My Lifelong Ambition was to wear Jeans

I was that girl that started her life as a chubby baby, so as I went through my early years it was natural to be referred to as the chubby pretty girl. Without me noticing chubby became fat and worse was to come…….

At my heaviest I toppled the scale at over 27 stone… I wasn’t living, I was just existing (thinking about those days still makes me shed a tear.) Things normal sized people take for granted, for me wasn’t. I will give you a few examples: I dare not go and watch a film! Unheard of! Why I hear you ask? Simply put, I could not fit into the chairs at the cinema….. When I got invited to any event (please note that I only went out to functions if I had to i.e. close friends and family) I would always go to the venue before the day to see what the chairs looked like there, if the chairs had arm rest or they looked flimsy. Trust me to make a very good excuse not to attend the function on the day. Clothes were a problem, because, the biggest size I could get in London was a size 30-32 and that wasn’t big enough for me. I had to save up for once a year trips to America to get myself some half decent clothes. Even those looked so frumpy. No matter how long my journey was. When going on trains and busses I dare not sit down, even if I got on when the bus was empty because once the bus starts filling up, no one will take the seat beside me as there wasn’t much space left anyway for anyone else to sit. So all I would get would be dirty looks and people muttering under their breath. So, to save myself the embarrassment I normally won’t sit in the first place…..I could go on about my life as a 27stone lady in what should have been the prime of my life. But I won’t, because that is exactly how I felt one day.

Enough is enough. I said to myself, I don’t want to live like this anymore. More importantly, I don’t have to live like this anymore, I said to myself…. I want to LIVE. I remember shedding tears all through that night and saying to myself if there is a way out of this size and weight I will give all it takes…… I had the greatest motivation ever. Trousers! Jeans to be precise! I have always wanted to wear trousers and up to that stage of my life I had never worn them……

My life saver came in form of Cambridge; little did I know at the time that that little powder in a sachet will change ME forever. I have heard people say that being on Cambridge is not easy because it’s not the norm not to eat food. But I say, at that stage of my life it was VERY EASY. I was losing weight, every pound made me smile, and every pound that turned into stone made me happy, every dropped dress size made me spend more money on clothes. I could now go into shops and choose clothes I wanted, and hold on a minute! I wasn’t going for the biggest size in the shop. The best is yet to come! I could wear trousers. Hmm I could wear jeans! Yippee…my lifelong ambition to wear jeans has been fulfilled. I have several pairs of jeans now it’s hilarious, I wear the thing so much I can’t get enough of them. My favourite piece of clothing is jeans…Please don’t blame me or laugh but the very first time I wore jeans, I wore them the whole day and ended up sleeping in the thing…..

Thanks to Cambridge I am enjoying life, I get compliments all the time on my weight loss. I can’t stop taking pictures. I wear clothes now and people ask me where I got them from because they want them too. I have been called pretty, stylish; I have had my styles copied. Life is for living and I’m living it…… I’m not there yet but I’m a very long way from where I started…..

Oyinlola Obileye