Drop a Dress Size in 2 Weeks Anna Richardson

I'll never be that chubby little girl again! How Anna Richardson overcame the childhood fear that drove her to comfort eat

Slimming solution: Anna Richardson dropped two dress sizes after confronting her relationship with food

Even from a distance, the slinky designer frock in Selfridges seemed to have my name on it. Being a shapely size 14 (in my Spanx support pants), I was determined to shoehorn myself into it.

After a minor battle with the zipper, I was in, and the reflection in the changing room mirror told me I looked a million dollars.

'What do you think?' I beamed at the sales assistant, expecting nothing more than a warm compliment in return. Instead, what she said left me so stunned I was barely able to shuffle back to my cubicle.

'I tell you this for your own good, and please don't take offence, but you need to lose a lot of weight before you can wear a dress like this,' she said.

'You're a nice girl and you're too young to have let yourself go. Go on a diet, lose that fat, then come back and see me and I will make you look fabulous.'

I was gobsmacked. Cursing her, I struggled out of the dress, flounced out of the store and let the tears roll down my cheeks all the way home.

'How dare she?' I told myself over and over. 'I may be carrying a couple of extra pounds, but I look great.'

The reason I was upset was that, deep down, I knew she was right. Arguably, my life had been leading up to that point.

Like many women, at 38 I was a fat girl struggling to be in a slim body, engaged in a constant war with my weight which had been going on since I was a teenager.

The bookshelves in my kitchen are testimony to the many (failed) diets I've tried over the years, from the F-Plan and food combining to Rosemary Conley's and Carol Vorderman's.

I've bought cookbooks, supplements, replacement shakes, CDs, food blenders and weighing scales.

I've obsessively calorie-counted for weeks before falling face forward into a bucket of Maltesers. I've had a wardrobe divided into 'fat days' and 'fatter days', while the photos dotted around my flat document the effects of 20 years of yo-yo dieting, from a slender 8st 12lb at my slimmest to a hefty 11.5st porker.

My default settings are 'greedy' and 'lazy', and, like any addict, the word 'enough' doesn't mean a whole lot. Give me one bite of a biscuit and I am more than happy to eat the whole tin.

Yet today, almost two years on from that humiliating moment in the changing rooms, and just months away from my 40th birthday, I can honestly say I've finally cracked it. At 5ft 5in, I weigh 9st 7lb and I'm a size 10-12.

I'm happy with my weight and I feel great - and the solution has not come from the pages of a scientific tome, but from finally confronting my relationship with food honestly and seriously and doing something about it.

It's been a long and emotional journey, especially as now, I can pinpoint exactly when my issues with food started.

It was 36 years ago when I was just four years old. I woke up one morning and came downstairs to discover my mother had disappeared. Tearful, I desperately searched the house, frantic with worry, until my dad was able to explain that mum had been rushed to hospital.

Pregnant with my little brother Ben, she was suffering with 'placenta previa' and would have to spend the next two months in bed.

Still, I was convinced I'd been abandoned, and for the next eight weeks I refused to utter a word to her, determined to punish her for leaving me. Meanwhile, at the mercy of a bewildered father who didn't know how to cook, my daily diet consisted solely of fare from the local chip shop: fish and chips, sausage and chips, fish fingers and chips - all washed down with gallons of fizzy pop.

I loved it. What I was being starved of in terms of attention, I made up for in appetite, and the more food I could cram into my tummy, the better I felt about being the little girl who was terrified that her mum had abandoned her.

Until that point, I'd been a normal-sized little girl, but now, as my mother recalls, every time she saw me it was like I'd been blown up with a bicycle pump.

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Tummy timeline: Anna's overeating began before she went to school

Marching into the ward, getting fatter by the day, I would sing: 'Yummy, yummy, yummy, there's room in my tummy for MORE!' before stubbornly refusing to say another word. I didn't know it at the time, but it was to set a terrible pattern for the rest of my life, one of yo-yo eating patterns and food as my comfort and my medicine.

When Mum came home and we started eating normally again, the weight fell off, but by the time I was ten, caught in the crossfire of my parents' unhappy marriage and with the prospect of boarding school looming, I found comfort once more in biscuits, sweets and fizzy drinks.

I would gorge myself until I was almost sick and even resorted to stealing from my mother's purse to fund illicit missions to sweet shops all over town. A picture taken at the time sums it up perfectly: I was ten years old, tubby and unhappy, and clutching armfuls of biscuits and sweets. Just glancing at it now makes me terribly sad.

In future years, when the going got tough, I would turn to food again. At boarding school I was the fat girl who was funny, the one who couldn't run fast because her legs were too heavy, but who conducted hilarious midnight raids on the kitchens, stockpiling biscuits as if there was a war on.

By the end of my first term at university, a combination of homesick gorging and a student diet of pizzas and beers saw my weight creep up to 11st. When I returned home after my first term, even my mother was shocked. 'My God you've put on weight!' she said.

The funny thing is I don't remember being upset. I had a boyfriend who didn't seem to mind my size - and, well, every student was carrying a bit of extra timber from all the partying.

Battle: TV presenter Anna had a struggled to slim as a size 14

I spent two years eating what I liked and not worrying about it too much until, in the summer holidays before my third year, an unexpected illness saw the weight drop off.

When I returned to university I was the thinnest I'd ever been, 8st 12lb. Men told me I looked great but, more importantly, so did women.

I became addicted to being thin, living on little more than 1,000 calories a day. I even tried to join WeightWatchers, and remember the vindication of being told I wasn't eligible because I didn't need to lose any weight.

It didn't last. After leaving university I moved to London, got a job and found a steady boyfriend - and, as is so often the case, a steady weight gain to go with it; 9.5st, 10st, sometimes a bit more, and every time I'd think: 'Oh, God, I need to go on a diet.' There would follow an episode of frenzied calorie-counting before, back at 9st, I would then slip back into my old ways.

Diet book after diet book started to line the kitchen cupboards, but somewhere along the way, as I headed into my 30s, denial took their place. My boyfriend seemed to like me whatever my size, and complacency and laziness became as much my friend as the crisps in the cupboard.

By the time I went on that fateful mission for a designer dress, I hadn't weighed myself for seven years. Even then, though, I wasn't ready to face up to my demons. But then Fate intervened, because two weeks later, I received a call from Channel 4 offering me a job on its new diet series Supersize v. Superskinny. My role was to road-test extreme diet regimes and report the truth about weight loss back to the nation.

Little realising that the series would change my life, I said yes. On day one of filming when I stepped on to the scales, the needle showed me I weighed more than 11st 7lb, the heaviest I'd ever been. The truth was out there, and it hit me straight between the eyes.

I was devastated, but at least the show would give me the opportunity to do something about it. Over the next two months, I tried every crazy regime going. I ate 40 apples over four days, swallowed diet pills, had surgery on my bingo wings and tried drinking just maple syrup and water.

'By the time I was ten, caught in the crossfire of my parent's unhappy marriage, I found comfort once more in biscuits, sweets and fizzy drinks'

I saw nutritionists and doctors all over the world, who quizzed me about my weaknesses. Was it chocolate? Bread? Each time, I would answer with the only truth I knew: my weakness was everything.

None of it worked. Depressed, and still overweight, my salvation came in the unexpected form of a hypnotist who asked me to go back to a time when food became important to me. Instantly, I was transported back to my four-year-old self, fearful of abandonment and stuffing my face.

The revelation was startling: only then did I finally confront the truth that I was, instinctively, an addictive emotional eater, responding to crises and drama with the self-medicating comfort of food. It also dawned on me that the only person who could sort it out was me.

So I decided to take control, to stick two fingers up to the diet industry and tackle the extra pounds in my own way.

By following my own two-week diet plan - based on common sense, with no weighing, measuring or counting points - I've learned to manage my addiction. Today, 2st lighter than in that Selfridges changing room, I feel I've got the body I deserve. I'll never be a size zero, but I can make the best of what nature gave me. I don't stress about my weight any more, as I know that even if I put on a few pounds over the festive season, I can deal with it.

It isn't always easy. There are many occasions where I find myself sitting with a Chinese takeaway menu in one hand and two peppers and a courgette in the other, my tummy screaming out for crispy fried duck. But then I catch sight of that picture of me as a chubby ten-year-old and I put the menu away, because I never, ever want to be that fat girl again.

• Anna Richardson's Body Blitz: Five Rules For A Brand-New You is out today (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99). To order (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720.

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Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1240355/Ill-chubby-little-girl-How-Anna-Richardson-overcame-childhood-fear-drove-comfort-eat.html

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