THE worst part of dieting is sticking to it. Particularly when you have mega-blubber to shed.
I mean, how does a whale see the horizon when it’s submerged by its own vast weight?
In human terms, I’m referring to the poor souls who allow their girth to expand to the point that they face literally years of deprivation to regain anything like a normal shape.
That ever-more-distant horizon was an important motivating factor when I began my sponsored slim on January 10.
My target weight was so far away that I would soon have been hopelessly chasing it for the rest of my life.
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| My sick granddaughter Daisy motivated me |
In my case, I was eating myself to death - literally. I’d put on a good ten kilos in the previous 18 months, courtesy of Chinese and Indian indulgences, second helpings as a norm - and an insatiably sweet tooth.
It was clear I HAD to diet so I devised a strategy. By publicising my progress in my newspaper column each week, I would put myself into a Catch 22 situation.
Imagine the humiliation if I had to tell all my readers: ‘Sorry folks, but I’ve started pigging again. Can’t do this diet stuff’.
Of course, I also had the powerful motivation of raising money for research into Crohn’s Disease, which has devastated my grandaughter Daisy’s life. I’m pleased to say she is vastly better since her recent surgery (see picture) and will hopefully soon be back in school for the first time in six months.
The incentive was enormous - and at 14st 9lb (93.2 kilos), my 5ft 5in frame was beginning to resemble an archer’s bow.
Even more worrying was that, as someone who suffers with angina, my heart was being seriously overworked.
Ten weeks on, I’ve not only passed halfway in my battle to lose 16kilos (2st 7lb) - I feel like a different person. To be precise I've dropped 8.4 kilos (1st 4.5lbs) and I feel fantastic.
Gone is the breathlesssness I felt whenever I walked 50 metres at anything faster than snail’s pace. Gone are the worrrying angina pains. And gone is the lethargy that made the tiniest household chore a major challenge.
I now march rather than shuffle and I can actually manipulate a pair of tights on to my feet. Younger readers can laugh..but it’s a battle royal for us creaking OAPs.
Talkin of creaking, my bathroom scales must be fed up with me leaping onto them at every opportunity - something the dietary experts would freak out at. But I have my own unique strategy and it is working.
The dieticians reckon that there is so much fluctuation that I'd become disillusioned and give up.
On the contrary, nothing would disillusion me more than to go for my official weekly weigh-in, having studiously avoided checking my weight for the previous six days - and discovering I had lost zilch - or indeed put weight ON. I want to know how much I weigh every time I go into the bathroom.
I am well aware that I weigh more at night than in the morning - and that readings can fluctuate wildly.
But after nearly six days in which I had GAINED a pound, it was a pleasant shock to see the digital display plunge by a whole kilo in the 24 hours before my official weekly weigh-in three days ago..
If that’s not an incentive to keep hammering the hell out of those scales, I don’t know what is.
If you'd like to donate to my fundraising for CICRA (Crohn's in Children Research Association), please go to www. justgiving.com/donna-gee
Fortunately I was only in the When I decided to take the plunge back in January
