Weight – a lifetime battle

If we look back to my "early years" I realise that I had problems with my weight as long as I can remember. I was a chubby during Kindergarden, I was a chubby child in school and I was chubby teenager. Never really on the fat side of life, but always with a little bit too much weight on my bones. Appetite control or healthy weight loss were never even discussed in our family and, as far as I know, in other families. Both my parents liked a good meal, both did not count calories and the portions were always more than enough.

You have to understand, we are talking the sixties and early seventies. Weight loss or even healthy weight loss was not discussed amongst people, the medias were not yet aware of health and weight issues. Nobody spent a thought about appetite control, because now was really the first time after World War II, where almost everybody had enough to eat, the economy was recovering and for most people and families the life got better and better. Nobody wanted to control anything and for sure nobody was interested in appetite control, because eating was just too nice.

The biggest blame, if one really wants to use the word, was to put on my granny. For her it was important to have always enough, better more than enough, food on the table and in the house. For her having some overweight was not bad, it was necessary to survive the next war. For sure, she did not want to hear anything about appetite control. Quite contrary, I remember her saying many times that I should be happy that I have such a "healthy" appetite. Healthy weight loss, although obviously never mentioned, would have been an oxymoron for her.

Years, actually decades, later I do not have a hard time to understand her and I certainly hold no grudge. Experiencing and surviving two big wars and bringing children through the second, certainly was not an easy life and things like diet, appetite control or healthy weight loss, were never even crossing her mind, because everybody was basically trying to stay alive and not to starve.

Be that as it may, during my childhood and my first teenage-years I was on the heavy side and not even unhappy about it. Most other kids were the same as I was, I always had friends. Never being the most popular kid, never being unpopular. Just running with the majority and within this majority, nobody discussed, or thought about, diets, appetite control, or healthy weight loss. We were just a bunch of happy, chubby kids, playing, running around and just having fun and nobody thought that anything is wrong with that.

Getting out of my childhood and out of puberty, I still was not on the slim side of life. Clearly at that age, I am talking 16, 17, one gets really and seriously interested in the "other half" of mankind, or as some call it: men! And unfortunately this was also the time, when I first realised that being slightly overweight might be a good thing for a war, but was seriously limiting my chances with the boys. So I began "weight management" or better, what I believed at that time to be weight management.

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