Welcome to the blog

In the interest of science (no doubt) some of my class and I are starving ourselves.

Allow me to backtrack a little.

My name's Orna, and I'm a member of DIT's fourth year journalism class. As our final hurrah, for one week we're going to be running a fully functional, spots n' all, news website, which is a very exciting prospect to say the least. However, a news website requires content, would you believe, and so, while throwing ideas around we decided to start diet blogs. These blogs will follow our progress for a week, in an effort to see if the diets really work and what all the hoo-hah with faddy diets really is.

The diet industry makes serious amounts of money every year. If it's not peddling books telling us we're too bleeding fat it's pushing low fat mayonnaise on us in sandwich bars and low sodium salt in supermarkets. THE OBESITY CRISIS is more scary than monsters under the bed and the world health care system is wracked with fear as hospital hallways fill up with trolleys groaning under the weight of dangerously large potential cardiac arrests. News reports are filled with images of roaming headless fatties, no doubt lumbering off to McDonalds or KFC for another hit of that sweet, sweet, grease.

Now, I am of course being glib.

You know how people say, "I was a fat kid?"

Well, I wasn't. I was a painfully skinny child, and very tall. I was gangly, bless younger me, but I was. Very awkward indeed.

I was, however, a fat teenager.

When everyone was discussing what diets they were thinking of doing, I couldn't help but think, Jesus Creeping Christ. I've done all of them.

Between the ages of.... I'm going to say twelve and fourteen, I piled on the pounds. There could be any number of explanations as to why this is the case- less physical activity as I entered secondary school, simply eating more, poorer eating habits, a poorer diet. Whatever happened, I got fat.

When I look back now, I realise that I wasn't fat, exactly. I was overweight, and I was still very, very tall (5'10') in third year of secondary school, but everywhere I looked I was surrounded by pristine, tiny beauties. Being tall didn't help my feelings or enormity and awkwardness. I was slowly growing into my unusual height, which eventually brought me to where I am today at a nice even 6'0' but I was terribly jealous of the smaller amongst my friends. My mother is a very thin woman, and my younger brothers are respectively a rugby player and a long noodly string of skin, sinews and not much else. I was the fat child, and I didn't like it.

My family slagged me mercilessly. I shouldn't have expected much else, they're a rowdy, opinionated bunch of people, from good hardy peasant stock, and the mere idea of a few extra pounds was pretty distasteful to my mother.

I ate cereal bars, rice cakes, low fat this, that and the other. Nothing seemed to work to shift the extra weight, and at the beginning of transition year, when I was fifteen, my mother enrolled me in Weightwatchers, and a gym.

And the weight melted off like butter.

And then it came back again.

I've been on every diet imaginable. I don't think a single day has gone past in the last few years when I haven't thought about what I'm eating, judged it in terms of its nutritional value, its calorie content, its carb, sugar, fat content. Very rarely do I eat something and feel satisfied without also feeling guilty. For years I avoided eating in front of boys, so distasteful did I find the idea of someone watching me eating, let alone someone I was trying to get stuck into.

I've tried Weightwatchers, Atkins, and South Beach, to name some specific ones. I've tried low GI, and I've tried a variety of fad diets, ones intended to help you drop a dress size in a week, cough*Special K* cough.

I've tried fruit and vegetable only, protein only. I've tried drinking four litres of water a day, and I've tried eating nothing but tomatoes, popcorn, diet coke and marlboro lights. I've tried going out and dancing and partying constantly. When I drink I drink vodka and diet coke. God forbid I should get calories from alcohol.

It may seem slightly shocking to hear someone admit to practising what is essentially years of damage to their body, but at six feet tall I always figured modelling would be the easy peasy lemon squeezy way to cash and accolades. And it would be a reaffirmation of what realistically is the end goal of dieting- confirmation that you, as a person, are attractive. Attractive enough, even, to act as a standard of attractiveness for others to aspire to.

I'm twenty one now. I modelled for about a year and a half, between the ages of eighteen and nineteen. I didn't do very much, I wasn't very good at it, and I hated every minute of it. Wearing shoes that were too small, being poked, prodded and judged, changing around strangers, constantly comparing myself to others (even at my smallest I was still a size ten) and terrible pay or pro bono work paled into insignifigance when one day a certain director (who will remain nameless) of one of Dublin's more auspicious agencies asked me if I was really going to eat all the food I had on my plate, because quote unquote, "Youre not going to fit in those trousers if you do."

It was a plate of mushrooms. I smiled sweetly and told him of course not, that I wasn't really that hungry to begin with, even though we had been in the hotel where the show was taking place since seven and at four o'clock that was my first meal. My first meal being a plate of bloody mushrooms. So instead, I left the plate, stood out the back puffing away furiously on a cigarette with a waif-like mother of two and apart from favours to friends, never modelled again.

I have to wonder though. For years I have gladly accepted the idea that I am simply not good enough and recently I have begun to think that maybe, just maybe, I am.

I wish someone could have gone back and told fifteen year old me, "listen mate. When you finish growing you're going to be two inches taller than you currently are, and I know you think you're fat now, but after years of dieting and occasional starvation as well as becoming addicted to smoking and fostering feelings of regret and inadequacy, you're still going to end up over a stone heavier than you currently are. You won't be fat- you'll have huge boobs, and a bum, and let's face it, a bit of a belly, but they're not going anywhere and the sooner you accept it the happier you'll be in the long run."

To be honest, I can't say no one said that to fifteen year old me. They said it to me at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty one and someone said it to me yesterday.

The reality of the world we live in, and I can rehash every angry statement about weight, the fashion industry and advertising ever made, but I won't, is that we're supposed to be skinny. Just this morning on one website alone, I read stories about mothers' body issues influencing their daughters, about a CEO of a clothes company unable to fit into the clothes her company produces, and a quantitative, if slightly unscientific analysis of how many messages we are bombarded with yearly suggesting we are not good enough, without ever once opening a fashion magazine. It's 386,170 unhelpful messages every year, in case you were wondering.

Well, you know what, after years of messing around with my metabolism, nurturing a conflicted relationship with food and mooning over pictures of pre-pubescent models with ribs you could play a tinkly tune on, I'm done. I give up.

I have tits n' ass and nothing is going to change that. It's how I was made and there's no diet in the world that's going to make me a size zero, just like there's no diet that's going to make you as tall as a model or give you exotic Eastern European features.

I'm not going to give a lecture on the evils of the fashion industry, or the body image crisis, or the insideous nature of advertising. Everybody knows about these. I think as much as we are targeted by the weight loss industry we are equally told how unscupulous they are.

I am however, going to give you an insight into what it's like actually being on any number of stupid, expensive, limiting diets. Dieting ends in failure. Every time, you will end up miserable. You will lose weight, return to normal eating habits, and regain weight, only to start another diet again. I've spoken to personal trainers and the only thing that's going to work, time and time again, is regular exercise and healthy eating.

Next week I'm going to go on a diet, and it's a "diet" I've never tried before.

I'm going to eat whatever I want and work out every day, and change up my exercise schedule so it's a bit more craic than chasing a carrot on an endless treadmill.

I might lose weight. I might gain muscle weight. The important thing to bear in mind is: who the hell cares? If I'm happy in myself then I've already achieved that which so many people aim to with milkshakes, pills, and harsh exercise regimes.

In the meantime I'll tell you a few stories. I hope they're helpful and interesting, but one thought occurs to me- while they may be cautionary tales, they are not to be taken as guides.

To fifteen-year old me: don't try and take tips from this, you fool.