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I was more scared of being seen naked at seventy pounds down than I ever was at my heaviest. I know how that sounds. It took a sixty-year-old lingerie fitter thirty seconds to explain why it wasn't madness. I'm fifty-one. I lost the seventy pounds after my marriage ended, not on purpose at first, then very much on purpose. Twenty-odd years married, and I came out the other side smaller than I'd been since my twenties, and everyone kept telling me I looked incredible. Here's what none of them knew. The weight went. The skin stayed. My thighs hang now, there's a fold above each knee, and the body that finally fit back into nice clothes is a body I will not let anyone see out of them. Which was fine, in theory, because I wasn't planning on anyone seeing it. Then I met someone. His name doesn't matter. What matters is that six weeks in he booked us a little place by the coast for a weekend, sent me the confirmation with a smiley face, and I felt my whole stomach drop through the floor. Because a weekend away means a morning. And a morning means daylight. And daylight means he sees. I know how it looks. I lost seventy pounds and my first real thought about a lovely man was how to keep my clothes on in front of him. Everyone assumes you get thin and you get confident. Nobody tells you that you can end up more frightened of being seen than you ever were at your heaviest, because at least then the skin was full. At least then it was firm. I tried to solve it the way I'd solved everything else. Shapewear, three different kinds, all of which either rolled down by lunch or left a red line I could still see at bedtime. A cream off Instagram, forty quid, tingled and did nothing. I even had a plan involving a long silk thing and never once turning on a lamp, which is a sad plan for a grown woman to make. Three weeks before the weekend, I went into a proper lingerie shop to buy something nice, and the woman who fitted me was about sixty and completely unbothered by anything. So I told her. All of it. The weekend, the lights, the skin, the whole humiliating lot. She didn't do the sympathetic head-tilt. She just nodded like she'd heard it a hundred times, and she said, "Love, half my regulars are you. You've lost the weight and you've lost the thing that held you together, and no knickers I sell you are going to put that back." And then she explained why. Why the skin hangs after fast weight loss and no amount of the stuff I'd been buying could touch it, because all of it works on the wrong layer. Why what I was actually missing wasn't being slim, I was slim, it was being firm, being held. She said it so plainly that something that had been screaming in my head for two years just went quiet. Then she said, "Right. Here's what you're going to put on under everything for that weekend. And it is not shapewear, so don't roll your eyes at me." And she told me exactly what to do. I'm not going to try to repeat it here, because she said it better than I ever could, and there's a reason it works that only made sense once I'd read the whole thing through. She wrote it down for me. I've put the same explanation on the page below, all of it, including the one honest thing about it that nobody trying to sell you something will ever admit. We went on the weekend. I'll leave the rest on the page, because how it went is not really the internet's business. But I did wake up first, and I did not reach for the curtain. If you lost the weight and you've been keeping the lights off ever since, read this before your next excuse to keep them off. It's here.