The ongoing saga of one woman's fight to weigh a bit less

 The Sad Truth About Slimming

My sister and I joined Slimming World in July. Neither of us are thin yet. 

So that we could go to the meetings together, I joined a group near her. It's a half-hour drive away from my house, if you include roadworks. She has only managed to drag herself to half the sessions so far, and she hasn't been sticking to the diet very closely due to being in the middle of house renovation and a new job - but she's still lost two pounds more than me! This is the story of my life, I'm afraid. 

One sad truth about slimming is that it doesn't bring sisters closer...

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I've been to Weightwatchers several times over the decades and lost weight each time, but – just like virtually everyone else I know – I've always put it all back on eventually, with extra for good measure.

There is no doubt that dieting makes you fat - the majority of people I know who have lost weight 'successfully' have ended up fatter than ever a few years later. When we signed up for Slimming World, my sister told me that the weight she’d put down as her target weight this time was the weight she was at when she last joined a Slimming World group, before she got married last year. And I’m fatter now than I’ve ever been in my life before.

But what else can you do except try to lose it again?

They say you need to change your approach to food and adopt new habits for life, but that's like saying ‘If you want to have natural blonde hair, make sure you were born in Sweden’. Or maybe a closer analogy would be 'If you don't want sore feet, don't wear high heels' - if you like high heels and look good in them, you want to wear them. Not wearing them might make your feet feel better but, if you are essentially a shoe-loving high-heeler, you just have to accept that you're always going to have sore feet.

If I was the sort of person who could happily live my life eating just chicken, fish, veg and fruit, and doing regular exercise, I wouldn’t be fat in the first place, would I? 

Also, when you reach my age – not quite sixty but rapidly getting there – it becomes increasingly difficult to actually lose weight. I am several stone overweight and in my younger days I could have shifted that fairly quickly by just cutting down on the cakes and biscuits. Since I joined Slimming World, around eight weeks ago, I’ve lost a grand total of eight pounds [plus almost £50 in Slimming World fees so far, which includes one week I got free due to an administrative error]. On one of those weeks, I lost nothing at all because I didn’t stick to the diet for a couple of days during the week. What I mean is that I went out for a modest Indian meal once during that week, and ate a roast pork sandwich with a few chips for lunch in a café on another day. Every other day, I stuck strictly to the diet and counted up my ‘syns’ diligently, AND I did half an hour of aerobic exercise five times that week. This only served to maintain my current weight. This does not feel like a lifestyle I could maintain over years, but it is one I would have to maintain if I just wanted to remain the weight I am without getting even fatter.

It is nevertheless true that I already feel better. The exercise is easing a lot of my chronic aches and pains (though causing some others) and the fruit and veg, the salads and lean protein, is making my skin better. I have eczema and it’s improving. I feel a bit more energetic, and certainly more psychologically upbeat [except when I have the low-sugar grumps]. But I don’t look or feel any thinner yet.

When I was first diagnosed in 2020 as being pre-diabetic, I felt as if I was being forced to adopt a diet that gave me no pleasure and told I had to stick to it until I died. It felt like I'd been sent to prison or a convent. I was also made to feel that it was entirely self-inflicted, like I'd committed a crime, even though I know people who are fatter and more lazy than me but don't have Type 2 diabetes, and people who aren't overweight and unfit but do. Type 2 diabetes is often portrayed in the media as the ‘plague’ that is ruining the NHS, the shameful illness people bring on themselves, a sign of a person with no willpower or self-respect. I sometimes think it would be less embarrassing to tell people you had syphilis than Type 2 diabetes these days. It's like gout: people always think that you are somehow responsible for having it, that you are greedy and self-indulgent, that it is God's punishment for gluttony. At least the thinking about the causes of gout has changed in recent years, but people with Type 2 diabetes still often internalise the feeling that our condition is all our fault. If only we weren't so weak-willed and insatiable!

But, of course, the reality is that no one should be ashamed of having type-2 diabetes, or gout - or even syphilis if it comes to that.

And it doesn’t mean you can never eat anything nice again.

I've always eaten well - lots of fruit and veg, eggs, olive oil, salads, home-cooked food, very little processed food and only very occasional takeaways. I love vegetarian food. I haven't eaten a Macdonalds or KFC or Burger King meal in literally decades, and never been inside a Taco Bell or Dunkin' Do-nuts or any of the other newer fast-food joints. I rarely eat sweets, only occasionally eat chocolate, rarely eat crisps or biscuits. I cook as much as I can from scratch, from fresh ingredients. We have always eaten out a lot, however, and I have always enjoyed carbs and fat-drenched foodstuffs like butter and cheese. But I know many people who have a much worse diet than mine. I listen to people like Michael Mosley quite rightly blaming metabolic disease on highly-processed food, but I don’t eat much of that. I’m not even keen on canned, jarred and frozen food, though I do eat some.  

I just eat too much of everything and do very little exercise, and I've always struggled with my weight. 

For about a month after my initial diagnosis, fear of my pre-diabetes turning into full-blown diabetes made me become obsessed with cutting out carbs and eating very little, but it was unsustainable. Since then, I have wobbled back and forth between periods of thinking 'Sod it!' and letting myself go, and periods of paying close attention to my diet and exercise and doing intermittent fasting and all the other things you are advised to do. I'm still overweight, unfit and unhappy about it, however, so I decided I would try seriously to be more pro-active. 

The Slimming World ethos makes me uncomfortable, though. My sister and I stayed for the meeting the first time we attended, but, after that, we both decided to turn up just to be weighed. At the meeting, the man in charge – a tall, loud man with a southern accent who wouldn’t have been out of place in the Queen Vic – split the group into two so they could in effect compete against each other to see which side had lost most weight that week. He then went through everyone individually by name announcing how much they’d lost or gained or whether they’d maintained their weight, and giving them each a patronising pep-talk about what they ought to do if they hadn’t lost what they were hoping for. He wasn't unkind, just dogmatic and narrow-minded. One young woman sitting near me didn’t look to be overweight at all yet she gave a tearful account of how she hadn’t lost any weight that week because she’d been ill and couldn’t do her exercises – I thought they should be advising her to put on a few pounds rather than commiserating with her, not for being ill but for failing to lose any weight.

Another woman had reached her target-weight and was given a box full of items of ‘free foods’ [stuff you can eat as much of as you like, such as fruit and veg] donated by the other members. It was a bit like those boxes of stuff your mum took out of the back of the pantry when you were a kid to give to the 'old folk' as part of the Harvest Festival. I swear the box contained things like a single potato and a pack of Aldi spaghetti – it wasn’t so much a prize as a kind of forfeit, and surely losing the weight should be the prize in itself? I doubt most people are incentivised to lose weight by the promise of being given a box of cabbage, apples and wholegrain rice. A friend of mine who used to go to Slimming World meetings told me she ‘won’ the prize-box for reaching her target weight but she had to give most of it away as she is a really picky eater and hates most vegetables, and carrying the box to her car hurt her bad back.

My unease, however, arose from the apparent assumption shared by everyone there that what we weigh is where our value lies. There were one or two men there, but most of the participants were women, and the entire conversation was about losing weight. There might have been people in that room who were gifted musicians, fabulous singers or painters or writers, entrepreneurs, charismatic public speakers, charity workers, teachers, nurses, doctors, dress-makers, builders – but all anyone was interested in was whether they’d shed any fat that week. And, worse still, that seemed to be how people judged themselves. There’s something really wrong with people whose be-all and end-all, as my gran used to say, is measured by a weight-scale.

There was one youngish man there who was seriously overweight, by some way the fattest person present, and when Mr Queen Vic addressed him, this lovely guy gave funny, genuinely entertaining answers, self-deprecating, showing he found the whole thing ridiculous but was prepared to put up with this crap if it meant he lost weight. I really warmed to him as it was clear that, behind that huge exterior, there was a highly intelligent man with wit and charm. However, Mr Queen Vic failed to even crack a smile at any of his quips, as he was too busy spouting his supposedly uplifting rhyming slogans and catch-phrases, like a 1970s used-car salesman. 

It seemed to me that we'd all have a much better time if the fat guy ran the meeting and Mr Queen Vic went off to eat a family pack of Doritos...