It’s 12 years since I had the gastric sleeve operation that I thought would end my lifelong nightmare of weight gain, weight loss, followed by yet more weight gain.
Within a year I lost half my body weight, going from 24 st to 12 st and, in my early 60s at the time, I was happy with that. As was my mother.
Throughout the whole process I could hear her applauding, saying, ‘Well done, love. You’ve done the right thing and you’ll never have to worry about gaining weight again.’
Of course, I wasn’t really hearing my mother. She died nearly 20 years ago, but her voice still fills my head on the subject that obsessed her throughout her life. Namely my weight.
Such was her strength of feeling about the subject that when visiting me at university for the first time, she refused to come and see the house I was living in because she was so incensed that I’d unwittingly gained 2 st and resembled, in her cutting words, ‘a baby elephant’.
My mother was naturally slender, but she was always dieting. She lived in constant fear of putting on a few pounds and my father no longer being able to fit her tiny waist between his two hands.
I, as she was often at pains to point out, seemed to have inherited Daddy’s larger frame and Grandma’s ‘fat gene’. (My maternal grandmother was as round as she was long, but never seemed to concern herself with it or worry about being fat.)
As a child and teenager, I was a big girl, but not fat. Nevertheless, from the age of 13, I would often be forced to join my mother in one of her WeightWatchers stints.
I’d maybe lose a bit of my plumptitude, but would never be as beautifully slender as she was. She never forgot to remind me how I’d lost out in the long, slim legs and slender wrists camp. I pretended I didn’t care, that I liked being built like a gladiator. I didn’t. I still don’t.
Her last words to me, only a few days before she died, were, ‘Come on love, it’s got really bad. You must do something about your weight.’ I was 55 at the time and had steadily ballooned over several years of trying to be everything for everyone – daughter and only child, wife, mother to two teenage boys and the family’s breadwinner.
Too much rubbish food when on my own and far too great a fondness for dry white wine. I’d managed to reach 20 st and I knew she was right, but they were last words I’ve never stopped hearing. No wonder her voice continues to haunt me on the subject.
It seems to me we underestimate the impact a mother can have on the weight of her child and how that child learns to perceive herself.
There’s no denial of a genetic influence – in my case, I suspect, a fat gene which came from my grandmother and seemed to bypass my mother – but I now understand much of my weight gain was actually caused by crash dieting in an attempt to avoid that constant criticism. I never felt I was good enough.
Unfortunately, I had been wrong in the assumption that gastric surgery would mean I never gained weight again. Though reduced by 80 per cent, my shrunken stomach learned to accommodate larger portions of food as time went on. I was warned by my GP that my little stomach could learn to expand. I should have been more careful.
As I entered my 70s, problems with arthritis, sciatica and finally a broken vertebra caused by a fall made me considerably less mobile than I’d been. Food once again became my greatest pleasure and the consequences were inevitable.
I went from my comfortable 12 st to 16 st and I could hear my mother telling me to do something about it. Ozempic had fast become the weight-loss drug of choice and I knew she would approve. She knew how untrustworthy diets could be – you put it on, you lose it and you put it back on again.
The body’s hormonal system is so clever, it panics when you lose a great amount of weight and thinks you’re starving.
Weight gain is inevitable. Chemical assistance would surely defeat the body’s own function. ‘Go for it,’ she was telling me. So I did.
In June 2023 I went back to my lovely surgeon, Professor Francesco Rubino, who gave me a prescription for the lowest dose of Ozempic and another for when I was ready to move up to the higher dose.
I was fine on the low dose. My appetite was reduced and in the first month I had no side-effects and lost a couple of pounds.
On the higher dose I felt awful. I was sick, I had severe constipation and after four weeks I had lost only another couple of pounds.
I could hear my mother groaning, encouraging me to keep it up. I defied her and gave up.
But that constant maternal whispering in my head, encouraging me to do something, meant that even after the miserable time I’d had on Ozempic, my mind was open when my physiotherapist introduced me to Mounjaro last autumn.
Mounjaro has been nicknamed the ‘King Kong’ of weight-loss drugs, because it activates two different receptors in the body, instead of just one like Ozempic.
She had a number of clients who were using it successfully and were claiming their conditions were less painful as a result. The idea of weight loss and pain loss in tandem was hugely appealing.
(Apparently, some find similar results from Ozempic but that hadn’t happened for me.)
I knew my GP wouldn’t prescribe Mounjaro – it’s only available on the NHS for type 2 diabetics at the moment, and I’ve managed to avoid that – so I headed for a well-known High Street pharmacy. Their doctors seemed to have an acceptable system for checking you were someone who really needed it and quickly my first order came through.
There’s a pen containing the Mounjaro wrapped in ice. It has to be kept cold. There are enough needles to keep me going for one injection a week for four weeks at 2.5mg.
For the month of September I took it religiously, didn’t feel at all ill and lost a couple of pounds. There was Mum, watching me eat tiny portions of healthy food, saying: ‘Go on love, go up a dose.’
I did, and from October to December have taken the 5mg dose with no unpleasant side-effects. Mum is applauding in my head because I’ve lost 2½ st, have less back pain than before and the much talked about ‘food noise’ has gone from my ears.
I no longer think constantly about what I can consume next.
Chocolate doesn’t beg to be eaten and when I get the occasional hunger pangs, I make something that contains protein, some carbs and plenty of green veg. Nothing fancy which, for the first time in my life, doesn’t bother me. Again for the first time ever, the bottle of red wine remains corked, too.
Mum’s voice in my head sounds keen that I resign myself to taking it for the rest of my life.
I’m OK with that, as I’ll still be able to enjoy a meal that tastes good – just a very small portion of it.
It would never have occurred to my mum that she might have contributed to my lifelong battle with my weight. I don’t think she’d have accepted any suggestion that was the case.
Despite the fact she didn’t want me to put on weight, the ‘food noise’ in our home was deafening, as it had been at my grandmother’s, too.
Their job as housewives was to keep everyone and everything clean and tidy, but primarily to feed us.
Being an admired cook was the ambition of them both and plates loaded with meat pies, potatoes and veg had to be followed by treacle sponge, blackberry and apple pie or chocolate pudding. In the afternoon there was chocolate cake or wonderful scones.
I now realise my relationship with food was damaged by those two women. The taste of their food was wonderful, as was the smell, but the portions were outrageous.
I ate far more than I wanted or needed because failing to consume everything that was presented was considered a hurtful insult to their skill and the amount of hard work that had gone into its presentation.
In fact, I don’t think I ever learned to control my appetite until Mounjaro began to do it for me.
The first time I discovered obesity was when I was 18 at Hull University. Free of my mother’s rules for the first time, I’d been rebelliously eating lots and lots of chips in the canteen and had begun drinking alcohol. I didn’t have the exercise I’d had at school and the walk to college was far shorter than the one from home to school.
I was hardly aware of the fact that, in just under a year, I’d gone from 9½ st to 11 st. Completely unconscious of my size, I took myself down to Hull’s ferry dock where I was to meet my parents for the first time in a year.
Dad, an electrical engineer, had been working in Poland, and they decided to drive across Europe, take the ferry from Rotterdam and meet up with their beautiful, beloved daughter.
That’s when the nightmare began. Dad drove past me at the dock, only noticing me when I shrieked and told them to stop.
He got out of the car, gave me a wonderful hug, but Mum stayed, stony faced, in the passenger seat.
I got into the back seat and the onslaught began. ‘What on earth has happened to you? We drove past because we didn’t recognise you. You look like a baby elephant.’
She was so angry she refused the planned visit to my student house, demanded I be dropped off and they would drive straight back to Barnsley.
Dad was upset but didn’t dare challenge ‘she who must be obeyed’.
Horrified, I was determined to do something about it at once. I found a drastic diet of nothing but boiled eggs and tomatoes, took diet drugs, amphetamine, prescribed by the doctor – black bombers, as they were known – went from 11 st to 6½ st… only to be ordered by my tutor to go to the medical centre and ‘get well’.
By Christmas I was told to go home. My mother opened the door. ‘Good heavens, you’ve lost too much weight. Come in. I’ll fatten you up.’
And that was the way it went for the rest of her life. I never looked the way she wanted me to. Always, I was too fat or too thin.
I learned not to cry myself to sleep every time it happened and just to go my own way.
I’d eat if I was hungry, never worry if I’d had too many chips or a lovely pudding and then diet – starvation if necessary and up and down I’d go, really past caring.
I always wondered if my mother’s obsession with the way I looked was a manifestation of her jealousy. I had the life that had been denied her by the war. She always told me she was proud of me, certainly in front of her friends.
Or was I simply a disappointment? She had hoped the one job into which she’d put so much time and energy – raising me – would have led to perfection. It didn’t.
It did, though, lead to a lifetime of trying to please her. Which, I have no doubt, is why I still hear her voice in my head years after her death.
My relationship with her and the pain it has caused is, I think, a lesson for mothers with children now.
Don’t bombard them with delicious cakes and puddings. Don’t put huge portions on their plate and be furious when they say they’re full and can’t eat any more.
Waste is better than force-feeding, then criticising them, which is what happened to me. Crazy, isn’t it, that my mother’s obsession with having a slim daughter led, in reality, to the opposite?
I have no doubt that my mother is delighted I’m using a medical means to reduce my weight now. I have no doubt, if such injections had existed when I was 18, she’d have had me on them pronto.
Would I agree with that approach, for an overweight 18-year-old I cared about, today?
The trick, surely, is for a mother to ensure her child does not become obese in the first place, but that hasn’t been happening as a result of the very poor food to which many children are exposed.
My mother would be battling for Mounjaro or similar to be available for kids and I’m afraid I would agree with her.
Obesity is horrible. It’s uncomfortable, it causes people who could have been friends to turn away, it means never being picked for a sports team.
Meanwhile, here I am in my 70s, eating very small portions of everything hoping to lose another 1½ st to reach my goal of 12 st. Only then, I think, will my mother be laid truly to rest.
Not that I’ll stop there. To keep control of that metabolic system that badgers me to eat more because I’m starving, I probably will take Mounjaro for the rest of my life. OK, Mum?
