About to start on a joyless January diet? Read this and you might think twice… I was convinced regaining my figure from ten years ago would make me happier. I was wrong

During the late spring of last year, I lay on the floor of a hotel bathroom in central London while paramedics crowded round me.

Moments earlier I had collapsed, after dining out with my husband. One minute I was fine, the next doubled over in pain, heart racing. Then everything went blank.

My husband tells me I was unconscious for almost 15 minutes. As I came to, I remember hearing his voice, small and seemingly far away: ‘Is she going to be OK? Please… is she going to be OK?’

Something was beeping; a heart monitor. I couldn’t see anything, but next came a gentle, unfamiliar voice, saying: ‘Farrah . . . Farrah . . . can you hear me?’

So this is what happens when you die, I remember thinking.

That night, and for months afterwards, I was subjected to CAT scans, MRIs and various other tests. I’d had a seizure but how and why no one knew. Up until that moment nothing dramatic had ever happened to my body — despite punishing it over the years with extreme dieting and exercise.

But, at the age of 44, it was pushing back and I felt, for the first time in my life, tremendous guilt.

I had just emerged from a strict six-month diet, triggered by a vow I’d made to myself on my 43rd birthday in November 2021. I had wanted to get back to the same weight I was when I was 34 and wore a size 10. 

I had gained almost 2 st since that time, could no longer fit into a single item in my wardrobe and felt tired and heavy. I had a choice: surrender to middle-age or fight back.

Ever since I hit my 40s, my body has grown and dropped and basically betrayed the person I felt I was.

The horror of catching sight of myself in a shop window — or worse, opening the camera on my phone to be presented with a worm’s-eye view of my entire face — has stopped me in my tracks: ‘Who is that woman? Where did Farrah go?’

At this very moment there are thousands of women (and men) plotting similar escape routes from the bodies they find themselves in. This is January after all, the month of denial, self-flagellation and many hours spent wondering how long it will take to fit back into your clothes.

This was certainly me as I hit 12st on the scales — a weight I had never thought possible on my slim 5ft 5in frame. My body puckered in places I did not know could pucker.

I had little rolls under the band of my bra. Sometimes I’d be in the shower and feel a new hummock of flesh.

I decided the best version of myself was when I was the editor-in-chief of Women’s Health — a role I took incredibly seriously by living the super-fit lifestyle I eulogised about in the magazine’s pages. This was when I was happiest — or at least, this is how it seemed. 

So I made a plan: I would exercise four or five times a week. I would start every morning with hot water and lemon, go sugar-free and eat salads, vegetables, protein and little else.

I found a picture of 34-year-old ‘old me’, taken as I was mid-way through a half marathon. I had small, buoyant breasts, defined biceps and legs as muscular as a shire pony. ‘Wow… look how good I used to look,’ I thought wistfully.

And of course I did. That was part of the unofficial job spec. I had always reasoned that if I was going to advise women to spend half their lives making spirulina smoothies and half their income on Reformer Pilates classes, then I had to do that, too.

I exercised six times a week — spin, weights, Pilates. On my day off I would walk 16km with the dog. I rarely touched carbohydrates.

Protein was my thing. My personal trainer gave me a ‘mean’ recipe for turkey bolognese, the mean presumably being that there was no pasta involved. I ate so much of it even my fingernails smelt of poultry. My kitchen worktop meanwhile was like Goop’s electronics department.

There was a Vitamix for shakes, a spiralizer for courgetti and a dehydrator for small, shrivelled pieces of pineapple and strawberry that served as healthy snacks.

I would make my own ‘treats’ out of blitzed dates, almonds and protein powder and convince myself they tasted better than a Snickers.

I downed green juices that made me retch and took pills for hair, skin, sleep. My insides were a shaken snow globe of raw kale, mince and Holland & Barrett’s omega-3 capsules.

Was I happy living my life this way? It’s hard to say. Vanity is such a relentless master that I never pondered whether I was happy or not.

Though I had always been relatively healthy, this was a new level of ‘healthy’ — and every photo from that period reveals it as such, including my wedding pictures, which show a minuscule-waisted image of me in a size-8 dress.

But it was not sustainable. The following year I was offered a much bigger job — editing Cosmopolitan — that required long hours. I also had a marriage to tend to.

Something had to go. And so, bit by bit my Gwyneth-style lifestyle wound down. The exercise classes became less frequent as I had to get into the office ever earlier.

‘Clean’ eating became trickier as I was required to lunch with agents, writers and PRs.

And here’s what else happened: I discovered I loved food. I mean really loved it. I adored dessert. Joy came in the form of a cheese platter shared with my husband.

A glass of wine felt far better than an hour’s spin class. So my body started to change. The weight gain was gradual at first — a few kilos a year. Barely enough to really notice.

Then lockdown happened. Suddenly, like the rest of the world, I found comfort in a sourdough starter and homemade cakes.

By the time the world re-emerged I was a size 14-16; not big by anyone’s standards but larger than I had ever been, or indeed felt comfortable being. My feet ached when I woke in the morning. I was breathless running up stairs.

For about 18 months I flitted between various weight-loss plans — Noom, a little bit of Weight Watchers, some intermittent fasting. Nothing stuck. That’s when I decided something drastic had to be done, namely attempting to go back to my 34-year-old lifestyle.

I started eating things like boiled eggs for breakfast, a big tuna salad for lunch and a plate of fruit for dinner. I also got reacquainted with the spin studio, took up yoga and downloaded the best of Joe Wicks.

Bit by bit the ‘old me’ started to reappear. I slid back into jeans I had not worn since the turn of the decade. Designer dresses I had been given in a former life suddenly fitted again. I woke up in the morning and my feet did not look like puff pastry pie tops.

‘Wow, your face shape has changed,’ a colleague I had not seen in months said to me over Zoom. And it had; I had cheekbones again. The little sack of fat that had taken refuge under my chin had scarpered.

And I had clavicles, actual clavicles, once more.

Within six months, I was almost back to my 2012 weight and wearing my size-10 clothing again. I felt elated but also, a little empty.

Because here’s the thing: I did not feel the same as I remembered feeling back then. This is because I was 44. And knackered. A one-hour spin class would leave me blitzed for the rest of the day. My shins hurt. So did my back.

A tuna salad just didn’t cut it when much of the joy in my fortysomething life came from food — meals out with my husband; a slice of cake after a day’s gardening; the sheer pleasure of sitting down to a meal I had cooked myself.

I was slim, sure. But my life felt equally slim; withered to a measly approximation of what it once was.

At weekends, the gardening I loved so much was sacrificed in favour of Peloton classes.

My ritualistic morning coffee, enjoyed in silence at the break of dawn, was exchanged for hot water and lemon, sipped to the soundtrack of a 90-decibel Vitamix shake-making session. (Because what other time did I have to do it?)

I also realised that exercising this amount required spending a large portion of one’s life in leggings, like those hard-boiled American mums in sitcoms who only seem to exist in tropical-coloured Lululemon Lycra. 

This also defeated the entire point of fitting into all my lovely old clothes since my new 24/7 wardrobe was basically leggings, yoga bra and a muscle T-shirt.

And here’s something else I discovered: while I was the same weight as I had been all those years ago, my body was not the same. My bum sort of slid away. One day it was there, big and bolshy like a newly appointed head girl, the next it was gone.

My face looked long and anguished too, like something Edvard Munch might have painted. Then, completely out of the blue, I collapsed in that central London hotel room in April 2023.

I will never forget sitting in A&E in the dark of night with weeping plasters in the crooks of both arms from the numerous blood tests. I was wearing a pair of very expensive designer trousers that I had not fitted into in years but which were now damp with my own urine. (This is what happens when one has a seizure. I believe the medical term is ‘evacuation’.)

No one has worked out exactly what happened that night. There is, however, some evidence to suggest that extreme weight loss can lead to seizures. Who knows if this was the case with me.

What I do know is that it was enough of a scare to make me take stock of what I was doing. Which is to say, chasing a version of ‘me’ that no longer existed.

Over the past seven or so months, I’ve quietly, steadily packed some of the weight back on again. Honestly, I’ve stopped trying to count now.

Today, aged 45, I eat healthily-ish but leave lots of room for the joy that eating brings: dessert with loved ones, cake at the weekends with the papers, wine after a hard day at work. 

I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about this idea of chasing who we once were. Because I know I’m not unique. After all, how many women do you know who dream of having the body they had at 20, 30, even 40? 

How many middle-aged men do you see bench-pressing their entire body weight in order to reclaim the flat stomachs they once owned?

But what every one of us is denying is this: the utter futility of chasing ghosts.

Because the cruelty of pursuing who we once were is that we can never quite get there.

You can throw as much hair dye, expensive creams, personal trainers and tweakments at it as you like, but it will only ever be, at best, a good approximation of who you once were and, at worst, a ghoulish one.

I read an article once that said adults over 40 perceive themselves, on average, to be 20 per cent younger than they actually are. That’s why it can be such a shock to see an exterior that no longer matches who you feel yourself to be.

And here’s something else I’ve learned over the past year: our memories of who we thought we once were are not to be trusted. It’s easy to bunch a load of broken recollections together of a fleeting moment in our life and think that was who we were. 

When I look back at the picture of me at 34, running through the streets of Vancouver in a marathon I’d had almost zero time to prep for because I was doing 14-hour days at work, I saw a story of success. I looked good, therefore that must have been the narrative of my life.

But this was also the year I was fraught with anxiety about whether to start a family or not. In the end, after years of trying, we decided to turn on our backs on the idea.

I was also burnt out at work and panicked about the future shape of my career. I felt enormous angst about letting key friendships fall by the wayside.

And if I look closely at that picture, I remember I wasn’t even happy with how I looked then. I thought my legs were too muscular and my hips too wide. I didn’t want the runners behind me to see my bum pummelling behind me like two punchbags so I put a jumper around my waist despite it being 70 degrees. 

And that year, like every year before it, I was busy comparing myself to the woman I was ten years earlier. Oh, the deeply tragic irony.

These days I honestly don’t know how much I weigh. On a good day I get into my size 12 jeans. On a normal day I wear a size 14. Some days I am happier with how I look; other days I am not. I have issues. We all have issues. That’s how it goes.

But here’s what I have discovered since that fateful night of the seizure: how to enjoy my body for what it can do rather than how it looks.

I appreciate that I can still move around a garden; that it can bend and stretch and that it can still get me from A to B without getting breathless. I also appreciate that in ten years’ time I’ll probably want to look exactly as I do right now.

Ageing is not easy. If it was, there wouldn’t be a billion-dollar anti-ageing industry. But understanding that with age comes change makes it a little easier.

I no longer have the expectation that I can ‘turn back time’ — certainly not unless I want heavy consequences. Instead I have the expectation that if I look after my body, it will, with a bit of luck, look after me.

And that feels like a New Year’s resolution worth sticking to.

• Farrah Storr writes the newsletter Things Worth Knowing