A short history of my weight - Part One

Like many people, or at least many women, I've had a variable relationship with my weight.  I've never really been over weight, but I've certainly been at both extremes of my healthy BMI range.  And yes, I know it's actually mass, not weight, that I'm talking about, but "A short history of my mass" made me sound too much like a priest... Anyway.

I was never one of those skinny kids, but through primary school I was fine.  My family ate pretty well at home and my friends and I spent most lunchtimes at school running around, climbing trees and swinging on the monkey bars.  When I went to high school, age 13, suddenly running around wasn't cool anymore and my new group of friends spent most lunchtimes just hanging around in the quad.  Although my school did have compulsory PE (gym) for the first two years of high school, we girls used to get out of it as much as possible (we considered sweat to be unattractive, and god forbid we looked unattractive!), and I wasn't doing any formal sport or exercise outside of school.

I got to my heaviest at age 14, around 70 kgs.  My Dad was quite overweight, and had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease a couple of years before.  He didn't do a lot of exercise, and loved things like fry-up breakfasts, roast dinners, pancakes and ice-cream.  He used to cook for everyone, and it was hard to say no when a plate of food was put in front of me.  We knew he wasn't healthy, but it was still a huge shock when he died suddenly of a heart attack in July of that year (1994), a couple of months after his 49th birthday.

Mum and I made some fairly major lifestyle changes after that, particularly in relation to our diet.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was also in the early stages of developing an auto-immune condition (later diagnosed as sarcoidosis of the larynx), one of the symptoms of which was drastic weight loss.   Within less than a year I went from 70kgs to around 55kgs, without much effort on my part.  With the naivety and obliviousness of youth, I was thrilled!  Naturally though, my family and teachers were somewhat concerned, and I was constantly being sent to doctors and counsellors.  Eventually a paediatrician sent me for x-rays, which led to a CT scan, which led to a two-week hospital stay while they tried to diagnose me.

Once they figured out what was going on, I was put on massive doses of cortisone steroids - and anyone with experience of these will know that one of the most common symptoms is weight gain, and what they call a 'moon face' effect. Thankfully, I escaped this, and my weight simply climbed back to somewhere in the middle of my BMI range.  Despite still not doing a lot of formal exercise, apart from the odd aerobics class, I stayed around the middle of the range for the next few years, even managing to lose a little weight in my first year of university, when most girls put on the 'fresher 14' (14 pounds).  First year uni was also my first foray into vegetarianism, mostly because the food was slightly better (apart from the deep-fried crumbed tofu blocks, which were served still frozen in the middle! *shudder*).

Flash forward a few years to 2006.  I was married, living in London, walking everywhere, taking circus classes and going to the gym.  I was the fittest I have probably ever been, and sitting comfortably at around 62 kgs. Then I landed badly (very badly) during a trampoline routine and broke my back.  Yes, for real.  I crushed my lumbar one vertebrae, and ended up in hospital for two weeks. The food was terrible, and without going into the gory details, when you are stuck flat on your back for seven days, you don't want to put too much in, as you really don't want to deal with how it gets out again...

TO BE CONTINUED...