Courageous True-Life
I tortured myself over and over for years before finding my true calling…
Amy-Louise Walker, 36, from West Yorkshire
Lying with my legs in the air, I stared at the empty page of my notebook.
Scribbling 11st in bold on the page, I then started to write down my emotions.
Dear Diary… I really need to lose weight, all the other girls in my class are so much smaller than me and it makes me look fat.
Slamming the lid shut, I turned over and stalked celebrities in my favourite magazines.
Beyoncé reportedly used a liquid diet to slim down for her new role in Dreamgirls…
Something pinged in my brain. If I can look like that it’s worth a try, I thought, truly immersed in a new diet culture.
Getting ready for secondary school the next morning, aged just 14, I filled my uniform, wearing the same dress size as my age.
I had started to develop a lot faster than girls in my class, so wherever I went in the corridors, I was always out of place.
Nobody pointed it out, but they didn’t need to – I had noticed.
Coming home after skipping meals at school, I mixed cayenne pepper with water and chugged the pint as quickly as I could.
It must have been at least the 10th fad diet I had tried, but after not giving my body the nutrients it needed, I was left feeling dizzy. Plus, the weight would just pile back on as soon as I started eating a normal meal. ‘You could be a model if you lost weight,’ my family members would often remark.
Although I knew they didn’t mean to hurt me, I couldn’t help but fixate on their words.
If being slim meant that I could fit in, I was all for it – I just wanted to feel worthy.
As I reached my late teens, me and my friends would get dressed up to hit the town.
Only, as soon as we got out, nobody took any interest in what I looked like, they didn’t have a chance, as I made myself the loudest of the group.
Distracting everyone from how I was feeling on the inside.
Alone, extremely self-confident and struggling.
Leaving school to study Fine Art at Bradford University, it was a fresh start.
But that’s where the vicious cycle continued.
I’d follow weight loss programmes and eat zero carbs, all for a little bit of pride when a uni friend said I looked slimmer.
Only, since starting my fad diets, I’d ballooned in weight and never wore any smaller than a size 16, no matter how much I tried.
The whole thing was draining, and I felt like I was losing myself in the process.
To me, my happiness was controlled by the number I saw on the scale in front of me.
Once graduating, in 2009, I started working nights at my local ASDA
