Being obese runs in my family but nobody told me what it meant for my health, or how to eat better. At just 13-years-old, I was wearing medium sized adult jeans.
Seeing other girls my age with boyfriends, I started to question why I wasn’t getting attention. I’m also part of a Turkish family where we had the mentality of “nobody’s going to marry you if you’re fat”. I tried to lose weight by skipping meals, which I now would never advise anybody to do but I did lose a little bit of weight.
By the time I got married at age of 21 to my husband Eyup, I’d dropped down to a size 14. Once I was married, I just starting eating what I wanted. Then, after I had my first child in 2006, my eating habits spiralled and I gained a lot of weight. I couldn’t lose the baby fat.
I know now that my baby had special needs but at the time, I couldn’t make sense of what was happening and it was hugely stressful. I left my job as an insurance broker in 2011, and things got a lot worse. I felt trapped; I didn’t know what was wrong with my son, I had nobody to turn to and where I live, there’s no family about, so I felt isolated. I turned to food to make myself feel better. I didn’t own scales, so I had no idea how much I weighed and I’d just wear whatever fitted.
I fell pregnant again in 2011 and because I hadn’t lost the baby fat the first time, I just gained more weight and during the pregnancy, doctors said I was borderline diabetic.
Between 2011 and 2019, my weight was constantly going up. At my biggest, I was 17 stone. I wasn’t eating proper meals; just snacks and frozen food. I didn’t really see snacking as eating. In my head, I was just eating once a day.
I was so low on energy that I couldn’t even stand up to cook my kids’ meals. It got to a stage where I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. I used to get changed in the dark. I was disgusted in the way I was, but I didn’t know what to do. Not knowing how to make changes, I just buried my head in the sand and carried on with life.
Then in 2019, I went on holiday to Cyprus by myself. On the way back, I was in a middle seat. I’m only 4ft 11in, and being 17st at the time, I ‘overflowed’.
This gentleman came and sat next to me; he was quite skinny and I was overflowing onto his seat, so he felt squished. He said to the air hostess, “I don’t want to sit with a fat person, who is invading my personal space. I want to get moved.” Everybody heard. It was an embarrassing moment. I knew I never wanted to feel that again so I had to do something.
When I got back, I looked at what I could do to lose weight. I couldn’t physically walk; even 100 metres was difficult. I wanted something to teach me how to eat properly so I looked at Slimming World. It felt easier because I could still eat pasta, rice and potatoes, so I went online and signed up.
I was cooking from scratch and felt full so didn’t snack as much. I was having three or four meals and I never felt hungry. After six weeks, I’d lost about a stone, and I wanted to start including exercise. The weight was just flying off so I just wanted to keep it up.
I looked to see if there were any exercise clubs in my area, but everything was high energy and then, I couldn’t even jump. So I started by walking. I got myself a fitness watch to track how much I walked in a day which was about 1,300 steps. I wanted to increase this slowly.
I made small goals. Originally it was just to get down to the end of my road, which would be half a mile. Then once I felt comfortable, I would increase it. In six months, I went from doing zero exercise to walking 10,000 steps daily, and it felt easy.
I never lost motivation or wanted to go back to the crisps, chocolate and no exercise because, without wanting to sound cheesy, I felt alive. For the first time, I felt I had this real energy. I was seeing my body shape, and I was losing weight. In the first six months I lost six stone. And then the weight plateaued a bit.
When I was 9.5st in June 2021, I started to run with the NHS Couch To 5k app and it took me nine weeks to get to a 5km run.
Once all the Covid restrictions were lifted in April 2022, I saw an advert for a Ramblers Wellbeing Walk. Originally, I just wanted to be a member, because I was isolated, I wanted friends and I wanted somebody to go out walking with. My husband and kids, although supportive, didn’t walk with me.
By this point, I was my goal weight of 8.5st. I was healthy and the only reason I needed the group was to make friends.
As there were no walk leaders for the Ramblers Wellbeing Walk, I put myself forward to be a leader. Originally, the whole idea was to create a safe space for people to come to, and hopefully encourage people like the old me to take up walking as exercise, because it’s so underrated. And you can do it with friends or alone if that’s what you choose.
My walk community is like my family. There’s one lady who is a little bit overweight and she finds it a struggle to motivate herself in the morning. I can relate to that. So now I do a one-to-one walk with her.
Looking back, I was a ghost. I was just getting by but I wasn’t me. I was just a wife and a mother.
I used to sleep on three pillows because I couldn’t breathe. But now I can sleep and breathe properly. I don’t get tired. In May, I did a 33km walk and next year, I’m going to Wales to do a 50km walk. I now can run up to half a marathon distance too.
When we used to go on holiday, I’d never leave the hotel room. It would just be my husband taking care of the kids, because every activity was hard for me.
I will never go back to my original weight. Now my mentality is that if I need to go somewhere, the car gets left if it’s local, and I walk everywhere. Before, I wouldn’t even think of doing any activities, but now I do things without thinking.
Dee is a Ramblers Wellbeing Walks leader. Find out more on their website.
As told to Lucy Gornall
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2024-07-27T11:12:14Z dg43tfdfdgfd