How losing weight can change your personality... and it may not be for the better
Slimmed down: Lucy lost four stone after dieting but admits keeping the weight off is a constant battle
Three years ago, I was fat. I really was. I was a roly-poly great big lump of lard. I weighed 14st 4lb, far too much for my 5ft 8in frame. I’d go into High Street stores and despair that no clothes fitted me.
I’d stand in front of the mirror and stare in horror at my increasing curves. I didn’t just look fat — I looked as if I was about to give birth. It was so bad that people got up for me on trains.
A woman in a restaurant even came up and congratulated me on my pregnancy. ‘Not long now,’ she said encouragingly. I sat there, burning with shame and close to tears.
That’s what really did it. I decided then and there that I couldn’t bear being fat any more.
Like former Birds Of A Feather star Pauline Quirke, who this week revealed her new svelte figure after losing more than six stone, I decided there was only one thing for it. The excess baggage had to go.
Quirke lost her weight on the LighterLife diet — a drastic regime that requires women to eat no more than 500 calories a day. I lost four stone with WeightWatchers, which offers a less drastic approach. But we both achieved the same result, losing 30 per cent of our total body weight.
I am now — after three years of dieting and being extremely careful about what I eat — a healthy and light 10st 3lb. Every time I climb on the scales, I want to do a dance of pure joy. For the first time in 15 years, I’m slim. In fact, I’m actually lighter than I was in my early 20s.
Yet proud as I am, something crucial and unexpected has changed. It’s not only my body shape that has been transformed, but my personality, too.
It’s as if I have morphed into a different person on the inside, as well as outside.
From being a laid-back type, happy to eat, drink, be merry and have endless parties, I’ve become a rampant control freak.
Instead of cooking or spending time with my husband, I’m either doing stomach crunches in the sitting room or talking about how guilty I feel that I’ve eaten too much. I am, in short, a bore. I have that nervous energy I always used to associate with thin people.