I remember the exact day that my body shame was born and I registered the thought that I am overweight. I was nine years old and my parents had gone on a cruise to Durban, leaving me with my grandparents.

I loved going to Gran and Grandpa because there were always delicious things to eat – my Gran was a wonderful cook (which fortunately/unfortunately I have inherited). I remember disgustedly pinching an emerging roll on my tummy - body shame for Jenny Henrick had been born. From that time on, my love affair with diets began.

Looking back, I wasn’t as big as I imagined myself to be. When I started high school at Rhenish Girl's High School in Stellenbosch, which in those days was a very exclusive girls’ only school, I earned the nickname of Bessie Bunter – a fat comic book character who loved eating buns!

I don’t think that my friends meant to be mean or grow my body shame. When someone made the comment one day that I looked like Bessie Bunter, they all thought it was really funny and the name stuck. It was so bad that even my mom called me Bessie! I don't think that she meant to be hurtful either, unlike my father who insulted my weight at every opportunity.

As with most fat people who walked around thinking 'I am overweight', I tried to hide the hurt with a larger than life persona and was always the joker of the group. It probably didn't do too much for my school career but it certainly made me popular and shifted the focus from my weight.

Body Shame made me
feel 'less than'

I always felt uglier than my friends – not as stylishly dressed, for one. I couldn't wear the fashions of the day – my legs in satin hot pants – I don’t think so! Jeans were out – in fact I don’t think I owned a pair of jeans until I was in my 40's! My one boyfriend used to call me 'Little Fat Girl".

As you can see from the pictures, I was nowhere as fat as they made me feel.

As teenagers we were always trying to diet – one unhealthy regimen after the other. I can’t remember a time when I wasn't on diet. I tried every form of starvation, fad diet and diet pill on the market, some of them, looking back, were downright dangerous and are no longer on the market. My overwhelming memory of those days, is how very ugly I felt. One pill was even rumoured to contain tapeworm eggs!! Who would take that? Me!

Comments grew my Body Shame

When I left school, I married a man who further destroyed my self esteem. Back in those days (and I can tell you at any stage of my life what I weighed) I weighed about 65kgs and wore a size 12! I was constantly told how fat I was and developed a very low self esteem. Once again, I was anywhere as fat as they made me out to be. Looking back I can't understand how I allowed myself to be brainwashed that I was fat.

Every morning when I got out of bed and walked to the bathroom, he would make comments about how fat my bottom and legs were. I was so self conscious that when I went to the beach, I used to wrap myself in a towel and go down to the very edge of the water before I would unwrap myself, dive into the water (even if it was only a few inches deep) and then grab my towel again when I came out.

The overwhelming theme of my adult years has been my weight. There were times when I was relatively slim and times when I was really overweight. When my children were born (I was 35 and 37) I weighed my highest at 109kgs. That dropped over the years to a low of 78kgs, which is the lowest weight I can remember being.

After almost 23 years together, my husband and I got divorced (the picture above is what he constantly taunted) and I met a wonderful woman, who I have now been with for 9 years. She has also struggled with her weight and, due to our love of eating out, bad eating habits such as take out, cakes and sweet things, we both hit at all time high 2 years ago. My weight peaked at 119kgs.

At that point I was suffering with constant back ache and aching feet. I also had an operation for a rectocele and my doctor advised me to lose weight, as the repair would not heal properly with all the weight pressing down on it. I once again embarked on a series of diets, diet products (diet pills, shakes etc) – basically everything on the market to lose weight fast.

We'd try it for a while and fail time and time again, each time feeling more and more depressed about our failure and hating the way we looked. Over a year I managed to come down to 109kgs. A colleague at work told me that she had joined Weigh Less and I asked Sue if we could try it.

The Weigh Less years

We started Weigh Less at the end of April, 2010, after an Easter weekend crammed with choccies and easter eggs – our proverbial 'last supper'. We threw ourselves into the Weigh Less way of eating 100%. We planned our meals for week, shopped for all our ingredients and bought ourselves cooler packs to religiously packed our lunches in for work.

The results started to show immediately. Our weight loss was constant, if somewhat slow. We hit a period towards the end of the year when we had lots of social engagements and it felt as if the weight wasn't getting anywhere. Also week-end cheating had slowly started to creep in but we always got straight back on the programme come Monday. The downside was that we had to lose weight that we had gained over the week-end before we could lose new weight.

After 9 months, I have in total lost 28kgs (including the 10kg I lost before starting Weigh Less) - it has made a huge difference to how I feel and to how I look.

At the stage when this picture was taken, I still had 22kgs to loose and so my journey was far from over. My back no longer hurt and I no longer had sore feet walking from the bed to the bathroom in the morning. I had loads more energy. Then it all started going wrong!

I kept getting to as low as 90.1kgs but just could break through the 90kg barrier. My weight went up to 94 and back down and so I see sawed for a couple of months. My weekly weigh in at Weigh Less started becoming a dreaded weekly torture. I had to make excuses for why I hadn’t lost and I didn’t know the answer.

I remember one day thinking about just getting through the 90kg barrier and a wave of fear came over me – like that awful butterfly ‘punch in the tummy’ kind of feeling when you think of something unpleasant which is going to happen. Although I kept telling myself that I wanted to get thin, clearly something in my subconscious mind didn’t want to go there. My weight slowly started to climb as I frantically mentally scrambled to find a solution to my weight gain. I tried going back to the Weigh Less way of eating and, although that worked in terms of my meals, every day included afternoon binges of things like chocolates, sweets, crisps and biscuits. They weren’t savoured but guiltily stuffed into my mouth, almost as if I was trying to see how much I could eat before I picked up weight.

Body Shame just grew

I had now climbed to 102kgs and was feeling so much body shame and self disgust and I was so miserable that I actually didn’t know what to do.

I then remembered having consulted privately with Cari Corbett Owen in the early 2000s when Mind Over Fatter was just getting started. We dealt with lots of issues which affected my weight and, due to the personal discoveries I made, I made some life changing decisions.

I looked up Mind Over Fatter and as I started reading through the articles which Cari had written, I knew that I just couldn’t face a lifetime of torturing myself with diets anymore. I had to get to the bottom, once and for all of why I was punishing myself like this and, hopefully, put my weight issues to rest forever.

The Mind over Fatter Journey starts....

As my journey has just started, Cari has asked me to share this with you and in that way, perhaps we could help each other on this sometimes rocky road.

I know that the journey is not going to be easy. Firstly and fore mostly, the thought of parting with my scale and every day weigh in, fills me with such terror that I can’t even think about it. I tried to give it up for the first week but it was just too stressful, so I will hang onto it for a little while longer.

I know that I might gain a little more weight before it comes off. (I am SO afraid of getting back to 119kgs where I started). I know that every day might not be a 100% day – in fact I’m sure it won’t.

Listening to my body is the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do. Years of silencing it’s voice has turned it into a very timid little creature who is perhaps afraid to say what it wants. Perhaps by reading what I’ve written and me reading what you have written, we might see a pin prick of light in the distance which will lead us to Nature’s Valley (the place of natural eating and being in love with ourselves and life).

When one of us falls, the others will be there to carry/drag/lead us along. When I read things that Cari has written, it’s as if a light bulb has gone on in my head and, although my behaviour has not yet changed, at least I am now conscious of what I am doing, although I don’t yet know why.I hope you will join me on this journey – a friend along the road will make it less lonely and less scary. Together we CAN do it!

Want to ask Jenny a question? Or does her story trigger something you'd like to share about your own story?

Want to make a comment or ask Jenny a question? Or does her story trigger something you'd like to share about your own story?

What Other Visitors Have Said

Click below to see contributions from other visitors to this page...