For years, I thought I ate really well.
I ate clean, I trained, I was active, and I genuinely believed I had a pretty good handle on food.
Then I met Jason, we got engaged, and I went wedding dress shopping.
I found the dress.
Of course I did.
And of course it was three and a half thousand pounds.
I loved it, but I just couldn’t justify spending that much money on a dress I was going to wear once.
Then, on the way home, I got a phone call from the shop.
They could let me have the dress for £1,500.
There was just one problem.
It was too small.
I was only one size away, so in my head this was absolutely no problem whatsoever.
“I’ll lose the weight.”
The woman on the phone was less convinced.
“You can’t lose a rib,” she said.
Challenge accepted.
I bought the dress.
At first, I felt pretty confident. I cut back, ate really clean, was “good”, and when I tried the dress on again I was nearly there.
Easy.
Then Christmas happened.
Six weeks before the wedding, I went back to try it on.
Disaster.
They could barely do it up.
I had a cleavage at the front and a cleavage at the back. You genuinely couldn’t tell which way I was facing.
I was absolutely furious with myself.
So I did what lots of people do when panic sets in.
Something ridiculous.
I went on an almost completely no-carb diet.
And I don’t mean I stopped eating bread, pasta and potatoes.
I mean if something contained carbohydrate, I basically didn’t touch it.
For six weeks, I was a miserable bitch.
I have absolutely no idea why Jason still married me because I was hungry, grumpy and probably horrendous to live with.
But I did it.
The wedding day arrived.
I got into the dress.
In fact, by then it was actually slightly too loose.
And I didn’t have to lose a rib.
Success?
Well… sort of.
Because once the wedding was over, I went straight back to eating the way I always had.
I think the first thing I ate was a burger.
And then the weight started creeping back on.
That experience taught me something I wish I had understood properly years earlier.
It doesn’t matter how “clean” your diet is.
You can eat the healthiest food in the world, but if you consistently eat more calories than your body needs and uses, you can still gain weight.
That was the point when I started looking properly at calories.
And suddenly all those innocent little things started making sense.
Milk.
Sauces.
Handfuls of this.
A bit of that.
Things you barely register as food can still contain a surprising number of calories.
I realised that I wasn’t necessarily eating badly.
I was simply eating more than I thought.
So I started tracking.
And I’ve tracked, in one form or another, for around ten years now.
Not because I want to obsess over every mouthful.
Quite the opposite.
For me, tracking took the emotion out of food.
It stopped that mentality of, “Oh well, I’ve been naughty now, so the day’s ruined.”
Nothing is ruined.
It just gets logged.
You see what you’ve eaten, understand where you are, and carry on.
And that has probably been one of the biggest changes for me.
My weight stopped bouncing up and down.
No dramatic diets.
No starving myself for six weeks.
No panic.
Just awareness.
So I suppose I really should thank that one-size-too-small wedding dress.
It taught me more about food than years of “eating clean” ever did.
And for the record:
I got into the dress.
I kept all my ribs.
And I learnt that calories really are evil little bastards.
