I’ve been on a diet (almost) my whole life

Here are just some of the times I believed I needed to lose weight

This person thought she needed to lose weight. (Me in 2005)

My name is Sam and I have wasted a large part of my life on a diet. There, I’ve said it. I’m sure I’m not alone – particularly amongst women of my age and stage, which is to say women 40+ who grew up in the 70s and 80s (not to mention the skinny-chic 90s). When you couldn’t move for the F-Plan diet and Jane Fonda in Lycra. When thin was in and calorie-counting was not just the order of the day, it was practically compulsory. It was the age of Nimble and Slimcea (remember them? If not, they were loaves of very small airy slices of “bread” that unsurprisingly possessed very few calories. Like eating cotton wool, although that's doing cotton wool a disservice), Ryvita and Special K's ubiquitous “Can you pinch more than an inch?” ad. I guess it’s a sign of, erm, "good" advertising that despite the fact that society has moved on substantially (depending which way you look at it) I can still quote it and can even catch myself doing it, occasionally. And for the record it is now far more than an inch. 

I’d like to blame the fashion industry and the fact I worked in magazines my whole adult life. That would be easy. But, although the fashion industry can be blamed for plenty of things, in this case, entirely untrue. Because it started way before that. (Although by the same token I can’t say sitting in the front row looking at 7 stone 6 foot Eastern European 16-year-olds for several years helped my sense of perspective. In the space of a couple of seasons I went from thinking those girls were horrifyingly thin and someone should stage an intervention to hardly noticing. Not something to be proud of, I know.)

This person thought she needed to lose weight. (Me, in Paris, in the early 90s.)

But to get back to the point. It wasn’t the fashion industry that started it, it was the warped 1970s world I grew up in. I was wee, probably six or seven-years-old, when I decided I had a big bum. I wasn’t an especially overweight kid but I was definitely not skinny. I was blocky, husky as I later discovered it was called in Gap Kids, meaning, I suppose, still age 7-8 but with an extra inch around the middle. What made that very average freckly ginger six-year-old look at the lanky girls around her, invariably blonde, more often than not never picked last for games, and decide she was fat, I still can’t put my finger on, beyond having already absorbed society’s messages, but she did. And from there on in she/I refused to wear jeans or trousers of any kind. Or even shorts for PE. A pair of stretchy turquoise pyjamas bought from my mum’s John Moore’s catalogue went straight back, not because they made me look like an extra from Star Trek but because my dad made a joke when I came downstairs in them and I decided they too made my bum look big. (Ironic now, since I've barely been out of jeans since about 1995.)

I was in my teens before the dieting started in earnest. (I’ve been trying to think of a word to use other than dieting. Restricted eating? Calorie counting? Disordered eating? Starving?! But dieting, toxic as it may be, is so all encompassing that I think I’ll stick with it. We all know what it means.) I'd spotted my mum's calorie book in the kitchen junk drawer and had been sneaking a look at it for as long as I could remember. By the time I was 12 or 13 I could tell you the calories in pretty much anything. No Google required. (Test me in the comments if you don’t believe me.)