I'll be on weight-loss jabs for life - to silence my diet-obsessed late mother who called me a baby elephant: JENNI MURRAY
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It's 12 years since I had the gastric sleeve operation that I thought would end my lifelong nightmare of weight gain, weight loss, followed by yet more weight gain. Within a year I lost half my body weight, going from 24 st to 12 st and, in my early 60s at the time, I was happy with that. As was my mother.
![[Jenni as a schoolgirl with her mother. By 13 she was going to WeightWatchers]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/01/22/17/94395753-14313673-image-a-15_1737566517619.jpg)
Throughout the whole process I could hear her applauding, saying, 'Well done, love. You've done the right thing and you'll never have to worry about gaining weight again.'. Of course, I wasn't really hearing my mother. She died nearly 20 years ago, but her voice still fills my head on the subject that obsessed her throughout her life. Namely my weight.
![[Jenni, pictured in 1991, says: It seems to me we underestimate the impact a mother can have on the weight of her child and how that child learns to perceive herself]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/01/22/17/94400043-14313673-image-a-16_1737566870843.jpg)
Such was her strength of feeling about the subject that when visiting me at university for the first time, she refused to come and see the house I was living in because she was so incensed that I'd unwittingly gained 2 st and resembled, in her cutting words, 'a baby elephant'.
My mother was naturally slender, but she was always dieting. She lived in constant fear of putting on a few pounds and my father no longer being able to fit her tiny waist between his two hands. I, as she was often at pains to point out, seemed to have inherited Daddy's larger frame and Grandma's 'fat gene'. (My maternal grandmother was as round as she was long, but never seemed to concern herself with it or worry about being fat.).
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