Menopausal, depressed and 16 stone ... I called the Samaritans
It’s a shocking confession from one of Britain’s best-loved broadcasters who, in a soul-baring new book, charts a battle with the bulge that so many women will recognise
How did it all start to go so wrong for me? Right through my 30s, I’d managed to keep my weight steady between 9½ and 10½ st — perfectly acceptable for a woman of 5 ft 7 in.
Perhaps there’s a moment for everyone who sets out on the road to obesity when things begin to get out of control. And that moment is often triggered by some big change in one’s life.
I was 41 in 1991 when woman’s Hour, which I’d presented for four days a week since 1987, moved from the slot it had occupied since its inception — two o’clock in the afternoon — to the morning. I firmly believe that this time change helped trigger my weight problems.
one reason was that night shifts and very early starts are known to increase the risk of obesity. Yes, I know I wasn’t working all night but I did have to get up at five every morning.
I’d down a quick cup of coffee before driving to the studio and having plenty of coffee and buttered toast from the canteen, or maybe a couple of croissants and a latte picked up on the way in. By lunchtime, after the stress of a live broadcast, I’d be starving.
Sometimes I’d pop up to the canteen for chips with everything. More often, the editor and I would go to one of the cheap local restaurants, frequently for Greek or Turkish food and a bottle of white wine.
I’d return to the office after lunch for a conversation with the producer of the following day’s programme, pick up any books that needed to be read and then be home around 3pm. Just in time to pick up the kids from school, after which I’d collapse in a heap for an hour’s sleep.
The evening would be spent bathing the children and putting them to bed, eating with the old man — he cooked — and bed around 11pm. Alternatively, I’d go to the theatre to see a play we’d be discussing on the programme. I was exhausted and creating a recipe for disaster.
In 1993, when I was 43, I went through another big change. My husband David is a Cheshire man, educated at a solid Northern grammar school, and I had a rigidly thorough education at Barnsley Girls’ High School. we wanted something similar for our two sons, so we decided to leave London.
I remembered Brian Redhead, with whom I’d worked for a short time as a presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme, raving about a small town called Macclesfield. It was on the edge of the beautiful Peak District and had an excellent train service to London — though clearly I needed to be in London for part of each week.
So we moved — and I rented a basement flat in Camden, North London, which I quickly dubbed wuthering Depths. Thus began my new life, with David taking on the full-time childcare in my absence, and I continued to be the breadwinner and part-time mother.
I loved my job, I loved my children, I loved the countryside and I loved London — but I began to hate my life. on a Sunday evening, the family would drive me to the station to catch the 7pm train, which would have me in London soon after nine. Unfortunately, not long after, British Rail was taken over by Virgin and train times became outrageously unpredictable.
on numerous occasions, the service was so late and so poor that we’d arrive in Euston at 2am or 3am. Barely time to get to the flat before I had to leave again for work.
In the buffet, there would be horrible sandwiches and a bottle of wine to share with other regulars and, together, we called our weekly experience of travelling ‘Virgin on the Ridiculous’. Then I’d return to my lonely little hole in Camden, with a terrible sense of loneliness and dislocation. I had good friends in London but they were generally occupied with their own families.
Any determination I had to eat wisely fell completely by the wayside. In fact, I don’t recall ever cooking a decent meal in the kitchen, which had only a gas hob and microwave. on Monday afternoons, I’d pop down to the local Sainsbury’s or Marks & Spencer and fill the fridge with pre-packaged foods. Then, of course, there were takeaways. There was a pizza place nearby and an Indian restaurant. I’d phone. They’d deliver.
And there was always a bottle of wine on the go. I’m afraid there were quite a few of us at that time who treated dry white wine as a non-alcoholic drink, and I think that remains the case for a significant number of us — that old ‘wine o’clock’ thing.
How come I didn’t have the good sense to realise that, with the croissants, the toast, the sandwiches, the takeaways, the microwaved ‘quickies’ and the alcohol, my intake of calories was phenomenal? Actually, I did. I’m not a stupid woman. But I’d become so isolated and so miserable that I became the classic comfort- eater. we all know how easy it is for our best-laid plans to go awry.
we all experience incredibly stressful periods in our lives. we might change jobs, move house, go through a divorce or find ourselves in that toughest of times — being the filling in life’s sandwich, where our teenage children and our elderly parents need us and there’s no time to think about ourselves. Food is so often what we turn to for comfort.
on Thursday afternoons, I’d fetch up at Euston again, buy a French- bread sandwich and
I loved my job and my children — but I began to hate my life
‘You could be beautiful,’ he said, ‘but you’re too fat’
My brain said ‘Eat!’ — and soon I was 24 stone ON MONDAY: ‘YOU LOOK LIKE A BABY ELEPHANT,’ SPAT MUM
another latte and make my way to the train. Bless them, David and the kids were always so pleased to see me, and never once made any comment about my weight.
It’s strange that I never really became aware of how much fatter I was getting. It’s that thing of doing your hair in much the same way, applying make- up in the style you’ve always done, wearing the same loose clothes — a pair of stretchy black trousers with a nicely expansive waist and a baggy top.
So, as I looked in the mirror each day, I saw pretty much the same person I’d seen the day before. I did know I was becoming profoundly depressed, and from time to time it occurred to me that my eating and drinking were in danger of becoming obsessive behaviours. But I was too sad to make the effort to do anything about it.
In the end, I went to my doctor. She prescribed Prozac, which helped a bit. I still managed to be the bright and cheery Jenni Murray who said a welcoming ‘good morning’ to the radio audience.
But antidepressants somehow felt like a weak cop-out, so I weaned myself off them.
Then I went back to the doctor, who confirmed that, in my early 40s, I was already perimenopausal.
She immediately offered to put me on to HRT, which landed me in big trouble. When I was later diagnosed with breast cancer, my consultant oncologist had no doubt about a connection with HRT.
There was also clearly a connection with my unhealthy weight. The HRT did at least seem to give me something of an energy boost, but the depression, the comforteating and the excessive attachment to a glass of dry white wine began to kick in again.
One miserable evening in Wuthering Depths, after a particularly difficult day at the office and worries about money, about my parents who were elderly and not very well, about deadlines and about the kids doing exams,
I picked up the phone and called the Samaritans. I just needed someone to talk to. Someone who had no idea who I was and to whom I could spill out all my anxieties anxieties. I shall always be grateful to the anonymous young man who listened so patiently as I sobbed my heart out.
It was an official ‘celebrity’ dinner at the newly renovated Cafe Royal on London’s Regent Street that prompted me to think seriously about my weight. I was seated at the top table alongside the hotels magnate Lord (Charles) Forte.
As we tucked into a delicious meal, he looked at me somewhat quizzically and said: ‘You know, you really could be a very beautiful young woman, but I think you’re becoming too fat.’
Staggered by such hurtful frankness, I spent the rest of the dinner giving rather stiff responses to his attempts at making polite conversation. I left in a bit of a huff as soon as coffee had been served — but his words rankled.
The next day, I went to John Lewis and bought some weighing scales. What a terrible shock. The scales didn’t lie: I weighed 16 st. How come I hadn’t been told by my husband or my dearest friends that I’d really become quite porky? Were they all just too kind to want to hurt or upset me?
Could it be that some of my friends, all lovely and slim, rather liked having a fat friend who made them look even more attractive?
Why hadn’t I noticed that whenever we had a ‘girls’ night out’, we all ordered chips — a great big bowlful for each person — but Sally or Jane or Norma merely nibbled at a few while I scoffed the lot?
What was wrong with me? Why had it taken a complete stranger to voice those terrible words, ‘You’re becoming too fat’?
My first response was to turn to Fat Is A Feminist Issue, by the psychotherapist Susie Orbach. Fat is not about lack of self-control or lack of willpower, she believes.
Instead, it can be about anything from protection and mothering to outright rage; it expresses the experiences of women today in ways that are seldom examined. Good grief. Was that what I’d been doing? Filling the holes left by my separation from my family; panicking about being the breadwinner and keeping the whole family afloat financially; raging at my mother’s constant criticism of my weight and the perceived assumptions — from bosses and colleagues when I worked in TV —that my appearance carried more weight than my brain?
Was my weight gain an act of anger and massive defiance? Was getting fat a ‘Screw you!’ to the expectations attached to being a wife, mother and, in my case, increasingly public figure?
I knew that Susie and a group of her colleagues had developed a new kind of psychoanalysis to treat the underlying causes of distress that produce obesity. And she kindly referred me to one of these therapists. I shan’t mention the name of the woman I saw because, for me, it didn’t work. I’d turn up at her house, sit in a comfy chair — with a box of tissues on a table between us — and she’d say virtually nothing throughout the hour-long session.
As for me, I’d babble on, occasionally bursting into tears, then hand over 50 quid, leave and find somewhere to have a cup of coffee and a bun. Not quite the object of the exercise.
I know that I eventually went into performance mode, trying to get some response. I’d tell what I thought were amusing stories that had happened at work, maybe relate a few jokes or a bit of gossip I’d picked up. After a few months, I quit. What was the point of me paying to entertain her?
I guess psychotherapy wasn’t for me. Neither, it turned out, was cognitive behavioural therapy.
I tried it. Frankly, I was ready to grasp at any straw. I was getting fatter. I hadn’t spoken to any of my family or friends about my sense of desperation. And my brain was continuing to tell me that having something nice to eat would make me feel better.
The woman I saw advised me to think happy thoughts when the sadness or anxiety engulfed me, and to start thinking about food as a necessary fuel.
I didn’t stick with that for very long. Talking therapies work for some people, but for me they were just something else filling up my already overstretched schedule.
So I did the inevitable: I went
on the first of many trendy diets — none of which had any longterm effect. By the turn of the millennium, my weight gain was considerable and I was about to enter the worst decade of my life.
I was still spending the week in Wuthering Depths. Meanwhile, my mother had Parkinson’s, Dad had developed an alarming cough, and he was finding caring for her an increasingly onerous task. I was their only child and they needed my support.
I was spending part of every weekend crossing the Pennines to my parents’ home in Barnsley to make sure they had plenty of food and to help Dad cook it. An alarming number of weekdays were spent negotiating with doctors and social workers. Is it any wonder I sought release from stress at every turn?
In 2006, it all came to a head. My mother, finally, had to be admitted to a care home. As I became fatter and fatter, she became dangerously emaciated.
One morning, in the shower, I noticed my right breast had an inverted nipple. I went to my GP, who rushed me off to have a biopsy. I was on the way to see my consultant surgeon to have a diagnosis of breast cancer confirmed when my phone rang.
My mother had died that night. Without doubt, it was the worst day of my life.
For the next few months, life couldn’t have been harder. I had to continue to work through the chemotherapy — we needed the money. My father’s dreadful cough turned out to be lung cancer and he died peacefully that year.
Then, a few weeks after my treatment ended, I began to experience a pain in my right hip — the upshot of which was a double hip replacement. I knew in my heart that my weight was partly to blame. After going on yet another strict diet in 2010, I managed to lose much of my extra poundage, only to put it all back on within seven months. This is by no means unusual: research has shown that 95 per cent of dieters regain all the weight they have lost — and often more.
Now 19st, I was drowning in shame and self-loathing. I knew I’d be perceived by friends, family and anyone who caught sight of me as a failure who was LMF (Lacking in Moral Fibre). And I was only too aware of my resemblance to a chubby penguin as I waddled along the road.
At this point, I pretty much gave up. Like so many others, I’d placed trust time and again in the ‘diet gurus’ and they’d let me down.
It was a conversation with the BBC’s science expert, Dr Michael Mosley, that finally convinced me to try again. ‘Of all the diets we examined scientifically, only Weight Watchers has a high success rate,’ he told me.
This was news to me, given that WW’s business model seemingly relied on dieters coming back once they’d regained the weight they’d lost — and then paying to go on the same diet again.
Still, at least WW had now ditched all the obsessive weighing that I remembered from the 1960s. So, I signed up, resigning myself to a slow rate of weight loss — WW reckons 2 lb a week is achievable — and for a few months I managed to stay on track.
I was measuring things obsessively, counting points, writing down every morsel I’d eaten and obsessively adding up the points consumed. Yes, I lost a few pounds, but my former obsession with comfort- eating had turned into an obsession with uncomfortable eating.
Food had become a full-time job. And my early sense of feeling liberated from the need to gobble up everything on the plate soon began to dissipate. That old sense of feeling very hungry indeed began to kick in again.
No amount of hypnotherapy — yes, I was doing that, too — could stop my body from telling my brain I was famished, and my brain from shouting: ‘ You’re starving. Go ahead — eat!’
The weight began to creep up again. And up and up — to 24 st.
I was drowning in shame and self-loathing
I’d put trust in eating gurus and they let me down