Dukan Diet news

«I lost three stone in three months»
by Woman's Hour's Jenni Murray

'I sat on a sunbed and it
shattered under my
weight': After tipping
the scales at 19 stone,
Woman's Hour's
Jenni Murray finally took
drastic action and lost
three stone in three
months

At the age of 20, I made the decision never to diet again. The first year at university had proved a difficult transition for a somewhat spoilt, only child. My parents were working abroad and I had no desire to burden my grandparents with my worries. 

So I’d filled the lonely, homesick hours with food — piles of hot buttered toast, mostly — and learned to down pints with the in crowd I so wanted to join.

It was my mother’s furious reaction on her return, just before the Easter break, to the mountain her daughter had become that spurred me into action. My slender 9½ st figure had burgeoned to 11st.

I asked for slimming pills from the university health ­centre and threw myself into the latest fad — no booze and nothing to eat but boiled eggs and tomatoes. The pounds fell away.

Then my tutor pulled me up short. He wanted to know why I was getting so thin; why my emotional stability appeared dented; in short, what was I on? 

I denied, honestly, any association with drugs, but showed him the pills the doctor had given me. They were he told me, black bombers — amphetamines.

He sent me to a different doctor who diagnosed impending anorexia — I weighed just over 6st, a phenomenal weight loss achieved in a mere couple of months — and sent me home for the summer to get off the pills and learn how to eat sensibly again.

For around 14 years afterwards I held at a steady, fit and healthy 9½ st to 10st. Then came two children in my early 30s, a sedentary lifestyle, the menopause, a fondness for devouring whatever a teenage boy could ­manage but, unlike my sons, without the hours in the gym or on the rugby pitch, and the habit of favouring, above all other pleasures, a night out with girlfriends and far too much white wine.

I quietly moved into elasticated waists and baggy, black tops, ­convincing myself that middle-aged spread was inevitable, persuading myself that my dramatic weight gain hadn’t influenced the development of my breast cancer and joking that, if diabetes resulted, losing a leg would mean a couple of stone gone and a blue badge gained. Idiot! 

It was a matter of principle never to weigh myself —a vow I’d made 40 years earlier during my recovery from an eating disorder.

But then came the bilateral hip replacement...

Read the article at Mail Online