Well my name’s Rachel and I’m eighteen, and I can’t remember a single point in my life that I’ve been thin – I’ve always been a chunky little kid. It’s very, very, very early that I was a normal size. I’ve always been an unhealthy size and that’s always been quite apparent especially like to family and family friends and stuff like that. So especially like as I was younger they’d go like Oh well, you’ve lost weight and they’d see that as a positive thing. But I guess a lot of the time, my Mum was like Ah you’ve lost weight you can have a biscuit. But, yeah, so I’ve always been big, and for the majority of the time it hasn’t been that much of a problem like I never got really badly bullied due to my weight or anything like that. I mean obviously you get the odd person who likes to give a dig at you but you know it’s just expected.

That is definitely a word that I’d use to describe myself, ‘obese. Especially like because when I went to go to the dieticians when I was younger, because of the way it works and it’s all in like a big wave. When you’d marked me on it, I’d be nearly off the scale, when I was a kid. So you know it’s kind of that’s something that I’ve always remembered that I have always been ridiculously obese.And to be honest I don’t know even if I lost weight, I’d still think myself as obese, because it is something that I have always been associated with.You know. There’s being ‘overweight’ and there’s being ‘obese. And I know I’m obese. You know. There’s no two ways about it to be honest.

I once did get a compliment because – I can’t remember what we were talking about but he said and I went, Oh yeah, well that’s because I’m really fat. And he went, From where I’m from, you’d be thin. I was like… [but] he meant that as a compliment. And I thought, Okay. But you know it’s just something that you do. I do consider myself to be obese. And I think I’d have to lose a fair bit of weight just to be considered overweight.

Did you say that you’d had a problem with your weight for quite a long time?

Not really. I know. I used to be, I were premature. So I was little for my age and size. And then like when I got to about 10 like I started putting weight on. And I always, like quite a lot of studies and stuff of all the universities and things like that for like your weight, because I were premature, and bones and things. So like, I don’t know, I just started putting weight on when I was like 10 years old. And then it just I used to be able to drop my weight and one month, and then the next month I’d put it back on. And it were just weird and things. But I don’t know really. Then I just stayed the one size and then I noticed, realised that I did have a problem.

And do you know why you started to gain that weight when you were about 10?

No. Because I just used to think, I eat the same as my mum and dad, and I eat the same as my friends. So why have I got, why am I putting weight on? Then I come to SHINE and realised about like metabolisms and how everybody’s different, and things like that. So it’s helped to realise that.

I realise you know I’m quite chunky all over but that’s what makes me ‘me. And no matter I’ve been on every single diet known to man, for the entirety of my life trying to make myself slim, but to be honest that just makes me really unhappy because I’m always calorie-counting, always looking at packets, and everybody else is just there enjoying. They can eat as many burgers as they like, I only have to look at a slice of cake or a burger, and I put on about a stone. It’s just the way that our family works, everyone in our family is large, I just have to accept that, you know, the amount of fruit and veg I eat is also important, I suppose, but no matter what I eat I’m always me, and I know I’ve got a big tummy and a huge arse, but, you know, that’s me, and somebody loves me for it so, I don’t have to change for anyone now.

Do you want to try to reduce your weight?

Absolutely yeah, I mean there are some days when I absolutely hate I look in the mirror and think, Oh my God. You need to lose some weight girl. And there are some days when I think, Oh, you look quite cuddly today. You know? And I do want to lose some weight, but I want to do it in a healthy way, I don’t want to lose it by starving myself. Like I’m just, you know, increasing fruit and veg, I’m increasing my exercise levels, you know, instead of slobbing about in bed all the time, I just get up and do something, you know, but it would be me choosing to do that instead of somebody telling me to do it.

From as long as I can remember really, you know I’ve got memories of like, you know when you are younger and kids play about and stuff? And it wasn’t necessarily harmful but it was always I was bigger than all the other kids kind of thing, not that much bigger, just you know, bigger than average. And maybe that is where it started, I was only a slightly bit bigger but then because of the way that I was treated by other people then it, it got worse and worse and worse kind of thing so yeah I would say maybe from like three or four years old probably I’ve probably been overweight which I know is quite drastic isn’t it really to be that young? But yeah, not, not like hugely, I mean you can see in the pictures I’m just slightly bigger, like, you know, quite fuller and things like that so, yeah, yeah I mean, yeah three or four years old I would probably say.

I’ve always been overweight from when I can remember, like a young age, and I would now put it down to I saw food as a comfort but then I don’t, but then it’s hard to say, you know, because I’ve always been overweight ever since I can remember so it’s, you know, I can’t say that it was being bullied that made me over-eat or things like that because it was from a very young age. I mean yeah like being bullied definitely a huge factor because you just get into like a circle of you are bullied because you are fat so you eat for comfort, and then you get bullied again and round and round and round so it just, yeah that that was basically the whole, that’s where it, like the peak of it kind of started. And yeah I have always been uncomfortable about it, always.

Well, I recently moved to the UK from Africa, and it was three years ago now. And just then I was happy with the weight I was when I was in Africa. But when I first came to the UK, I put on a lot of weight, possibly because of kind of stress and a new country, new experiences. I was, it was, I’d never even, I’d only ever been on holiday once, so everything was like new and overwhelming and scary. And I struggled to make friends at the beginning. So that sort of thing was kind of horrible. And I think putting on a lot of weight before then was just sort of part of it. And as I gradually, now that I’m starting to make friends and get to know people, and sort of finding out about different activities and the sort of thing I can get involved in, I do a lot more exercise now. Because I know that I enjoy doing sports. But when I first started we couldn’t do anything because I didn’t know what there was. So I spent the first two weeks in the UK literally at home doing nothing, because there wasn’t anything, I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going.

I think she was always a big girl, I mean she wasn’t a big baby, she was only what 7lbs 10ozs, that’s not huge, I mean it was huge for me because I’m quite small, but I know she was a caesarean birth and she was too big for me, but within the first six months of her life she’d gone up to about a stone.

She just was greedy really, she just drunk and drunk she just, you know, always filled herself up a lot, as it were, so she was always big. And I think I personally, I don’t think I got it under control I think I probably should have done a lot more a lot sooner in terms of her weight, I should have had a bit more control over it, but I think we always thought, Oh she’s only a baby she’ll grow out of it, it will be fine, she’ll be okay, and that, so we just fed her and we just continued to keep, you know, feeding this big appetite that she had, not thinking that actually we were actually fuelling a big problem for later on.

We allowed her to eat too much right from day one and so I have to hold my hand up to that, we did allow her to eat too much and so therefore she’s got into that sort of pattern. She was already brought up on that pattern of overeating and of filling herself up in that way, not having any sort of restrictions put on the amount that she could actually sort of, you know, nobody saying to her well actually you don’t need that much you know, nobody needs that much, stop eating that – she was never told that.

Well, I’ve always been an overweight kid. So my mum’s always referred me to the doctors.

And when you say you’ve always been overweight, how far back would you say?

Since about four or five. I think.

How did you know that you were overweight? What made you think you were overweight?

Well, I was bigger than the other kids at school. And I couldn’t really fit into the right size clothes and stuff like that. And then I used to get bullied sometimes as well. So, that’s just what let it on.

I’ve always liked eating vegetables, so we didn’t really understand why I was overweight. And I did quite a lot of exercise as well because I used to go dancing nearly every day of the week. So, we just really didn’t understand.

Have you got an ideas about what made you overweight?

No not really. I know it sounds funny but I think it’s genetic because half of my family, half of my family on my mum’s side are overweight. And all the women on my dad’s side are overweight. So.

So you think it’s just in you genes that…?

I think so yeah.

So do you think there’s anything you can do about it then in that case?

Just try my best.

On Sundays we’d always go down to my Grandma’s house and it would be big Caribbean cooked foods, so there would be about three different meats, about two or three different rices, like there’d be like a vegetable rice, and a plain rice and then like a curried rice. And loads of side dishes, like, and then there’d be starters and huge desserts, and my whole family bakes, including me, and my family’s is ginormous, like my Mum has six sisters and my Dad has two sisters and five brothers, so everybody, like it was just tradition, everyone makes a dish and carries it.

And I love baking, I’ve probably got that from my Aunt and my Grandma who taught me, so we’d always be making loads and loads of desserts. And in the weekdays as well, I’d come home and, it was like a little thing, me and my big brother and Mum used to always bake and she’d let us like lick out the dough and the mixtures and stuff, and it seems really fun now but when you look back and think how unhealthy that was, it was shocking. But yeah, so it was always loads of Caribbean foods when we were at home. It was like just kind of normal meals, but huge portions and like, if we did well at school we’d always have a big meal where the whole family would come over to celebrate or, again with birthdays, anything, any excuse there’d be some kind of big massive party with food to go along with it.