A few years ago I watched a cine film taken of my friend, Kim, and I on holiday in Lloret de Mar. We were 17 years old. We were both dressed in flared, high waist jeans, cropped tops and cork wedges.  Which just goes to show that fashion is cyclical. If you wait around long enough nearly everything comes back in even if it should be a crime punishable by a lengthy jail term to bring some fashions back.

But what really struck me was how slim we both were. We both looked amazing. Yet I had spent most of my teens fretting about my weight.

From the age of 15 Kim and I would start the summer off on some sort of diet.  Replacement food were becoming popular so one year we went on the Limits biscuit diet. Little lumps of cardboard that could replace one or two meals a day.  I can’t recall whether we ever lost any weight as we could never keep it up for very long and looking back we had hardly any weight to lose. The only thing that lost weight was our purses. The biscuits were exorbitantly priced.

But why couldn’t I see that I looked great and, more importantly, why wasn’t I enjoying having a young, slim, crease free body. It wasn’t going to last forever.

I took my weight obsession with me when I started training as a nurse. At the time I was 9 stone but really wanted to be 8 ½ stone. If I had been successful I would have had a BMI of 18 which would not have been at all healthy. Fortunately I couldn’t resist the cheese rolls in the canteen so I never achieved my target weight.

I think I can be fairly confident that these unnecessary diets resulted in the weight issues that followed in the subsequent decades.   There were times when I was very slim but other periods of my life when I was less than happy with the way I looked and felt.  Clothes’ shopping was not to be enjoyed as the objective was usually to find a little number that didn’t make me look fat.  It didn’t occur to me that it was the fat that was making me look fat not the piece of material that I was struggling into.

Of course as a 15 year old back in the 70s I wasn’t bombarded with the cheap rubbish that passes for food now days. Although we obsessed about our weight the reality was that the majority of us were slim and healthy.  The same can’t be said for teenagers now with 1 in 5 of 11-15 year olds being obese.  Each year we spend billions of pounds   on processed food that makes us fat and billions of pounds on diet foods to undo the harm caused by the processed food. The irony being that it is often the same multinational organisation that is producing both.  It takes a huge amount of willpower to break the cycle.

So what would I tell the 15 year old me? I would tell her to step away from the diet and don’t spend your precious teenage years striving for something that you already have. But I probably won’t be listening.