my fat diaries

 Hi there

I was cleaning out the garage, and came across decades of my old diaries.  I started a diary when I was about twelve.  I kept diaries till I was 40.  

What I can't get over is that practically in every entry in all the diaries, over all those years, I mention my weight and how I want to lose it, and I'm too big, and "I put on a lb today, oh no!".   Umpteen times, I write that I bought, say, a doughnut (that's how we spelt it in the 1960's) and felt so guilty after a mouthful that I threw the rest in the rubbish bin.  I rarely succeeded with any long-term dieting, putting on the pounds extremely quickly.

In a photo taken of my cousin and me at the beach - me, aged 13 - I tore off the bottom half of the photo, at the time, because it showed my "big fat thighs". 

When I retired I made a decision.  I threw out my measuring tape, my scales, and diet books.  I'd never eaten carrot cake in my life, never bought a block of chocolate, hadn't scoffed down a pie since I'd been at the Winter Show in 1960.  I didn't know what a brownie tasted like,  But everything was going to change.  I was going to taste forbidden fruits...  And I have done!

And that brings me to Judith Collins, leader of the National Party, and up for election this Saturday.  She intimated this week that fat people should use discipline when eating.  I tried discipline for forty years and was sad, hungry, and let watching-my-weight all but ruin me.  Sure, I'm fat now but I go to the gym every week, I walk almost every day, I swim in the sea in the middle of winter, I can bound up 40 steps with hardly a puff.  And how many other senior citizens can do one-arm push-ups?