I stood staring at my laptop, mouth wide open in awe as I stared at the facebook photo my friend H had just posted.
When I first started at Bra Towers, I worked in the Customer Services department. The company was relocating to the midlands, and a group of around fifteen girls (myself included) had all been recruited as the company’s new Customer Service “Dream Team” based at the shiny new head office in Leamington Spa.
We all started as consultants, but before long it was obvious that we needed some team supervisors, and H was recruited as such, along with another colleague Emma. As the company expanded the management took advantage of the human resources degree that Emma had, and she moved on to head up our HR department...which essentially was just made up of her! I was promoted into Emma’s CS supervisor role alongside H, and over the course of a few years we formed a strong friendship, based around our jobs, our twenty a day fag habit, and generally just the fact that we found we shared the same daft sense of humour.
H has always been one of the most beautiful women I know. Striking even. With soft kind eyes, and calming nature, lustrous auburn hair (that could literally dazzle you it was always so glossy) and a mutley-like giggle that you couldn’t help but laugh at, she is just a genuinely beautiful person. Like myself though, H wasn’t a size zero. You didn’t notice it to be fair because despite carrying a few extra pounds, her curves always went in and out in the right places, and when she walked, it wasn’t with the clumsy heavy footedness of someone who was carrying any weight...in fact I often felt she needed to wear a bell round her neck so that you could hear her approaching, so light on her feet she was! When she left Bra Towers and started a family, naturally she gained more weight, and I know she won’t mind me saying that that extra weight finally started to take its toll.
I had seen comments on facebook about runs that she’d been doing recently. I watched as her recorded distances grew steadily longer and longer, but having not seen her for a couple of years I had no idea she’d decided to lose her weight...Until I saw the photo on facebook. What was staring back at me was my beautiful friend holding up a pair of size 22 jeans in front of her now teeny size 8 body. 7½ stone lost in under one year! Now like I say, I have always though H was stunning, but the look on her face in that photo screamed to the world “Look at me! Look what I can do!” and it literally brought a tear to my eye.
She popped into the office today to say hello, which gave me a little time to catch up properly and very gingerly hug her teeny tiny skinny-minny self (I was a little concerned if I squished too hard I may crush her), and naturally I asked her secret. “Pure and simple” she told me; it was weight watchers, not going into her additional 49 points allowance and cutting out the carbs wherever possible. That combined with exercise and being a busy mum, meant that ten months later she was 7½ stone lighter, and positively beaming as a result.
Now don’t get me wrong, a massive weight loss like that is inspirational enough, but what I found more inspirational was the way H was so meek about her achievements. She was so concerned that she’d sound like a fanatical weight watchers devotee, standing on her soap box and telling us all how she did it, that she became shy as she told us about the road she’d taken to lose the weight. It just showed me that her journey was a personal one. She knew the plan worked for her, but she also wasn’t going to pretend it had been easy.
When H was bigger, she never really complained about her weight, she wasn’t like me, moaning that I wasn’t blessed with a thin gene, or hankering for the days when I could fit my ass into a pair of size 10 jeans. Her feelings about her weight were kept under her hat. H never let her shape or size define who she was then...and in the very same way, she won’t let her weight loss define who she is now. Today she reminded me, that who we are, and what we can achieve when we put our minds to it, comes from our core. It’s not from how we look on the outside, nor is it controlled by our environment, or our peers. It’s our very essence, our core and our hearts that make us who we are, and how successful we’ll be in life. The minute we stop caring about what life, people or society expects, is the minute we’ll truly start to achieve our potential. Thank you for the reminder H (you gorgeous beautiful lady) It was exactly what I needed to help me refocus xx
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