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Three years after I lost the weight, I sat up in bed at midnight and looked up how to put ten pounds back on. I want to be clear that I wasn't ill and I wasn't drunk. I'd just run out of ideas. I'm forty one. I work on reception at a dental practice, so I spend all day being looked at by people who are already having a bad morning. Two years, thirty pounds. Diet and exercise, the boring way, no shortcuts and nothing clever. It isn't a dramatic number. I know women who've lost four times that. But I'd carried it since Amber was born and I'd tried to shift it about nine times before it stuck. And it worked. My blood pressure came down. I sleep. My knees stopped talking to me on the stairs. Here's the bit I didn't see coming. People thought I was ill. Not once. Repeatedly. Someone at work asked if the weight loss had been intentional, in that careful voice, and I've had a version of that question about six times since. Three years on, my mother in law still asks if I'm eating. And I stand in my own bathroom and I understand why they ask. Because the weight went, and the shape it was holding up went with it. My thighs are softer than they were when they were bigger. There's a bit above each knee that creases when I sit down and doesn't fully uncrease when I stand. Nobody can see it under trousers. Col says he can't see it at all. Col also can't find the butter. I stopped wearing skirts about a year in. I wear tights in July. I have a whole system. I tried, obviously. A firming cream that came up on my phone until I gave in and bought it. Twenty two quid. It tingled for about a minute and then it was just wet. Collagen in my coffee every morning for eleven months, which is longer than I've stuck at anything since my A levels. And then I fell into the internet. Which is where it properly went wrong, because every answer was contradicted by the next one down the page. Drink more water. Eat more protein. You've lost it too fast. You haven't lost enough yet. Build muscle. Don't build muscle, you'll look drawn. One woman on a forum said the only real answer was surgery. The reply underneath said surgery ruins you. I bought two lots of shapewear. Both of them gave up at the top of my thigh, which is the one part of my leg that was never the issue. After about eight months of that I stopped researching it and just started managing it. Trousers, tights, don't look. Then in July we went to buy a dress for my niece's wedding. My sister came with me. I found one I liked and I took a twelve into the changing room. I have not been a twelve since I was twenty six. It zipped up first go. And I stood there in a dress that fitted me perfectly and looked completely wrong on me, and I could not work out where the problem was, because the number was right and the mirror was not. I said, out loud, through the curtain, "I think I might need to put a bit back on." And my sister didn't say anything. That was the worst part. She's never short of something to say and she went quiet. I bought the dress anyway. It needed taking up, so I took it to the alterations woman at the back of the shop. Her name's Pauline and she's been doing it in that shop for twenty six years. She had me stand on the box and she pinned the hem, and then she stood up and looked at the dress for a bit longer than she needed to. She said, "Have you lost weight recently?" I said three years ago, about thirty pounds. She said, "Right. And you're stood here thinking there's something wrong with you, because the size is right and it still doesn't sit." I said something like, how do you know that. She said, "Because you're the fourth one this month." Then she said the thing I have thought about nearly every day since. She said, "There's nothing wrong with the dress and there's nothing wrong with you. You've lost your lining." I said I didn't know what she meant. She took a jacket off the rail behind her, turned it inside out, and made me feel it. She said, "This is a decent jacket. The outside fabric isn't what's holding that shape. The lining is. All the structure's underneath and you never see it." "Take the lining out and it's the same fabric, same cut, same buttons, and it hangs off you like a bin bag." And then she said, "That fat was doing a job you never knew it was doing. It was holding the shape out from inside. Nobody tells you that, because everybody's too busy telling you to lose it." "You didn't lose the wrong thing. You lost what was underneath, and the outside stayed exactly the size it always was." I asked her about the cream. She laughed, but not at me. She said, "Love, a cream's a finish. You put a finish on the outside of the fabric. You've not got a fabric problem. You've got a lining problem." And then I told her what I'd said to my sister in the changing room. She stopped pinning. She said, "Don't you dare." She said, "It wouldn't go back where you took it from. It never does. And you'd have handed back three years of doing the hardest thing you've ever done, for a dress." Then she said, "You haven't got a weight problem. You've got a fitting problem. And you've been trying to solve a fitting problem with food." I stood on that box like an idiot with my eyes going. I said, so what do I do. And she said, "You put the lining back. Not in the dress. On you. It goes where a lining goes, next to the skin, underneath everything else. That's all it is." "It has to be the full leg, mind. Graduated, hip to ankle. Not one of those that gives up at the top of your thigh, because the top of your thigh isn't your problem." "And it has to be comfortable enough that you'll actually put it on. Anything that hurts gets worn twice and lives in a drawer, and it's no use to anybody in a drawer." Then she said the bit that actually surprised me. "You'd be amazed what women have on underneath. I see it all day. Half the ones you're stood next to at that wedding will have something on, and not one of them will mention it." I asked what it would set me back and she said, "Less than I'm about to charge you for that hem." Then she wrote Cellumove on the back of my alterations receipt. I did not believe her. I want to be honest about that. I had a bathroom cabinet full of things that hadn't worked and I'd just been given the answer by a woman with pins in her mouth. I ordered a pair to shut my own brain up. I also ordered the wrong size, because I picked based on the number in my head rather than the number I actually am. First week, nothing I could have told you about. Comfortable, which annoyed me slightly. I had them on under my work trousers on a Tuesday and forgot about them by half ten. The first thing I noticed wasn't in a mirror. I got up off the sofa and there was no crease left behind on the inside of my knee. I'd got so used to that crease that I sat back down and stood up again to check. Then about ten days in, I got dressed in four minutes. One decision instead of the usual negotiation. Everything was held. One line, hip to ankle, and the bit above my knee wasn't doing its thing. Not smaller. I want to be exact about that, because it isn't a size thing and anyone selling it to you as a size thing is having you on. Held. Like something was underneath it again. I wore the dress in September. I sat at a round table for four hours, got up at the end of it, and didn't check anything. Now the honest bit, because I'd want somebody to give me the honest bit. Nothing underneath has changed. They come off at eleven at night and my legs are exactly the legs Pauline was pinning a hem around in July. Nothing has been reversed and nothing has been repaired. Thirty pounds doesn't come off a woman of forty one and leave everything where it was, and there is no pair of leggings that undoes that. What changed is that I stopped checking. And the checking turned out to be the whole thing. That was where the day was going. What I actually think about now is that midnight search. I was one bad week away from eating my way back to a body I spent two years getting out of, because a dress didn't sit right. Three years of work, nearly handed back, over a fitting problem. I wore a skirt to work in October for the first time since 2022. Nobody said anything, which was the entire point. That wrong size I ordered, by the way. I sent it back braced for an argument and it cost me nothing, which is the only reason I'm comfortable putting any of this somewhere people I know can read it. I've got two pairs now. They do a buy one get one free, and the practical truth is that one pair lives in the wash. I told my sister what I'd said in that changing room, and why she'd gone quiet. She said she hadn't known what to say to me, and that she'd been carrying it since July. It had not occurred to me once that she'd been carrying anything. Pauline didn't have to tell me any of that. She had a hem to do. So I'm telling you. Use them too. https://cellumove.com/products/3d-sculpting-anti-cellulite-leggings-instant-lift-smooth