Girl Sees Airship in Shop Window Reflection........

How does this sound?  Orange and celery diet.....all you can eat for two weeks and you'll drop 8kg (17lbs)? Or the grapefruit diet? No, I didn't like that one either...how about the replacement meal diet, sensible eating diet, lets-try-bulimia diet, anorexic diet and do-your-head-in diet?  Done them all? Same here.  By some miracle my family members survived my axe-weilding mania whilst I undertook some of these insane eating plans.

Some of these freaky-whoever-thought-of-them-should-be-burnt-at-the-stake plans actually worked.  Yeah, the weight can come off (in the case of the meal replacements) in giant slabs.  I literally ate "chocolate" and lemon pie for three months - not a natural food passed my lips.  It was for my sister's wedding.  She didn't want a porker for a matron of honour and I didn't want to be the circus tent slightly to the left in all the photos.  I lost 22kg (48lbs) and a good part of my frontal lobe. Problem was as soon as the ring was on the finger I experienced what can only be described as a desperate almost pathological hunger.  I ate for Australia - and south east Asia and most Pacific nations.

 A few gazillion calories and four dress sizes later this puffy-faced lard butt in the mirror was unrecognisable and HAD TO GO - preferably to another universe.  It wasn't all vanity.  Actually it wasn't vanity at all, it was a visit to the doctor a glucose tolerance test and an ecocardiograph to check whether I had  "suspected" heart disease.  Thankfully I have neither diabetes or heart disease, but it was enough to scare me pale.

Now for the really difficult bit.....I'm a little person, as in vertically challenged...a whole lot of  152cm or 5ft nothing.  My weight had ballooned to, ahem, 90kg (around 200 pounds for you non-metrics).  Good Lord. (Can't believe I'm actually putting that out into the ether where it will reside for ever and ever and ever and ev........)

I joined Weight Watchers. Actually I kind of fell into it when a friend, Sal,  asked if I would go with her one night and I wasn't quick enough to come of with a reasonable excuse.  Why not? I groaned.
Meeting time and Sal wasn't there to hold my hand over the threshold so I just walked in with a big smile on my face feeling like a sumo wrestler's bigger sister.   To me WW always had that kind of hand-holding, pretendy friendy, Amway-type evangelical air.  The leader would stand at the front espousing the joys of conversion whilst the parishioners clustered at her feet soaking up every syllable.  In this kind of environment my walls go up so quickly that air is lucky to escape. But thankfully I was so WRONG.
I was hooked (lined-and-sinkered) almost instantly.  There was no  pushy-pushy-smiley sales talk, it was just a bunch of women old and young who were weary from battling with the scales.
WW has come a looooooong way from the old days when, according to our leader, they actually used to have a "pig-pen" in the corner at meetings where people who were found to have gained weight were herded in disgrace.  If that wasn't bad enough they had to sing a song along the lines of  "I'm a Little Piggie".  I can see years of therapy and a psychiatrist's new Mercedes right there in that last sentence.

Anyhoo - WW has had somewhat of a renaissance in recent years.  This rebirth came in the form of the points system.....every food is allocated a number of points and every WWatcher is allocated a certain number of points per day.  (I make the point here that I never actually undertook the points plan, I've just researched it a little).  This points plan seemed fine, but I noticed that bloggers who were doing it kept going on about the "points friendly" caramel sundaes,chocolate bars and pasta cabonara they had found in the freezer section at their local supermarket.  The magazines advertised all his prepackaged, looks-and-tastes-like-it's-naughty stuff.  It occured to me that this was arse-about.  These people weren't learning to make the right and healthy choices they were making the same choices that made them fat but  in portion controlled versions.  As soon as they "stopped" WW they'd go back to same ol' eating habits and pork up again. (Don't argue with me here, I'm an expert!) Thankfully there is now the Pro-Points system (I think it's MyPoints in the UK and PointsPlus in the US).  This system focuses on fresh healthy eating.  Fruit and most veg have NO points so you can fill up on them.  Other foods have points based on not calorie and fat content, but protein, fibre and carbs.  I can't tell you how loudly the "ka-CHING" moment rang for me.

I'm a convert.

I'm also 4.5kg lighter (9.9lbs).

Stay tuned for weigh-in tomorrow night!

Charlotte.