Skinny
Without Prejudice
It's amazing being skinny after being fat for a very long time. Probably the last time I was skinny was when i worked at the Sheraton Mirage, working like a demon and working days in a row, once 11 days without stopping so i could afford to go to Melbourne and stay in a top hotel.
We had to go that time Yvette and I, it was October and cold in Melbourne a man from Caboolture offering to buy our coats off our backs at 6am in the morning.
"Not a chance", I had told him as i laughed at his thin shirt and shorts.
Yvette and I being used to the cold in Melbourne and we had come prepared. I stayed at the Banks in town and met up with Yvette to go to the Court Case against her Father for common assault.
She won, he lost and the Police who had fought hard for a conviction were ecstatic. So were we and I celebrated by having a Melbourne Cappuccino, the best anywhere in the world. I was skinny then my body honed by the work and the sunshine in Queensland.
We lived in Main beach then, with hot and cold running cockroaches that would not die. We tried everything and one landed in the toilet and we poured bleach on the horrid thing and still it would not die, or flush away.
I was skinny though and never appreciated it until years later. And then I gave up smoking ten months ago and replaced one addiction for another, food. Any food, of which I could not get enough and I could not fill my mouth enough for the first few months, craving fullness.
I went off to Camp Eden firm packed and well rounded. My cheeks bloated and a body that I could not look in a mirror at.I did the exercised and ate the beautiful healthy food and went back for second helping of everything.
I thought the "health Nuts' were a pain in the arse and I was so much wiser than them. I listened to the lectures on food preparation and cooking them and joined in, enthusiastically. I was first in to eat and last to exercise and I was so convinced my unhealthy body would always be so.
I was over 50 after all and had tried hard to lose weight for years, diet pills and walking and would lose some and put it all back on and more. I was lazy, napping during the day and groaning at having to do anything physical.
I was proud of myself giving up smoking and took it a day at a time. But the fat remained and I liked it in a way, not having to worry about it, and proud of my enormous bust.
If I lost that what would I be left with, wind socks with marbles in the ends, and where would all that saggy skin go ? My Doctor told me off once for being so heavy and I didn't go back for a year to see him and he was really angry by then. Me being a type 2 diabetic for the last 5 years.
How rotten for me to get it, my dad being type 1 and not finding out till he was early 70's and thought he was having a stroke.
He didn't like the diagnosis and refused to conform at first. he hated having to stop smoking or eating chocolate biscuits and I loved my Dad and felt sad for him. He lived till 76 and a year before he died he had Prostate Cancer.
He opted out of treatment, and they gave him six months to live and he lasted 9. He never gave himself a chance and said he had lived a long and good life, with many women he had loved and had by then given life to 8 children.
I didn't want to be like him but I was headed that way and after Lauren died I guessed I couldn't have cared less. I had been through nightmare years of loss and trouble and just wanted to live a simple easy life and then die.
But something happened at Camp Eden. I decided all the rich fucked up people were trite and meaningless and that only I knew the answers to my problems. So I loved the experience and somehow in my cynicism at the lifestyle and my body I must have absorbed by Osmosis some of the "good stuff"
And it certainly didn't happen overnight. I came home and I wanted to kiss the ground to my ordinary life, kids, grandkids and raising 7 boys to men. I was so full of myself and ground nuts and made all my own food and walked every day and nothing happened.
I didn't lose an ounce, not a teaspoon of fat dissolved magically from my body. And I kept on trying and hoping and cooking and one day, months later, in anger and frustration I gave up. I stood at the kitchen window and looked out and just gave it all up to God.
I was so tired of trying and I was over trying. So I just simply gave up. And the weight started to fall off, just fall off like sheets of wall paper uncurling off a wall. I had promised myself years before that if I ever was skinny again I would make the biggest fuss of it.
I would touch and stroke and admire my body instead of hating it. And i knew from my old swimming days that I would have to go back to discipline and non temptation. So when the weight started coming off I went back to control behaviour and harsh self examination.
I wrote like a mad woman having to release everything I was scared of onto the blank page I had become. And the writing was fierce at first I felt pushed after Camp Eden and expert helpers that I owed it to myself to be the best that i could be.
And by releasing the demons that had haunted me for years, spewing out on to the page my failures I came to terms with it all. Camp eden made you set 3 goals for the next 12 months and they would be checking that you somehow held firm to them. By a follow up.
1. I wanted to write a book.
2, A fit brown healthy body
3. To trust a man enough to want to be in a relationship, not necessarily living with him, but that we belonged to each other and went out and did normal things.
The 3rd was the hardest in the end. I feared men. I spent 20 years in a marriage where my husband was violent. I held the violence to me, too ashamed to say it out loud, feeling the guilt of a marriage ended, what I had put my children through.
I felt guilty that Lauren had died. it was my job as a Mother to hold her to life and I had failed. I had failed as a Mother and a human being and self loathing was a warm blanket that I could cover myself in.
Sometimes yanking it up over my head and retreating under it, not having to face the world that might judge me and find me wanting. But when I started writing the truth pulling no punches I realised three very important things.
First I was a survivor, not victim to a cruel and unheeding world.
I was not to blame for his violence, it was his to own. A deal breaker as Doctor Phil likes to call them.
And that I had not led Lauren by the hand to the Noble Park swimming Pool, she had gone there willingly and a silly dare went terribly wrong.
I had been an over anxious Mum before she died, so what I turned into after she died was a nightmare. We were told that we all now felt unsafe in the world, realising that life can change in a second. And that we had to somehow make sense of it and go on, continue to live.
And with each word, very sentence I felt satisfied and could write in memory for hours, time just falling away and I would look up and realise hours had passed, nights, days and I felt better putting it on to the page and make some sort of pattern of it.
It satisfied me like nothing else and because of the inner satisfaction and the fact that people were reading them and liking them I realised that I had a voice. That was like a gift, that people came back to me and told me what they thought.
My brothers sitting down one Saturday and reading my stories of my mum and Dad and my beloved brother Jamie, who had also died as a child and also tragically and my homage to him made by big tough brothers cry, And they had no hesitation in telling me.
I was surprised, I had cried when I wrote it and realised how much he meant to me, the little Sis of 5, who admired him, he being so much older, 11. And that as children we weren't allowed to talk of him as it might upset our "Highly Strung" mother.
She had a nervous breakdown when he died and us kids were sent away to a strangers house for 3 months into the Adelaide hills. It was like we were being punished twice and it and the fact of Jamies death was to have an enormous impact on all of us.
And the fact that we couldn't talk about him as if he had never existed. And years later I was given by my daughter a photo of his sad ugly iron cross memorial. And I cried and cried, furious with my dead mother and alive dad, that was the best they could do for him.
And in a case of art imitating life at that exact same moment in time I was being asked by my girls to give up their Sisters ashes so they could create a beautiful memorial for her. I had to go away for a week to think about it and still wanted to keep some of the ashes with me forever. the girls insisted on the whole thing.
They thought it was unhealthy of me to be so obsessive with her, they wanted somewhere to go to lay flowers and take their children to visit. So in the end I bowed to the inevitable and let them go. Realising that their needs were important and more so than mine. Because I would always carry her in my heart.
Gwen my Mother In Law said I didn't even need photos as I carried her image inside of me and could recall it in fine detail at any given moment. So I gave up her ashes and they had a beautiful memorial to their little sis made. It's a huge rock with plants all around and a flower holder.
The rock is what she was, steady as a rock, and the children can sit there on top of the rock or examine the plaque and read it's hearfelt message and reflect on a life beautifully lived and how she would treasure them all if she was alive.
She loved them before they came into being and she paid me the highest compliment as a Mum while she lived, her biggest desire to be a Mum, just like me.
And my siblings say as a little girl I was Lauren. And they could pay me no higher compliment, a sweet girl that thought of others. And when they said that all of the older sibs, I was shocked. Only viewing myself through my adult eyes with all my flaws.
And at Camp Eden they made you confront the child you were at 5 or ten or 13, what you wanted for your life, what your hopes and dreams and ambitions were and who you were and why and how did that relate to where you were in life. they had expert life coaches that counselled and challenged.
And I thought about it. I had always wanted to be an author, I had always wanted to be a Mum with a big family, like my family of 7 siblings. I saw the child i was, sensitive and shy but also blessed with a high IQ which I kept hidden fearing being a brainy girl would not be popular.
Until my parents found out and gave me The Bruckshaw Speech. that i had been in Scotland and was a Scot firstly and the Scots were fiercely proud and craved freedom and I was a Bruckshaw and I damned well better put my hand up in class, so what if I knew all the answers??? say it loud and proud.
So I marched in to every school I went to as a weeping newcomer (17, at the last count ) and fought my way to the top. I could read voraciously and did, ignoring entreaties to "help" as my head was always buried in a book.
Even before I started school I could read and write, jealous of the kids in school already who would write this wondrous thing in the dirt in the road outside out house. Language, the written kind. And I wanted to learn it more than anything.
So my Mother taught me to read and write before I started school and in prep I only spent six months being put up to Grade 1 half way through the year and by the end of that year I was winning prizes for my English. I was the School Orator, story teller and read to the Preps at 7.
At 7 I could read adult books and did and my Mother had a few grim meeting with teachers and after that I did not have to look at Janet and John or Spot the dog again and had licence to read whatever I wanted.
My parents were incredibly intelligent, a meeting of minds. They gave us Encyclopedias to read so we learned history and geography and religion. We had a Websters dictionary the size of the Yellow Pages and we devoured it. Our lives apart from swimming and other sports was learning.
A child coming up to me when I was 6 or so and asking me what word was written on a piece of paper,
"Alphabet", I said, shyly.
He turned around to all his friends and said,
"See, I told you, she would know it!"
And I felt puzzled but knew it was a good thing.
So I raced through school and life and was a skinny girl as I exercised all the time and hated most foods except scrambled eggs and tomato soup. So I knew I hadn't laid down fat cells as a child and therefore if I made up my mind to get healthy it would not be as hard as say a chubby child.
So Camp Eden brought up my child memories and dreams and small ambitions and big ones and I realised that she was still there, that child. I recalled the child of five who refused to believe Jamie was dead, I recalled the child of 7 who wanted glamour and blonde hair and a big chest, And I was surrounded by people who were telling me what my writing meant to them.
Ah, the dreams of a little girl, I think Marilyn Monroe was the icon influencing me then and my reality was a tomboy girl who competed with "The Big Boys" and had to be just as good as them if not better. The bastards gave no quarter at times and did their best to toughen me up. Jackie they didn't need to as she was fierce and gave them "what for".
I played with meccano and their toys and loved being the cow girl, I wanted to be Annie Oakley as well and shoot them all dead. I was plain, freckled with straw hair that tangled and Mum had it cut in what Jackie called my "Roman Soldier" style. Awful, chopped off at the ears and trimmed around my ears and always a fringe. I had a squint as well as I was blind as a bat, severe astigmatism in my left eye and shortsightedness coming to the fore.
I didn't care what I looked like. Jackie despaired of me, she was so feminine and I was just a ratbag. But a brainy one and fit one and I liked being boyish as it meant more fun than hanging around the kitchen and "tidying" the house. And because I was brainy like her my Mum let me get away with it and Jackie must have hated my guts.
She kicked a Maths teacher in the shin once and left school that day at 14 and went to work. And mart arsed me replied to her once when she wanted the dirt swept off the floor,
"You do it, you're the maid"
As she was working as a housekeeper at a rich lady's place, I think she knocked me across the room and I very much deserved it.
Shortly after that I suffered a bout of cystitis that was so painful I lay on the cold tiles in the bathroom and passed out. My Mum finding me there and taking me to the Doctors. I am sure it was Karma for giving Jackie a hard time and I never suffered it again until I was pregnant.
But back to skinny, I have now in a few short months gone from a size 16 to 18 to a 12 and even the new jeans I bought are starting to loosen. And it's the way I was as a child, skinny legs and arms and face and I have collar bones now. My bust went from a huge 44 inches to 36 and stayed firm amazingly. My upper arms have turned to mush underneath, but Helen my nurse younger sister says that will readjust.
She has also lost an incredible amount of weight, 30 % of her body weight is gone. She was a very overweight child, coming years after the rest of us sibs, and Mum and Dad indulged her. She looks amazing now and we swap eating or non eating tips as she is like me can only eat small amounts.
The bonus of all this is you gain so much more energy. I have boundless energy now and have to keep moving all the time, cleaning like a demon, house, unit and garden.
I mow the lawns and we have 4 teen boys in this household. I cannot stop cleaning and am obsessive about it. A friend had stomach stapling years ago and she told me she had to take up cleaning as a profession to wear off the energy she had after years of inertia and plates, yes plates, of donuts.
I know how she feels. And another bonus is that men now find me attractive and want to take me out. Imagine that! After being in a friends with no benefits with 2 men over the last 4 years. One so young it's obscene and one so powerful its hurts. I decided that was not good enough when I arrived back from Camp Eden.\
And they could readjust and come on the next stage with me or not, I really didn't care. I wanted more and I deserved more and even though I too had been happy with the way things were then, I wasn't anymore.
A woman's self confidence tied up with her body and a man's tied up with his career. When you get skinny it's like you belong to a whole new club, the skinny club and there are definite advantages to belonging.
You see people differently. I am amazed at the size of some people and now look at it from a health angle. I have looked at the elderly and cared for them and its the skinny little bird like ones that live long. Not too many fat ones amongst the elderly, they are dead.
And suddenly I have found everything in my wardrobe fits, right down to a Charlie Brown sequined dress I kept as Ebay stock. And being more attractive to men does wonders for my confidence and I have started dating, My first today just for a coffee, and it ended up being 3 hours and still we talked and he wants to see me next weekend.
So I have gone from being a fat recluse to a foxy babe except for the shitty arms, but I will work on them, stay healthy and happy,
Love Janette
It's amazing being skinny after being fat for a very long time. Probably the last time I was skinny was when i worked at the Sheraton Mirage, working like a demon and working days in a row, once 11 days without stopping so i could afford to go to Melbourne and stay in a top hotel.
We had to go that time Yvette and I, it was October and cold in Melbourne a man from Caboolture offering to buy our coats off our backs at 6am in the morning.
"Not a chance", I had told him as i laughed at his thin shirt and shorts.
Yvette and I being used to the cold in Melbourne and we had come prepared. I stayed at the Banks in town and met up with Yvette to go to the Court Case against her Father for common assault.
She won, he lost and the Police who had fought hard for a conviction were ecstatic. So were we and I celebrated by having a Melbourne Cappuccino, the best anywhere in the world. I was skinny then my body honed by the work and the sunshine in Queensland.
We lived in Main beach then, with hot and cold running cockroaches that would not die. We tried everything and one landed in the toilet and we poured bleach on the horrid thing and still it would not die, or flush away.
I was skinny though and never appreciated it until years later. And then I gave up smoking ten months ago and replaced one addiction for another, food. Any food, of which I could not get enough and I could not fill my mouth enough for the first few months, craving fullness.
I went off to Camp Eden firm packed and well rounded. My cheeks bloated and a body that I could not look in a mirror at.I did the exercised and ate the beautiful healthy food and went back for second helping of everything.
I thought the "health Nuts' were a pain in the arse and I was so much wiser than them. I listened to the lectures on food preparation and cooking them and joined in, enthusiastically. I was first in to eat and last to exercise and I was so convinced my unhealthy body would always be so.
I was over 50 after all and had tried hard to lose weight for years, diet pills and walking and would lose some and put it all back on and more. I was lazy, napping during the day and groaning at having to do anything physical.
I was proud of myself giving up smoking and took it a day at a time. But the fat remained and I liked it in a way, not having to worry about it, and proud of my enormous bust.
If I lost that what would I be left with, wind socks with marbles in the ends, and where would all that saggy skin go ? My Doctor told me off once for being so heavy and I didn't go back for a year to see him and he was really angry by then. Me being a type 2 diabetic for the last 5 years.
How rotten for me to get it, my dad being type 1 and not finding out till he was early 70's and thought he was having a stroke.
He didn't like the diagnosis and refused to conform at first. he hated having to stop smoking or eating chocolate biscuits and I loved my Dad and felt sad for him. He lived till 76 and a year before he died he had Prostate Cancer.
He opted out of treatment, and they gave him six months to live and he lasted 9. He never gave himself a chance and said he had lived a long and good life, with many women he had loved and had by then given life to 8 children.
I didn't want to be like him but I was headed that way and after Lauren died I guessed I couldn't have cared less. I had been through nightmare years of loss and trouble and just wanted to live a simple easy life and then die.
But something happened at Camp Eden. I decided all the rich fucked up people were trite and meaningless and that only I knew the answers to my problems. So I loved the experience and somehow in my cynicism at the lifestyle and my body I must have absorbed by Osmosis some of the "good stuff"
And it certainly didn't happen overnight. I came home and I wanted to kiss the ground to my ordinary life, kids, grandkids and raising 7 boys to men. I was so full of myself and ground nuts and made all my own food and walked every day and nothing happened.
I didn't lose an ounce, not a teaspoon of fat dissolved magically from my body. And I kept on trying and hoping and cooking and one day, months later, in anger and frustration I gave up. I stood at the kitchen window and looked out and just gave it all up to God.
I was so tired of trying and I was over trying. So I just simply gave up. And the weight started to fall off, just fall off like sheets of wall paper uncurling off a wall. I had promised myself years before that if I ever was skinny again I would make the biggest fuss of it.
I would touch and stroke and admire my body instead of hating it. And i knew from my old swimming days that I would have to go back to discipline and non temptation. So when the weight started coming off I went back to control behaviour and harsh self examination.
I wrote like a mad woman having to release everything I was scared of onto the blank page I had become. And the writing was fierce at first I felt pushed after Camp Eden and expert helpers that I owed it to myself to be the best that i could be.
And by releasing the demons that had haunted me for years, spewing out on to the page my failures I came to terms with it all. Camp eden made you set 3 goals for the next 12 months and they would be checking that you somehow held firm to them. By a follow up.
1. I wanted to write a book.
2, A fit brown healthy body
3. To trust a man enough to want to be in a relationship, not necessarily living with him, but that we belonged to each other and went out and did normal things.
The 3rd was the hardest in the end. I feared men. I spent 20 years in a marriage where my husband was violent. I held the violence to me, too ashamed to say it out loud, feeling the guilt of a marriage ended, what I had put my children through.
I felt guilty that Lauren had died. it was my job as a Mother to hold her to life and I had failed. I had failed as a Mother and a human being and self loathing was a warm blanket that I could cover myself in.
Sometimes yanking it up over my head and retreating under it, not having to face the world that might judge me and find me wanting. But when I started writing the truth pulling no punches I realised three very important things.
First I was a survivor, not victim to a cruel and unheeding world.
I was not to blame for his violence, it was his to own. A deal breaker as Doctor Phil likes to call them.
And that I had not led Lauren by the hand to the Noble Park swimming Pool, she had gone there willingly and a silly dare went terribly wrong.
I had been an over anxious Mum before she died, so what I turned into after she died was a nightmare. We were told that we all now felt unsafe in the world, realising that life can change in a second. And that we had to somehow make sense of it and go on, continue to live.
And with each word, very sentence I felt satisfied and could write in memory for hours, time just falling away and I would look up and realise hours had passed, nights, days and I felt better putting it on to the page and make some sort of pattern of it.
It satisfied me like nothing else and because of the inner satisfaction and the fact that people were reading them and liking them I realised that I had a voice. That was like a gift, that people came back to me and told me what they thought.
My brothers sitting down one Saturday and reading my stories of my mum and Dad and my beloved brother Jamie, who had also died as a child and also tragically and my homage to him made by big tough brothers cry, And they had no hesitation in telling me.
I was surprised, I had cried when I wrote it and realised how much he meant to me, the little Sis of 5, who admired him, he being so much older, 11. And that as children we weren't allowed to talk of him as it might upset our "Highly Strung" mother.
She had a nervous breakdown when he died and us kids were sent away to a strangers house for 3 months into the Adelaide hills. It was like we were being punished twice and it and the fact of Jamies death was to have an enormous impact on all of us.
And the fact that we couldn't talk about him as if he had never existed. And years later I was given by my daughter a photo of his sad ugly iron cross memorial. And I cried and cried, furious with my dead mother and alive dad, that was the best they could do for him.
And in a case of art imitating life at that exact same moment in time I was being asked by my girls to give up their Sisters ashes so they could create a beautiful memorial for her. I had to go away for a week to think about it and still wanted to keep some of the ashes with me forever. the girls insisted on the whole thing.
They thought it was unhealthy of me to be so obsessive with her, they wanted somewhere to go to lay flowers and take their children to visit. So in the end I bowed to the inevitable and let them go. Realising that their needs were important and more so than mine. Because I would always carry her in my heart.
Gwen my Mother In Law said I didn't even need photos as I carried her image inside of me and could recall it in fine detail at any given moment. So I gave up her ashes and they had a beautiful memorial to their little sis made. It's a huge rock with plants all around and a flower holder.
The rock is what she was, steady as a rock, and the children can sit there on top of the rock or examine the plaque and read it's hearfelt message and reflect on a life beautifully lived and how she would treasure them all if she was alive.
She loved them before they came into being and she paid me the highest compliment as a Mum while she lived, her biggest desire to be a Mum, just like me.
And my siblings say as a little girl I was Lauren. And they could pay me no higher compliment, a sweet girl that thought of others. And when they said that all of the older sibs, I was shocked. Only viewing myself through my adult eyes with all my flaws.
And at Camp Eden they made you confront the child you were at 5 or ten or 13, what you wanted for your life, what your hopes and dreams and ambitions were and who you were and why and how did that relate to where you were in life. they had expert life coaches that counselled and challenged.
And I thought about it. I had always wanted to be an author, I had always wanted to be a Mum with a big family, like my family of 7 siblings. I saw the child i was, sensitive and shy but also blessed with a high IQ which I kept hidden fearing being a brainy girl would not be popular.
Until my parents found out and gave me The Bruckshaw Speech. that i had been in Scotland and was a Scot firstly and the Scots were fiercely proud and craved freedom and I was a Bruckshaw and I damned well better put my hand up in class, so what if I knew all the answers??? say it loud and proud.
So I marched in to every school I went to as a weeping newcomer (17, at the last count ) and fought my way to the top. I could read voraciously and did, ignoring entreaties to "help" as my head was always buried in a book.
Even before I started school I could read and write, jealous of the kids in school already who would write this wondrous thing in the dirt in the road outside out house. Language, the written kind. And I wanted to learn it more than anything.
So my Mother taught me to read and write before I started school and in prep I only spent six months being put up to Grade 1 half way through the year and by the end of that year I was winning prizes for my English. I was the School Orator, story teller and read to the Preps at 7.
At 7 I could read adult books and did and my Mother had a few grim meeting with teachers and after that I did not have to look at Janet and John or Spot the dog again and had licence to read whatever I wanted.
My parents were incredibly intelligent, a meeting of minds. They gave us Encyclopedias to read so we learned history and geography and religion. We had a Websters dictionary the size of the Yellow Pages and we devoured it. Our lives apart from swimming and other sports was learning.
A child coming up to me when I was 6 or so and asking me what word was written on a piece of paper,
"Alphabet", I said, shyly.
He turned around to all his friends and said,
"See, I told you, she would know it!"
And I felt puzzled but knew it was a good thing.
So I raced through school and life and was a skinny girl as I exercised all the time and hated most foods except scrambled eggs and tomato soup. So I knew I hadn't laid down fat cells as a child and therefore if I made up my mind to get healthy it would not be as hard as say a chubby child.
So Camp Eden brought up my child memories and dreams and small ambitions and big ones and I realised that she was still there, that child. I recalled the child of five who refused to believe Jamie was dead, I recalled the child of 7 who wanted glamour and blonde hair and a big chest, And I was surrounded by people who were telling me what my writing meant to them.
Ah, the dreams of a little girl, I think Marilyn Monroe was the icon influencing me then and my reality was a tomboy girl who competed with "The Big Boys" and had to be just as good as them if not better. The bastards gave no quarter at times and did their best to toughen me up. Jackie they didn't need to as she was fierce and gave them "what for".
I played with meccano and their toys and loved being the cow girl, I wanted to be Annie Oakley as well and shoot them all dead. I was plain, freckled with straw hair that tangled and Mum had it cut in what Jackie called my "Roman Soldier" style. Awful, chopped off at the ears and trimmed around my ears and always a fringe. I had a squint as well as I was blind as a bat, severe astigmatism in my left eye and shortsightedness coming to the fore.
I didn't care what I looked like. Jackie despaired of me, she was so feminine and I was just a ratbag. But a brainy one and fit one and I liked being boyish as it meant more fun than hanging around the kitchen and "tidying" the house. And because I was brainy like her my Mum let me get away with it and Jackie must have hated my guts.
She kicked a Maths teacher in the shin once and left school that day at 14 and went to work. And mart arsed me replied to her once when she wanted the dirt swept off the floor,
"You do it, you're the maid"
As she was working as a housekeeper at a rich lady's place, I think she knocked me across the room and I very much deserved it.
Shortly after that I suffered a bout of cystitis that was so painful I lay on the cold tiles in the bathroom and passed out. My Mum finding me there and taking me to the Doctors. I am sure it was Karma for giving Jackie a hard time and I never suffered it again until I was pregnant.
But back to skinny, I have now in a few short months gone from a size 16 to 18 to a 12 and even the new jeans I bought are starting to loosen. And it's the way I was as a child, skinny legs and arms and face and I have collar bones now. My bust went from a huge 44 inches to 36 and stayed firm amazingly. My upper arms have turned to mush underneath, but Helen my nurse younger sister says that will readjust.
She has also lost an incredible amount of weight, 30 % of her body weight is gone. She was a very overweight child, coming years after the rest of us sibs, and Mum and Dad indulged her. She looks amazing now and we swap eating or non eating tips as she is like me can only eat small amounts.
The bonus of all this is you gain so much more energy. I have boundless energy now and have to keep moving all the time, cleaning like a demon, house, unit and garden.
I mow the lawns and we have 4 teen boys in this household. I cannot stop cleaning and am obsessive about it. A friend had stomach stapling years ago and she told me she had to take up cleaning as a profession to wear off the energy she had after years of inertia and plates, yes plates, of donuts.
I know how she feels. And another bonus is that men now find me attractive and want to take me out. Imagine that! After being in a friends with no benefits with 2 men over the last 4 years. One so young it's obscene and one so powerful its hurts. I decided that was not good enough when I arrived back from Camp Eden.\
And they could readjust and come on the next stage with me or not, I really didn't care. I wanted more and I deserved more and even though I too had been happy with the way things were then, I wasn't anymore.
A woman's self confidence tied up with her body and a man's tied up with his career. When you get skinny it's like you belong to a whole new club, the skinny club and there are definite advantages to belonging.
You see people differently. I am amazed at the size of some people and now look at it from a health angle. I have looked at the elderly and cared for them and its the skinny little bird like ones that live long. Not too many fat ones amongst the elderly, they are dead.
And suddenly I have found everything in my wardrobe fits, right down to a Charlie Brown sequined dress I kept as Ebay stock. And being more attractive to men does wonders for my confidence and I have started dating, My first today just for a coffee, and it ended up being 3 hours and still we talked and he wants to see me next weekend.
So I have gone from being a fat recluse to a foxy babe except for the shitty arms, but I will work on them, stay healthy and happy,
Love Janette
