Weighty Thoughts- it is a Monday after all....

I wrote this little piece  for the Beyond Chocolate website-should be posted there this week sometime.

Scrolling down the newsfeed on Facebook, I read the words ' I lost 21 lbs in 18 days on hcg drops' and before I knew it, I'd clicked on the link and was feverishly reading  amazing testimonials of magically easy weight loss.  High on blind hope,my logical thought processes had been completely bypassed. Santa Claus really does exist after all. How could I have doubted it?
I'd been here before, of course- first there was hoodia,then proactol, and finally,  alli, (a charming side effect includes oily discharge..... yes,really). It would all be worth it, I'd tell myself, this time it really will work. But of course none of them did, and the only thing I lost was cash- enough, I'm sure, for that Mulberry bag I've coveted forever!
This time, thankfully, normal service was resumed before my credit card took a hit, but it really unsettled me. I KNEW these trails of false hope led nowhere. I'd made a conscious decision to draw a line under years of my life lost to diets and quick fixes, and have instead chosen to listen to what my body needs, and try to follow it's lead. It sounds simple, but after years of ignoring it, and vacillating between starving and overfeeding, I've had  to work hard at reconnecting.
For the last five years, even with having another baby my weight has remained fairly stable- a big achievement for me. Most of the time, I eat what I want but stop when I've had enough- again, sounds easy!  It certainly wasn't at the start. Years of training myself to opt for the low fat, low cal option, meant that I'd labelled many foods as bad,  and consequently they came with a hefty side order of guilt.
I've had ups and downs-having had the last baby, and a good stone up, I wobbled a bit, lost confidence and rejoined weight-watchers even though I knew it was a backward step for me....And so it was- trying to be 'good', obsessing about points, dreading the weekly weigh in- I hated it and after a month, left, ignored the scale and trusted myself. My body soon ambled back to it's prepregnancy weight  and seemed to naturally settle again around a size 14- 16.  Now, there's no doubt, that I would much prefer if like my sister, I naturally settled around a size 8-10! But then, I remind myself, that this body has given me five beautiful children, is healthy and strong, and deserves a little respect.
And yet last week, there I was, reading about the hcg drops, back to where I started, mesmerized albeit briefly, by the illusion of the magic bullet. Because it's just so seductively easy to believe that life would just be perfect if I could just shift that 5 lbs/ stone/ 2 stone. The difference was that this time, I saw it for what it was- fake. Definitely not like the Mulberry bag I plan on owning some day!

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