Rebecca Moore has a revelation when she stops worrying about the scales...and then starts losing pounds

I have a confession to make. Don’t get too excited though because it’s not a very great confession, I imagine most women in the western world could make it, too.

I have been on a diet since the age of 15. There, I said it. It feels like admitting to murder: which, to be fair, it sort of has felt like – the murder of all my natural urgings.

The whole issue on a personal level feels taboo even though everyone knows most women waste far too many hours worrying about the calories we pick up from licking stamps. However, it still feels as though we should either be effortlessly slim and fabulous looking, or should not care that we’re not and focus on our charming wit and personality. Unless you’re a celebrity of course, and then you never stop giving away your diet secrets and confiding to the latest interviewer that if you didn’t go to the gym 20 times a week you’d be the size of a whale. “No, honestly, I would!”

When I was 15 I knew the calorie content of any chocolate bar in the school vending machine. Seriously. The tragedy is that I’ve stayed basically the same weight for over a decade now, give or take a couple of overly excessive holidays and one whole week in which I was…er…ill. So no amount of worrying or obsessing or gorging on chocolate chip cookies following a period of intense starvation has ever made much of a difference to my body. Which is disheartening, to say the least.

However, over the last year, something miraculous has happened. I’ve stopped being on a diet. And by that I simply mean that I have stopped thinking about food 24 hours per day. Because that’s what a diet does – it doesn’t make you skinny, it makes you stressed: every meal choice is like torture in which you’re asked what you’d prefer to keep – your family or your torso.

A very old (incredibly skinny) friend of mine once acted incredulous to this information as the rest of our friend group weighed up what take-away to order. Why don’t you just eat less tomorrow? It’ll even out. She’d casually said. It was so obvious that we all mocked her. Unlike the rest of us who were debating breakfast plans after our dessert course, she just didn’t think about food until she was looking in the fridge for inspiration. I envied her for the food blinkers she wore.

But then, over this past year, something has suddenly changed: I’ve rarely thought about food at all. I’ve had set meals every day by accident. And crucially, I haven’t gotten stressed about it.

If I’ve eaten a cake I haven’t had that immense panic immediately after placing the fork down. I don’t know why this is the case, but I do know that not only have I lost some pounds, I now also care a lot less whether I have or haven’t lost some weight. And that, it turns out, is much better than actually losing it.