose weight when I was young.  The photo above was taken in about 1983 (I was 22 years old) and at the time I thought that I was hugely overweight, even though I patently wasn't.  I was about 12 stone (168 pounds), which I realise would have put me in the overweight BMI category for my then height of 5'6" (I've since lost over an inch in height as I've got older 😳), but I certainly wasn't as big as I had convinced myself I was.  However, each time I attempted to get slimmer I just didn't seem able to stick with it and ended up being bigger than before.

Since I was a teenager I had compared myself unfavourably with my school friends, most of whom did indeed weigh less than me.  However, what had also never dawned on me was that I was also a fair bit taller than most of my friends, in fact during my early senior school years in particular I was taller than a lot of the boys in my year group too!  I think what cemented this feeling of being huge compared to the others was a maths lesson we had in our first year at senior school.  It was teaching us about averages, and the teacher in his wisdom decided that the ideal way to do this was by weighing every child in the class and dividing the total amount by the number of pupils.  Of course we all then knew how much each of us weighed and I was quite mortified to discover that at 8st 12lbs I was the second heaviest girl in the class!  Even now, over 50 years later, that "lesson" has stayed in my mind!

And I can also see that it didn't help growing up with a mother who was somewhat obsessed with being overweight herself.  I don't think I can really remember a time when Mum wasn't trying to lose weight on some diet plan or another.  But conversely she was also very much a "comfort-eater", a habit that I picked up too.  She was bigger than she perhaps should have been but again, like myself, she really wasn't as huge as she imagined herself to be.  Looking back I think that she was rather hung up on the fact that she was so much slimmer when she was first married, forgetting that she had three pregnancies over the course of five years and wasn't very well for the first two ~ I'm the eldest, with the child between myself and my sister sadly being stillborn ~ which I think triggered depression which she tried to damp down with comfort-eating.  There seem to have been a fair amount of overweight women on my Mum's side of the family, and whilst it would be sort of comforting to think that perhaps it's genetics, I rather suspect it's more of a learned behaviour and lifestyle issue!

So the upshot of this rather long post is just to say that 2026 has got to see me seriously tackling my weight issues.  I shall be 65 years old next June and I know that if I don't get to grips with this as a matter of some urgency, it really may become too late to change things.  The run-up to Christmas, though, is definitely not a good time to start a weight-loss campaign but what I can do over the next few weeks is carefully plan out what direction I should move in.  That way, once Christmas and the New Year are both out of the way, I will be ready to start the journey with no excuses 😉  I'm not sure if I will be brave enough to share with you my actual weight, certainly not to start with anyway, but I will share how things are progressing.  I'm hoping that there will be plenty of "ups" to tell you about, but I will be honest about the not-so-good times too 😊