Your success is found in your daily choices.
I did not wake up one day and BAM the weight was gone. I changed my lifestyle for this. I changed my eating habits for this and I educated myself for this.
I wake up every day continuously working on this. I am dedicated to this. It’s not always easy but it’s what I want.

I have an Angel and Devil voice when it comes to my behaviours around food and drink.
In the past the devil has won more than the Angel hence why I moved out of the normal weight range into the overweight and eventually into the obese category.
These voices haven’t disappeared just because I’m now at my goal weight. They are very much still there – every single day. I just know how to adjust the volume.
Over years of re-education about why I eat certain things at certain times along side nutritional knowledge based on modern science and recent studies, I’ve come to accept that I have had to change my whole lifestyle in order to be successful in maintaining a healthy weight. To go against the so called “expert” advice and find another solution. One that truly makes sense when you look at the science behind it.

Losing weight was relatively easy if I’m honest. Most diets work if you can stick to them but I found Lighterlife particular helpful for me because it gave me a chance to stop and reset whilst losing weight quickly.
I stopped buying food, stopping preparing food and eventually stopped thinking about using food to fill a void. I learnt different ways of filling those voids.
I ate 4 foodpacks a day and that was it. Those were the boundaries. These were boundaries that I hadn’t put in place before. In fact I recognised that it’s because of my lack of boundaries around food (and drink) that I was fat. Who would have guessed??
I learnt about this in the weekly CBT sessions.

I learnt about my fear of failure and how my shame of putting the weight on actually hindered my motivation to lose it.
It was lightbulb moments after lightbulb moments and that is when I knew that I couldn’t be fixed. I couldn’t wave a magic wand and be slim and eat what I want. Lord knows I desperately wanted that.
But that wasn’t going to happen. I was going to have to recognise that this was something I had to ‘manage’ for the rest of my life.
Once I accepted that, I realised it had to just become something I do every day like cleaning my teeth. (You don’t expect to have clean healthy teeth if you don’t brush them and look after them regularly)
I’ve also come to accept that I can’t eat ‘what I want and stay slim’. I can’t just have a cheat meal or day/weekend/week off plan and not expect weighty consequences.
I’ve recognised that my old eating habits were the reason I got fat, not Covid, not lockdown, not that family bereavement, not that all-inclusive holiday, not my PCOS, not work stress but how I used food to cope with those issues and how my thoughts around them perpetuated the problem.

Those issues / events are not going to go away. There will always be social occasions, holidays, work stresses and I have to learn to live with them.
Although I now recognise that I’ve used food to cope with them in the past It took years to recognise the actual emotion I was feeling and which foods I would reach for to ‘mask’ that particular emotion.
Chocolate for loneliness, wine for a desire to be accepted in an male dominant environment, cake mixture (yes the raw mixture) for when I was feeling nostalgic and wanted to go back to an earlier, easier time.
This combined with poor advice about what to eat and when to eat over the years added to my weight problem.
I was in denial.
I would use phrases like ‘I deserve it’, it’s healthy sugars so it’s ok, it’s fat free, I’ll start again tomorrow.
Or I would eat because I thought you had to when you felt dizzy because I was told it’s due to low blood sugar. Bullshit!
I was taught that “little and often” is the key to managing my weight and that I should snack on ‘free’ foods like fruit (and even pasta) throughout the day to help me manage my cravings and therefore my weight. I was also told that low fat is definitely what I should be following so I spent years looking for low fat foods not realising they were high in sugars (that didn’t matter though right? Because it was the fat that made us fat!). More Bullshit!!!!
I’ve now learnt that the ‘low fat’ and the ‘little and often’ advice was the worst advice anyone ever gave anyone ever in the history of the World. EVER!!!
By doing this, my body developed a resistance to the insulin that it triggered, when I consumed high carbohydrate (even high protein) foods. This actually made me want more of them. (The science behind that is fascinating and the subject of my next blog).

But the hardest part about maintaining my weight loss is societies abundance of Carbohydrate heavy foods. Everywhere you look you see carbohydrates and poor advice telling us to eat them. (NHS are still recommending the Eatwell plate which says half your plates should be starchy carbs) 😡
It’s not that we are uneducated (although I used to believe this) it’s because we put our trust into the so called experts to give us the correct information and hope that if they recognise that the information is based on outdated evidence, that they utilise new studies and evidence to change that advice.
People still believe they have to follow a low fat diet and eat a mainly whole grains diet. It’s just bullshit. It’s this advice that’s turned us into a nation of overweight and obese people. Even our children are growing up in this category.
The abundance of convenience foods at cheap prices hasn’t helped this either. But that’s a story for another blog.
Restaurants have adapted their menus to suit vegetarians, vegans, gluten free.
When are we going to see main stream ‘low carb’, ‘sugar free’ or ‘Keto’??
Please can we see more of these options in Society.