I'm forty-four years old and fast settling into the shape of my mother, and also the shape of a mother to be...but I'm not pregnant!
My late thirties and early forties have seen my shape change radically from being flat stomached and generally strong with curved limbs and big shoulders, to being egg-shaped in the middle!
People glance down at my lovely round tummy with that slightly gooey smile and then flick their gaze up with the unsaid question. But I'm not pregnant! (I'll confess though that on particularly bad big tummy days if I'm out in a world of strangers I will let it be and enjoy remembering that pride in my tummy, housing it's baby, who became my boy).
Nope, it's just fat, regained slowly after his birth six years ago, regained through being too sedentary, too time-poor for classes that inspired my better health, and from drinking again, which had been easy to drop during pregnancy but not so easy now (see 'time-poor'- drinking wine is a time waster that briefly makes one think there is all the time in the world!).
I like clothes and am finding it harder to dress to this shape. I vacillate between feeling low self esteem or curvy-pretty. But basically it's the unhealthiest place for a woman my age, who is in menopause already, to carry extra weight. It has to go!
So here I'll be trying everything (that isn't dangerous) and blogging the journey.
Height: 167cm. Weight: 82 kilos. Goal: that my c-cup boobs stick out more than my tummy.
Because my usual mode is to go hard on some wacky diet then plateau, this time round I'm going to backtrack and follow advice I had from a dietician last year (lost the weight, then got slack and regained it). That means go slow, introducing some change but not too much, each week.
So for this week the focus is on less drink (every 2nd day must be completely alcohol free, not even a glass of vino), and dinner portions must be smaller. Over winter, dinner is my downfall- big bowls of comfort nosh sending fragrant steam up to my face... Add to these not too onerous changes more use of my standing desk at work and we'll see what happens.
