All my friends were smaller than me and we all put it down to genetics until one day we went shopping for clothes to wear that evening. I was 16 years old with ever growing womanly curves. I spotted a dark green Windsmoor skirt (a sign of how deep rooted these event are, that I remember them so clearly). I loved everything about that skirt, I took the size 14 (already a big size for a 16 yr old) into the changing room. It didn’t fit. Windsmoor always were small sizing! So I took the size 16 in. It was tight in fact too tight to spend an evening in. My friends mum tweaked and pulled the waist band, but we had to accept I couldn’t have the skirt. (They didn’t sell clothes bigger than a size 16 in those days). I tried to hide my disapointment but my friends saw through it and tried to comfort me with platitudes. They didn’t help!
Good news for me I had never seriously dieted before so at that point, I believed there was something I could do about it.
At that time I had another friend who wanted to shift a few pounds so we agreed to meet at her house and three of us set about losing weight.
We created our own exercise routine which we did amongst roars of laughter. We started following the string bean diet. Another first, the first of many completely ridiculous weight loss plans that you couldn’t possibly hope to follow for long and would never lead to a permanent weight loss. If memory serves me well I think we ate half a cup of beans each meal with either a boiled egg or some tuna fish. I think after about 4 days we all gave up and returned to our favourite meal of chicken fried rice from the Chinese.
