Weight Management During the Teenage Years of My Generation

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.

The most popular boys were , of course, the ones which were successful in sport and these boys were only interested in the really slim girls. So I started to raise the issue overweight, appetite control and weight management at home, because I wanted to become one of them. It was unnecessary to speak to my granny about it, so I tried my parents. Weight management was for my father “terra incognita” but at least my mother had started to at least think a little bit about it. It was the end of the seventies and in magazines, newspaper and TV appeared the first reports. And they all said. overweight could be responsible for many health issues, which were appearing in the society.

So, together with my mother, I tried somehow to organise the eating habits of our family in a way, which would enable me to lose some weight and carry on an active weight management.

As you probably know by yourselves, this was the time when counting of calories came in fashion, when watching sugar, fat and carbohydrates became quite normal amongst the female part of the society, weight watchers made their first real public appearances, in general: weight management suddenly was normal! At least for most people, but clearly not for my father! For him weight management was plain and simple a modern way to take a away the good tasting, homemade food and replace it vegetables and plain rice.

My father clearly opposing any sort of weight management, it was left for me and my mother to do it and we tried more or less every diet and every meal plan, we could find. Some was easy and clearly understandably, some were more of the “spherical” kind. Some worked really well, others were spectacularly unsuccessful.

This way I spent my teenage years and my early adulthood with changing weight. A diet worked for some time, I lost weight. Then it got boring or I lost my self-control, I gained the weight again. My weight management was very clearly trial and error. And this up and down stayed with me until my first child.