now... I've really never been naturally skinny, it's all curvy women from both mum and dad's side of the family so I know that's not what I'm naturally meant to be.
when I was little, I was as a skinny as a ruler - I needed belt and braces to hold my trousers up!
in my teen years, mainly down to poor diet, little motivation when it came to sports and then later a sporting injury, I quickly piled the weight on.
I also have PCOS and now a borderline underactive thyroid which both make it really easy to put weight on and very very difficult to lose it.
About 8 months I had my son, due to breastfeeding and not having time to eat I dropped right down to little over 9 stone (I usually hover about the 12-13 stone region), now... while this in terms of my BMI is still within my "ideal" range, it just didn't suit me. to be honest, looking back at photos from then, I looked malnourished - this is probably one of the better pictures from that time, all the others are just too awful to share! I really had no muscle tone, so I was pretty much just skin and bones. I was a size 18 when I first dared to try and get back into normal clothes after being pregnant - some 4 months after he was born, and I lost the best part of 5 stone in 4 months - now even I can tell you, that's not healthy!
So... I don't want to get back down to that low a weight ever again, though those jeans in this pic I LOVED and would love to fit back into them again, but realistically I know that probably wont happen.
yes the weight gradually crept back on, i stayed about a size 12/14 for a while when I was working as a nursery nurse but then when i started working at hansel I quickly put a lot more on (though truth be told, we all did!), it was when my size 16's started feeling tight I knew I needed to do something about it. When I went to get my student nurse uniform fitted I had to go up to a size 18 for the trousers (they tend to say you need to go up a size from your normal anyway), and they were tight, but there was no way I was going back out and asking for a size 20!
so here we are now: I've ditched my scales and I am judging my weight loss through my loss of inches and the way my clothes fit. I want to tone up rather than slim down, get a bit of definition to my arms, legs, abs... I don't care if I still stay around the 14-16 size region (though I'd rather be more in the 14's than the 16's) but I want to feel more comfortable within my skin, and to do that, I need to exhange some of the fat for muscle.
I haven't regretted starting Zumba classes for one minute, even when my legs have been screaming at me, I never in a million years thought I would ever become so enthusiastic about a keep fit class, but I now understand that adrenaline rush people get when they exercise - just I like to do it to latin beats and in a dance studio rather than down a gym.
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