Well here goes!.

My name is Emma. I am a sugar addict. Well, ok my name isn’t really Emma, but for the purpose of the blog it’s going to be. This weekend seemed like a perfect weekend to start off my diary of a sugar addict as tomorrow I turn 25 and it will be ten years since I started on my journey through various diets and eating plans. All have failed.

Let me start from the beginning… When I was five years old, I was the skinniest, shortest girl in the classroom. How things went so disasterously wrong, I honestly don’t know. Did I eat a lot? Not really. But somehow I went from the smallest to the biggest kid in the classroom in the space of a few years. I was like any normal kid. I didn’t like vegetables. I loved sugar. Perhaps too much.

The years passed with my weight getting higher and higher. Bullying started pretty early in my childhood although I was never punched or kicked. It was always verbal. I guess if you ask the people now who used to pick on me if they were bullies they’d tell you they were messing about. But to me, the kid who used to cry herself to sleep at night, It was bullying.

My weight gain didn’t go unnoticed however. In primary school, I was taken out of a sex education class to see a dietician. Our new headmaster was overweight herself and saw me as a cause for concern. I saw that dietician once. She asked me what foods I liked, what foods I didn’t like then basically told me and my parents I was a lost cause. That hurt.

I ventured into secondary school a few years later trying to reinvent myself. There were so many new people to impress and for the first time in my life I was really showing an interest in boys. They, of course weren’t showing an interest in me.

It was when I was fifteen I decided to do something serious about my weight. I’d had enough of the taunting and looking different to everyone else. Ok I wasn’t the only fat kid in school but I certainly felt like it. I started eating breakfast, skipping lunch and instead filling up on a bottle of previously frozen water. For dinner I would eat whatever my family were eating which didn’t really include vegetables unless it was a Sunday! Don’t get me wrong my parents were not fat. They never forced me to eat what I did. I was fat because it passed through my mouth. No one elses.

After a few weeks, I lost a little bit of weight but starving myself during the day was taking its toll on me. I was ratty, tired and completely uninteresting in anything. So, I tried replacement meal milkshakes. I did this for a full year, doing an exercise video every day in my bedroom and taking more of an interest in physical education lessons. I was too embarrased to do sports with the other kids and regularly wrote myself sick notes to get out of it, but my teacher was understanding. She put me in a squash court by myself and a skipping rope for an hour each week.

I lost four stone over a year on milkshakes. I was finally getting into size 12 clothes which, for me was an achievement. I managed to stay the same weight until after I finished secondary school where things took a slight turn for the worse…