Dear Holly,
I have never been particularly thin, but recently I was told by my doctor that I'm clinically obese and I am beginning to think I should try to lose some weight. The problem is I'd much rather sit in an armchair and scoff enough Domino's pizza to feed a family of five than subject myself to the humiliation and trauma of exercise. I can't afford to have a gastric band, so my only option is to diet. I've tried a number of different diets so far, with varying degrees of success. I did manage to 'drop a dress size' through eating nothing but Kellogg’s Special K for a month, but I ended up shitting blood and the whites of my eyes went orange, so eventually I had to stop and the weight quickly piled back on. Do you have any suggestions?
Harriet
Plymouth
Dear Harriet,
There's a girl in my class called Frances Hall, who everyone refers to as 'Frank the Tank' because she's so big and fat. There's a rumour going round the school that she has to eat a Mars Bar every 15 minutes or she'll die. Once, when we were in PE, Frances tried to climb really high on the apparatus while the teacher wasn't looking, but because she's got such fat sweaty hands she slipped and fell on Emma Patterson and couldn't get up again. It took the teacher and a bigger boy from the top class to roll Frances off, and Emma ended up in a wheelchair for nearly a year. Also, Frances has to have a big wooden chair like the teacher because she once sat on one of the children's plastic chairs and it shattered into a thousand pieces.
I asked my mummy why Frances is so fat and she told me it had something to do with her jeans. I don't really know how this can be, because I can't imagine she would ever be able to find a pair of jeans big enough to fit her enormous tree-trunk legs, but maybe this is the key to your own battle against obesity.
Hope that helps!
Holly
