Why Weight Loss Never Lasts
A Free ADHD Breakthrough Guide
On This Page...
1- Welcome to Lose For Life™
If you've found your way here, there's a good chance this isn't your first experience of trying to lose weight.
Maybe you've been trying for years.
Perhaps you've followed diets, joined slimming groups, exercised, changed the way you eat or made promises to yourself that this time would be different.
Maybe you've lost a significant amount of weight before, only to watch some or all of it return.
Maybe you repeatedly lose some weight, but something seems to happen before you get where you want to go.
Perhaps you've started again so many times that you've stopped counting.
Or maybe you're losing weight successfully right now, but somewhere underneath the excitement is a quieter worry.
How do I make sure this time lasts?
And if you have ADHD, have been diagnosed later in life, are waiting for an assessment, or simply recognise some ADHD-related patterns in yourself, there may be another layer to that history too.
Maybe you've had times when you've thrown yourself completely into losing weight.
You were focused.
Motivated.
Completely all in.
You planned everything.
Thought about everything.
Perhaps you couldn't imagine not continuing because, at that moment, it mattered so much.
And then something changed.
Your attention moved somewhere else.
The enthusiasm that had felt so strong seemed to disappear.
Things you had been doing almost effortlessly suddenly felt much harder to keep doing.
Maybe you've experienced that enough times that you've started wondering why you can want something so intensely and still struggle to stay connected to it.
Whatever your history looks like, you may know what it's like to begin with hope.
To think, this time I'm going to do it.
And maybe there have been times when things really did feel different.
You were doing what you'd intended to do.
You were making progress.
You started believing you might finally have cracked it.
Then, somewhere along the way, something changed.
Maybe life became a little busier.
Heavier.
Harder to manage.
Maybe things simply stopped feeling as easy to keep doing as they had before.
Perhaps your progress slowed or stopped.
Perhaps some or all of the weight returned.
Perhaps you found yourself starting again.
Or perhaps you're reading this before that has happened again because you desperately don't want it to.
And when you have experienced regain, there's a particular kind of disappointment that can come with finding yourself back somewhere you worked so hard to move away from.
You may remember the effort.
The hope.
The milestones.
The clothes that fitted differently.
Maybe other people noticed too.
They commented on how much weight you'd lost.
Asked what you were doing.
Told you how well you looked.
And if the weight returned, suddenly being noticed could feel very different.
Perhaps somebody asked whether you were still following the plan you'd told them about.
Someone commented on your weight or your eating.
Or somebody who hadn't seen you for a while said absolutely nothing, but you still found yourself wondering whether they'd noticed.
Sometimes nobody needed to say anything at all.
You already knew.
And with that can come frustration, disappointment and sometimes an enormous amount of shame.
How did I let this happen again?
What are people going to think?
Why can I never seem to keep it off?
And perhaps there are other questions you've asked yourself too.
Why do I always start so strongly and then lose momentum?
Why can something feel so important to me one week and somehow feel miles away from me the next?
Why do I keep putting off something I genuinely want to do?
Why can I know exactly what I intended to do and still find myself doing something completely different?
Maybe you've avoided seeing somebody because you didn't want them to see that you'd regained weight.
Maybe you've dreaded returning to a slimming group, gym or place where people had watched you lose it.
Perhaps you've felt embarrassed telling somebody that you're starting again because you've told them that before.
Or perhaps you've found yourself explaining the regain before anybody even asked.
Yeah, but I love food too much.
Life's too short to be on a diet all the time.
I was miserable trying to maintain it anyway.
Maybe saying those things felt easier than admitting how disappointed you were that the weight had come back.
Or perhaps, after saying them for long enough, you genuinely started believing them yourself.
Maybe you decided you were done with dieting.
Done worrying about your weight.
Done putting yourself through it.
Until, at some point, being at a higher weight began to feel uncomfortable again.
Perhaps it was how you felt physically.
How your clothes felt.
How you felt when you saw yourself in a photograph or caught your reflection.
Maybe concerns about your health returned.
Or perhaps you simply reached a point where, despite everything you'd told yourself about being done with weight loss, you knew you wanted to lose the weight again.
And there you were.
Facing something you'd hoped you would never have to begin again.
Your experience may not have looked like that at all.
But if weight loss has repeatedly become harder to sustain, or you've found yourself wondering whether the weight will eventually return again, you may know the frustration of asking yourself why.
Why can I want this so much and still struggle to make it last?
Why does something that can feel so achievable at one point become so difficult at another?
Why do I keep ending up back here?
And when you ask those questions enough times, it's understandable that eventually you start looking for an explanation.
Maybe you need more discipline.
Maybe you need more motivation or willpower.
Maybe you don't want it enough.
Maybe you're simply incapable of being consistent.
And if consistency, organisation, focus or following through have been things you've struggled with in other areas of your life too, perhaps those conclusions have started to feel even more convincing.
Maybe you've heard that you're forgetful.
Disorganised.
That you leave things until the last minute.
That you start things and don't finish them.
Perhaps you've watched other people seemingly just decide they're going to do something and then keep doing it, while you've wondered why your own experience can feel so different.
And after enough experiences like that, it's very easy for a difficulty with consistency to stop feeling like something you experience and start feeling like something you are.
Or maybe you just haven't found the right weight-loss approach yet.
Perhaps somewhere out there is the diet, plan or way of eating that will finally suit you so perfectly that this time you'll be able to make it last.
And underneath all of those possibilities may sit a much more painful one.
Maybe the problem really is you.
Maybe there's something about you that you can't seem to change.
Something other women appear capable of doing that you simply aren't.
Maybe you're destined to spend the rest of your life losing weight, struggling, starting again and wondering why you can't seem to get this right.
If you've ever thought any version of those things, I understand how painful those questions can become.
Because they were once my questions too.
I’m Sabrina, and I created Lose For Life after spending much of my own life trying to understand why, no matter how determined I was that the next time would be different, I kept finding myself back in a place I had promised myself I would never return to.
And there was something I wouldn't understand until much later in my life.
I have ADHD.
I received my diagnosis later in life, long after many of the experiences I'm going to share with you had happened.
So I didn't live those years knowing I had ADHD and neatly understanding my behaviour through that lens.
I lived them wondering why I could become so intensely focused on something and then lose that focus.
Why I could desperately want to do something and still put it off.
Why I could know what I wanted to do and still find myself doing something else.
Why food could sometimes feel incredibly loud.
Why I could be completely all in and then somehow become completely disconnected from something that had mattered enormously to me.
And why consistency seemed to be something other people could apparently just decide to have.
My ADHD diagnosis didn't suddenly rewrite my history.
But it did eventually give me more information with which to understand parts of it.
By then, I had already learned an enormous amount about myself, changed many of the behaviours and responses I'd once struggled with and developed a very different relationship with food and weight.
But later understanding ADHD made some of those experiences make even more sense.
And that's important to me as we begin this Guide.
Because whether you have an ADHD diagnosis or simply recognise some of the experiences we're going to explore, I don't want us to begin by deciding that ADHD explains everything that's ever happened with your weight.
We're going to do what I eventually learned to do with my own history.
We're going to become curious about it.
I didn't know then what I would eventually come to understand about my own weight-loss history.
I only knew that I needed to understand why this kept happening.
And perhaps that's part of what has brought you here too.
Your experiences with weight loss may be completely different from mine.
Your experiences of ADHD, or the patterns you recognise in yourself, may be completely different too.
Your answers may be different.
But if you've come here wondering why weight loss hasn't lasted for you, why knowing what you want to do hasn't always meant being able to keep doing it, or how you can stop another attempt eventually becoming another return to the beginning, that's the question I want to help you begin understanding.
2- I Thought I Needed To Try Harder
I know what it's like to reach the conclusion that perhaps the problem really is you.
Because that's exactly where I had ended up too.
I'm going to share some of my story with you.
Not because I expect your story to look like mine, but because looking differently at mine eventually helped me understand what I had never been able to see in my own.
And perhaps, as we go, it will help you begin looking differently at yours.
By that point in my life, I had been trying to lose weight for years.
I was living with morbid obesity, struggling with binge eating and desperately wanting my life to change.
I didn't just want to lose weight. I wanted to feel comfortable in my body.
I wanted to stop feeling as though food had so much control over me.
I wanted to stop starting again.
And I wanted to believe that somewhere there was an answer that would finally help me do all of those things.
So I searched for it.
I'd done Slimming World.
Weight Watchers.
Keto.
SlimFast.
Rosemary Conley.
I'd worked with personal trainers, followed different diets and made more promises to myself about starting again than I could possibly count.
And I don't mind admitting that whenever I came across a new diet or weight-loss approach, I was usually willing to give it a go.
Not because I was foolish enough to believe every promise that was made to me.
Because I was desperate enough to hope that maybe this one would finally be different.
Maybe this is the one.
Maybe this is the thing I've been missing.
Maybe this time will be different.
And sometimes, it did seem different.
For a while.
I'd make progress.
I'd feel motivated.
I'd become completely focused on what I was doing.
There were times when weight loss seemed to occupy an enormous amount of my attention.
I could throw myself into it.
Think about it constantly.
Feel absolutely determined that this was the time I was going to change everything.
And I'd think perhaps I'd finally found the answer.
But sooner or later, I would struggle again.
And I didn't understand how I could go from feeling so completely committed to something to struggling to keep doing the very things I'd been so determined to do.
And the place I returned to most often was slimming clubs.
Over the years, whenever I struggled, I seemed to hear many of the same messages.
I needed to be more motivated.
I needed a more positive mindset.
I needed to be more disciplined.
I needed to show more self-control.
I needed to be more consistent with following the plan.
So it's hardly surprising that those became the explanations I gave myself too.
If I wasn't getting the result I wanted, I needed to try harder.
If I wasn't following the plan consistently, I needed to become more consistent.
If I kept struggling, I needed to change my mindset.
And sometimes those messages came with something else.
Judgement.
Maybe you're not trying hard enough. Maybe you're making excuses.
Maybe you're being lazy.
Maybe you just don't want it enough.
Perhaps you've heard some version of those messages too.
From a weight-loss professional, or from somebody in your life.
From something you've read or watched.
Or perhaps those messages have felt particularly familiar because you've heard versions of them outside weight loss too.
You need to be more organised.
You need to stop putting things off.
You need to finish what you start.
You need to concentrate.
You need to stop being so impulsive.
You need to just get on with it.
And eventually, from your own voice.
For me, those messages became so familiar that I stopped questioning whether they were actually helping me understand why I was struggling.
I just kept questioning why I couldn't seem to do what I was being told to do.
And I remember one particular weigh-in at my slimming group when that feeling really came to a head.
I'd had an emotional week.
I'd struggled with my eating, I already felt low about it, and that struggle showed up as a gain on the scales.
I was still standing there at the scales, with other women queued behind me waiting for their turn, when my group leader asked me where I thought I'd gone wrong.
Usually, I probably would have given some version of the answer I'd given before.
I'd had a bad week. I'd get back on track. I'd do better next week.
But that day, I was honest.
Standing there, knowing other women were waiting behind me, I admitted that I was struggling.
I was eating when I was emotional.
I knew I was doing it. I knew it was affecting my weight.
And I desperately wanted to stop.
What I didn't know was how.
I was told that I needed to change my mindset, be more consistent, stop eating my emotions, follow the plan more closely, show more self-control and be more positive.
The problem was, I already understood what I was being told to do.
I knew I needed to stop emotionally eating if I didn't want emotional eating to keep affecting my weight.
I knew I needed to follow the plan if I wanted the plan to work.
I knew being consistent would help me make progress.
None of that was the part I didn't understand.
What I didn't understand was how to do those things when they were the very things I was struggling with.
So I asked.
How?
How do I stop eating when I'm emotional?
How do I change my mindset?
How do I become more consistent when consistency is the very thing I'm struggling with?
I wasn't trying to be difficult. I wasn't looking for permission not to follow the plan.
And I wasn't saying that I shouldn't have to change anything.
I genuinely wanted to understand.
There was something happening between knowing what I wanted to do and being able to keep doing it, and I didn't know what it was.
And that wasn't a feeling I only recognised around weight loss.
There were other areas of my life where I could know what I needed to do.
Want to do it.
Sometimes desperately want to do it.
And still struggle to understand why actually doing it, or continuing to do it, could become so difficult.
But I didn't have an explanation for any of that then.
I remember feeling almost desperate for somebody to help me understand that part.
But the answer brought me back to much the same place.
Be more positive.
Follow the plan better.
Show more self-control.
Try harder.
And then something happened that stayed with me for years.
My group leader pointed towards several women in the room who had successfully reached their goal and were maintaining their weight.
They were presented to me as the evidence.
Look at them.
They'd followed the plan.
They'd succeeded.
They were proof that it worked.
And there I was, still standing at those scales after another gain, with women waiting behind me.
At the time, I didn't question what I was being told. I looked at those women and thought, She's right.
They'd been given the same plan I had.
They'd managed to do what I was struggling to do.
So if the plan worked for them and I couldn't seem to make it work for me, the conclusion felt painfully obvious.
The difference must be me.
And because that feeling wasn't confined to weight loss, it landed somewhere much deeper.
I didn't just think I was bad at losing weight.
There were times in my life when I genuinely wondered whether there was something wrong with me.
Why could other people seem to just do things that I could desperately want to do and still struggle with?
Why could I be so completely focused and determined at one point, then struggle so much at another?
Why did everything seem to have to be all or nothing with me?
I didn't know I had ADHD.
I didn't have that information with which to look at myself.
So when I couldn't understand the difference, I did what I'd been doing with my weight-loss history for years.
I made the difference mean something about me.
I left that group feeling ashamed, embarrassed and incredibly low.
I didn't leave wondering whether there might be something missing from the answer I'd been given.
I left wondering what was missing in me.
And I was terrified of going back.
Terrified of another difficult week.
Another gain on the scales.
Another conversation about where I'd gone wrong.
Another room full of women who seemed able to do something I was becoming increasingly frightened that I couldn't.
But I still desperately wanted to lose weight.
And that combination of desperation and shame would lead me to make a decision that changed everything.
3- When Desperation Took Over
I wasn't ready to give up on my goal of losing weight. I still desperately wanted it.
But after what had happened at the slimming group, the thought of walking back through those doors again filled me with dread.
And I just want to stop here for a moment and acknowledge something.
I'm not suggesting that every slimming-group leader would have responded to me in the way mine did that day.
There are incredibly kind, supportive and empathetic people working within weight loss, and another woman may have had a completely different experience.
This was simply mine.
And for me, that experience had left me frightened of going back.
And I had another tendency that I didn't understand particularly well at the time.
I could ruminate.
A difficult experience didn't necessarily end when the experience itself ended.
I could replay it.
Go back over what had been said.
Think about what I should have said.
Relive how I'd felt standing there.
And then go through it all again.
So I wasn't only remembering what had happened at that slimming group.
In my mind, I had revisited it over and over.
The embarrassment.
The women standing behind me.
The feeling of being compared with women who had succeeded.
The conclusion I'd taken away from it that perhaps the difference really was me.
By the time I thought about going back, I wasn't walking towards an experience that had happened once.
I was walking towards something I'd already relived countless times in my own head.
I couldn't bear the thought of standing on those scales after another difficult week and seeing another gain.
I didn't want to stand there with women waiting behind me while I tried to explain what had happened.
I didn't want to sit in that room feeling as though other women had somehow worked out how to do something I couldn't.
And I didn't want to be asked again where I thought I was going wrong when I already knew some of the things I was doing, but still didn't know how to change them.
I felt ashamed, embarrassed and completely stuck.
But I still wanted to lose weight, so instead of giving up on that goal, I looked for another way to reach it.
And eventually, desperation overruled better judgement and I bought diet tablets.
And to be clear, they weren't prescribed to me by a doctor.
They were dodgy, unlicensed tablets, and I knew taking them came with risks.
I've always had a tendency towards impulsivity.
There have been plenty of times in my life when something has felt compelling in the moment and I've acted before fully thinking through what might come afterwards.
I didn't understand that part of myself particularly well then either.
But combined with how desperate I had become to lose weight, it could lead me towards decisions that carried very real consequences.
And this one did.
What makes that decision even harder for me to look back on is that I'd already had a weight-related DVT in the past.
I already knew what it was like for my weight and my health to collide in a serious way.
But I became so desperate to lose weight that I convinced myself the risk was worth taking if they helped me lose weight.
The tablets caused a bowel obstruction, and I ended up in hospital. But that wasn't even the worst part. While I was there, I also developed another blood clot.
I was a mum lying in a hospital bed because my desperation to lose weight had taken me to the point where I'd been willing to risk my health to do it.
Some women reading this may recognise that level of desperation immediately.
Others may read what I did and think, I would never have taken that risk.
And I completely understand that.
Our experiences don't have to look the same for us to recognise something of the feeling underneath them, because desperation around weight doesn't always look like taking dangerous diet tablets.
Sometimes it looks like starting another restrictive diet you already know you won't want to live on forever because right now you just need something to change.
Sometimes it's spending money you can't really afford on the next thing that promises it might finally work.
Maybe it's another plan.
Another programme.
Another piece of equipment.
Something new that brings with it another burst of hope that perhaps this is finally the thing that's going to make everything different.
Sometimes it's pushing your body harder because you're frightened that what you're doing isn't enough.
Sometimes it's avoiding photographs, clothes, mirrors, social occasions or people you haven't seen for a while.
And sometimes it isn't visible to anybody else at all. It's simply the amount of your life that becomes occupied by wanting your weight to change.
The thinking about it, worrying about it, making promises to yourself, feeling disappointed when things don't go to plan and hoping that this time will finally be different.
Because when you feel trapped somewhere you desperately don't want to be, and you've tried repeatedly to get out of it, that can come with an enormous emotional cost.
My desperation eventually took me somewhere dangerous.
But strangely, it was lying in that hospital bed that finally made me stop and think.
For years, whenever another attempt hadn't worked out, my response had been to look forwards towards the next one.
What diet would I try?
When would I start?
What would I do differently?
How could I make sure I tried harder this time?
There was nearly always another thing to try.
And I was very good at becoming excited by the possibility of something new.
A new approach could bring new motivation.
A new plan could feel like a fresh start.
For a while, it could give me something to become completely focused on again.
What I didn't understand was why that intensity so often failed to become something I could keep doing.
But lying in that hospital bed, I started looking backwards instead.
Not just at the last diet or the last gain on the scales, but at all of it.
I thought about all the years I'd spent trying to lose weight.
The diets I'd followed, the slimming groups I'd joined and the weight I'd lost and regained.
I thought about the emotional eating I'd struggled with, the promises I'd made to myself, the times I'd started again and all those questions I'd asked about why I couldn't seem to get this right.
I didn't suddenly have the answers.
But for the first time, I began to wonder whether repeatedly looking for the next thing to try was ever going to give me the understanding I was searching for.
I knew I needed to start looking somewhere different.
I decided I wasn't going back to the slimming group.
Instead, I took the money I'd been spending on my monthly slimming-group fees and decided I would use it to buy books.
If I didn't understand how to change my mindset, I wanted to learn.
If I didn't understand why I was emotionally eating or how to begin changing it, I wanted to learn.
And if there were things about nutrition, psychology, the brain and behaviour that could help me understand what had been happening to me, I wanted to learn about those too.
And if there's one thing I've always struggled with, it's not knowing.
My mind wants to understand how things work.
If something doesn't make sense to me, I can find it incredibly difficult to simply leave the question sitting there unanswered.
I can go over it.
Pull it apart.
Read about it.
Follow one question into another and then another until I've gone far deeper into something than I originally intended.
And once the question became why does this keep happening to me?, that was exactly what I did.
I didn't know then that there would eventually be another lens through which I could understand that intensity too.
All I knew was that I couldn't accept not understanding anymore.
So that's what I started doing, whilst I was still in hospital.
And when I came home I continued reading and also bought myself a notebook to keep track of what I was learning, and on the front I wrote:
LOSE THIS WEIGHT FOR LIFE.
I didn't have a framework and I certainly didn't have everything worked out.
In fact, I had no idea what came next, or where that search for understanding would eventually lead me.
Because I was still the same woman who had stood at those slimming-group scales asking one very simple question.
How?
But this time, instead of waiting for somebody else to give me an answer, I started searching for it myself.
4- Looking At My History Differently
As I searched, read and learned, I began coming across ideas I'd never really considered before.
One of those was around perception, and how the way we frame an experience can influence what we see when we look at it.
We can become so used to viewing something from one particular perspective, or through one particular lens, that we don't necessarily realise there may be parts of the picture we're not seeing.
And that really made me think.
Because for years, I'd been looking at my weight-loss history through one very particular lens.
Failure.
I'd spent years trying to lose weight and repeatedly finding myself back somewhere I didn't want to be.
And somewhere along the way, I had drawn a conclusion from that history.
I couldn't lose weight.
And for me, that conclusion sat alongside others I'd collected about myself over the years.
I couldn't stick to things.
I was too inconsistent.
I was all or nothing.
I could become completely fixated on something and then somehow lose interest in it.
I could have the best intentions in the world and still not do what I'd intended to do.
At the time, I didn't understand those things through an ADHD lens.
They simply felt like more evidence about the kind of person I was.
Maybe you've drawn similar conclusions from your own history.
Maybe you've told yourself you're just not very good at losing weight.
That you've tried everything and nothing works for you.
That you're somebody who can never seem to stick to anything long enough.
Maybe you've watched yourself become incredibly enthusiastic about a new plan, routine or way of doing things, only to struggle when that initial intensity changed.
Or perhaps you've simply come to believe that, for whatever reason, losing weight is something you just can't seem to get right.
I hadn't consciously decided to see myself or my history that way. I didn't sit down one day and label my entire history a failure.
But every time I regained weight, that was what seemed to matter most.
That was the ending.
And the ending had gradually become the way I interpreted everything that had come before it.
So as I continued learning, I became curious about what I might see if I stopped looking at my history only through where each attempt had eventually ended.
And before I tell you what I began to see in mine, I'd like you to start thinking about yours too.
Not analysing it yet, or trying to work out what went wrong.
Just looking back at the whole of it.
The diets you've tried.
The plans you've followed.
The times you've started.
The progress you've made.
The times things became harder.
The things you've become completely absorbed in for a while.
The things you've intended to come back to and somehow haven't.
And, if you've experienced it, the weight you've regained.
Because until I started doing this, I hadn't really been looking at the whole of my history at all.
I had mostly viewed it through the times I had regained weight.
Those were the parts that seemed to count.
I remembered the disappointment.
The clothes becoming tighter again.
Returning to a slimming group and stepping back onto the scales knowing I'd regained some or all of the weight I'd previously lost.
Every regain seemed to wipe out the success that had come before it.
And because I had a tendency to go over difficult experiences again and again in my mind, those endings could become incredibly loud.
I could revisit what had gone wrong far more easily than I could recognise everything I'd successfully done before it.
Maybe you've done something similar.
Maybe when you think about your own weight-loss history, your mind goes immediately to where you are now, what came back, how long it lasted or the fact that you're having to think about losing weight again.
And if that's where the story ends in your mind, it's easy for everything that happened before it to become overshadowed by what happened afterwards.
That's what had happened to me.
But when I started looking at the whole of my history, rather than judging it only by where each attempt eventually ended, there was evidence I had completely overlooked.
I'd lost one stone.
I'd lost two stone.
I'd lost three stone.
At one point, I'd even lost five stone.
I'd watched the numbers on the scales come down. I'd reached milestones. I'd collected Slimmer of the Week certificates.
I'd followed plans successfully and made changes that had resulted in me losing significant amounts of weight.
And I'd done it more than once.
The regain hadn't erased any of that.
I might not have maintained those losses, but I had still lost the weight in the first place.
For years, I had used my history as evidence against myself.
Now, for the first time, I started looking at what that same history might actually be telling me.
And this is where I'd like you to turn that same curiosity towards your own.
Have you lost weight before?
Maybe you've done it once.
Maybe twice.
Perhaps you've done it so many times you've stopped counting.
Maybe you've lost a few pounds, reached your first stone, then your second.
Maybe you've lost several stone.
Perhaps you've reached your goal weight before, or come incredibly close to it.
And I know how tempting it can be to look at those experiences and immediately add a but.
Yes, I lost weight, but I put it all back on.
Yes, I lost three stone, but I couldn't keep it off.
Yes, I reached my goal, but look where I am now.
I understand that temptation because I did exactly the same thing.
But on this occasion, I'm going to stop you at the but.
Not because what happened afterwards doesn't matter. It does, and we're going to look at that too.
But right now, I want you to sit for a moment in what came before it.
Yes, I lost weight.
That's it.
No qualification. No cancelling it out with what happened next.
For this moment, we're simply looking at the evidence.
If you have successfully lost weight before, then just as it was for me, that evidence tells us something important.
You can lose weight.
And perhaps that's particularly important to recognise if you've spent years collecting other evidence against yourself.
Every abandoned plan.
Every burst of motivation that disappeared.
Every intention you didn't follow through on.
Every time you were told you needed to be more disciplined, organised or consistent.
Those experiences may have become part of the story you've built about what you're capable of.
But they don't get to erase the evidence sitting here either.
That was such a simple realisation for me, but it challenged the story I'd been telling myself for years.
I'd spent so long believing I couldn't lose weight that I'd never stopped to recognise the contradiction sitting inside my own history.
I could.
I'd done it repeatedly.
And perhaps you've just recognised the same contradiction in yours.
Because if you've lost weight before, the fact that it later returned doesn't change the fact that you were able to lose it.
It doesn't answer the question of why it came back.
But it does change the question.
And once I recognised that, another question became impossible for me to ignore.
If losing weight was something I'd already demonstrated I could do...
why did I keep finding myself back at the start?
5- What Else Kept Repeating?
Once I'd recognised that I had successfully lost weight before, it changed where I looked next.
Because if I stopped treating every regain as evidence that I couldn't lose weight, I was left with another question.
What kept happening afterwards?
So I went back to my history again.
But this time, instead of looking at how much weight I'd lost, or judging each attempt by where it eventually ended, I started looking for what else had been happening along the way.
And once I did that, I began noticing things I hadn't really connected before.
The weight loss wasn't the only thing that had repeated.
I would lose weight.
Something would change.
I would gradually move away from some of the things I'd been doing.
Eventually, some or all of the weight would return.
And at some point, I would find myself going back to weight loss and starting again.
Then, sooner or later, some version of the same thing would happen again.
But when I looked more closely, I started seeing repetition within that too.
There were times when I would turn to food when I was emotional.
Times when one difficult meal or one difficult day would become several.
Times when I would find myself eating almost automatically, even while part of me was thinking, Why am I doing this?
Times when my thinking would shift from I'm doing really well to I've ruined it now.
Times when I'd become completely focused on losing weight, want to change everything at once and feel as though nothing could possibly knock me off course.
Then at another point, that intensity could disappear and I would struggle to understand how something I'd been so absorbed in could suddenly feel so much harder to keep doing.
There were times when something new would capture my attention.
A new diet.
A new fitness plan.
A new routine.
Sometimes even a new piece of equipment.
And the possibility of doing things differently could bring another rush of enthusiasm with it.
There were things I'd fully intended to do later that somehow kept becoming later.
Tomorrow.
Next week.
Monday.
And times when I would move so far away from what I'd been doing that eventually another restart felt like the only way back.
At the time, I didn't see any of those things as connected.
Some of them simply felt like more evidence that I was inconsistent.
Too impulsive.
Too all or nothing.
That I got obsessed with things and then gave up.
That I could never just seem to do anything normally.
And some of those experiences had existed far beyond weight loss.
I could become intensely interested in something.
Throw myself into it.
Think about it constantly.
And then struggle when that interest or attention changed.
I could put something off despite genuinely intending to do it.
I could make decisions in the moment that didn't seem to match what I'd wanted for myself before it.
I could go over difficult experiences repeatedly in my mind.
And because I didn't understand why I seemed to experience things with such intensity, there were times when I didn't just think my behaviour was unusual.
I thought I was.
I remember genuinely wondering whether I was broken.
Whether I was some kind of freak who simply couldn't seem to operate in the way other people did.
I didn't have the understanding then that I have now.
So instead of recognising things I experienced as something I could become curious about, I often turned them into conclusions about who I was.
Not every regain happened in exactly the same way.
And not every one of those things happened every time.
But when I stopped looking at each weight-loss attempt as a separate success or failure and started looking across the whole of my history, I could see behaviours, thoughts and responses that had repeated often enough for me to recognise them.
And this is another point where I'd like you to become curious about your own history.
Not to judge it.
Not to decide what you should have done differently.
Just to notice.
When you think about the times weight loss became harder to continue, what else was happening?
Maybe there were times when you found yourself emotionally eating.
Maybe one meal that hadn't gone to plan became, I've ruined it now, I'll start again tomorrow.
And tomorrow became Monday.
Maybe you found yourself eating almost automatically, even though part of you knew you hadn't intended to.
Perhaps you became more restrictive, then found yourself overeating, then responded by becoming even more restrictive again.
Maybe you could start with enormous enthusiasm, planning everything, changing everything and feeling completely committed, but struggle when that initial intensity changed.
Perhaps something new could make you feel motivated all over again.
A different diet.
A different routine.
A new way of exercising.
Something that made you think, yes, this is what I needed.
Maybe there were things you genuinely intended to do but kept putting off until later.
Perhaps you stopped doing one or two of the things you'd been doing, then gradually moved further and further away from them.
Or perhaps none of those examples sound like you.
Your repeated behaviours, thoughts or responses may have looked completely different from mine.
And even if you recognise ADHD-related experiences in some of them, we're not trying to decide yet what caused each one.
We're not trying to identify all of yours yet either.
For now, I simply want you to consider whether the weight returning was really the only thing that repeated.
Because that was the question that changed something for me.
For years, I had seen each regain almost as an isolated ending.
Another attempt that hadn't worked.
Another failure.
Another reason to go back and try to lose weight again.
But now I could see that there were behaviours, thoughts and responses appearing across different attempts.
They weren't random individual moments anymore.
There was repetition.
And when something repeats often enough, we can begin to recognise it as a pattern.
That's what I had started seeing in my own history.
Patterns.
And because these particular patterns had repeatedly appeared around the times my weight loss became harder to continue, or the weight eventually returned, I came to understand something that changed the entire trajectory of my life.
I didn't have a weight-loss problem.
I had Weight-Regain Patterns.
And I want to give you a moment to consider what that distinction might mean when you look at your own history.
If you've successfully lost weight before, but have repeatedly struggled to sustain those changes, could it be possible that you've been interpreting every regain as evidence that you still haven't solved weight loss?
Maybe you've responded by looking for another diet.
Another plan.
Another way of eating.
Another attempt to become more motivated, disciplined or consistent.
Or perhaps another new approach has felt particularly compelling because new can bring with it that feeling of possibility again.
Because if the problem is weight loss, it makes complete sense to keep looking for a better way to lose weight.
That's exactly what I had done.
But my history was beginning to show me something different.
I had repeatedly demonstrated that I could lose weight.
What I hadn't understood were the behaviours, thoughts and responses that also seemed to keep repeating around the times maintaining those changes became harder.
Those are two different things.
And recognising that distinction changed where I needed to look for answers.
Instead of continuing to ask:
Why can't I lose weight?
I could begin asking:
What keeps repeating around the times I struggle to keep it going?
And perhaps that's a question worth becoming curious about in your own history too.
Because before we can understand why Weight-Regain Patterns matter, or the role they may have played in making weight loss harder to sustain, we first need to understand what they actually are.
6- What Does That Repetition Mean?
So what exactly do I mean when I talk about Weight-Regain Patterns?
Weight-Regain Patterns aren't simply the weight coming back.
They're behaviours, thoughts and responses that can repeatedly show up throughout our weight-loss history and contribute to us moving away from some of the things that had been supporting our weight loss.
Some can be incredibly obvious.
Others can become so familiar that we don't necessarily recognise them as patterns until we stop looking at one individual attempt and start looking across our history.
For me, emotional eating was a big one.
Food had become connected to almost every emotion I experienced.
Sad? Food could make me feel better.
Stressed? Food could give me relief.
Bored? Food gave me something to do.
Disappointed? Food could soften the blow.
Happy or celebrating? Food belonged there too.
I wasn't necessarily making a conscious decision each time that food was the solution.
It had become a familiar response.
And because life continued to contain emotions whether I was trying to lose weight or not, that response didn't magically disappear simply because I'd started another diet.
But emotional eating was only one of the patterns I began recognising.
And over the years I've worked in weight management, first within the NHS and later through my own work with women, I've seen many of the same kinds of patterns appear again and again.
Not in every woman.
Not in exactly the same combination.
And certainly not for exactly the same reasons.
But often enough that there are some Weight-Regain Patterns I now recognise as particularly common.
Emotional eating.
Comfort eating, boredom eating, stress eating or using food as a reward.
Impulsive eating.
Overeating or binge eating.
Picking and grazing.
Automatic eating attached to particular times, places, people or routines.
Food noise and repeatedly thinking about food, wanting it, resisting it and thinking about it even more.
All-or-nothing thinking.
Perfectionism and rigid rules around what doing weight loss properly is supposed to look like.
Negative self-talk.
Procrastination.
Avoidance.
Restarting.
Waiting until you feel more motivated, more focused or more ready before doing something you already intend to do.
Repeatedly making plans that work brilliantly when everything goes to plan, but become difficult to adapt when it doesn't.
Starting with enormous enthusiasm, doing everything at once and then struggling to sustain everything you've asked of yourself.
Putting something off until tomorrow, next week or Monday even though you haven't changed your mind about wanting to do it.
And gradually drifting away from things you had been doing without ever consciously deciding to stop.
Maybe you're already recognising some of those in your own history.
And if you have ADHD, some may feel familiar beyond weight loss too.
ADHD can affect things such as attention, organisation, time management, completing tasks and impulse control.
That doesn't mean every time you've procrastinated, eaten impulsively, abandoned a plan or struggled to organise yourself was because of ADHD.
And it doesn't mean every woman with ADHD will experience the same Weight-Regain Patterns.
But it does mean that, for some of us, ADHD can be useful additional information when we're trying to understand why certain patterns have felt particularly familiar or persistent.
I wouldn't have known to look at my own history that way when I first started doing this.
I didn't know I had ADHD.
I just knew what I repeatedly experienced.
Perhaps you've found yourself eating almost automatically while part of you was thinking, Why am I doing this?
Maybe you've made one choice you hadn't intended to make and immediately thought, I've ruined it now.
Perhaps one meal became the rest of the day.
The day became the weekend.
And the weekend became another promise to start again on Monday.
Maybe you've created such rigid rules around doing weight loss properly that when real life made those rules difficult to follow, adapting them didn't feel like an option.
So instead, you stopped.
Perhaps you've repeatedly told yourself you'll plan your meals tomorrow, go shopping later, get back to the gym next week or start taking things seriously again when life calms down.
You haven't necessarily decided not to do those things.
You still intend to.
But the action keeps moving further into the future.
And this is something I can recognise far beyond weight loss.
Time has never felt particularly reliable to me.
Something can feel important and urgent when I'm thinking about it, and yet something I genuinely intend to do later can keep becoming later.
Tomorrow can feel like the place where I'll definitely do it.
Until tomorrow becomes today and somehow it moves forward again.
What I now understand is that difficulties with time management and differences in the way time is experienced can be part of ADHD too.
Again, that doesn't mean every postponed intention is ADHD.
But it gave me another way to understand experiences I'd previously interpreted simply as procrastination, inconsistency or me failing to do what I'd said I would do.
Maybe you've had periods where you've thrown yourself completely into weight loss.
You've planned everything.
Tracked everything.
Changed everything.
Bought the new equipment.
Started the new fitness regime.
Found the new recipes.
Perhaps you've spent hours researching the new approach because suddenly you need to know absolutely everything about it.
And for a while, you've felt completely focused on it.
But somewhere along the way that intensity has dropped, your attention has moved elsewhere or maintaining everything you started doing has become harder.
Not because you consciously decided that losing weight no longer mattered.
But because what you were doing stopped translating into what you continued to do.
That one was particularly confusing for me.
Because when I was interested in something, I could be intensely interested in it.
I didn't feel unmotivated.
Quite the opposite.
I could research it, plan it, buy what I needed for it and become completely absorbed in doing it.
So when that intensity changed, I interpreted the difference as another personal failing.
Why can't I ever just keep doing things?
Why am I always all in or all out?
Why do I need something new again?
I didn't yet have another way of making sense of that experience.
Maybe avoidance has been part of your experience too.
You stop getting on the scales because you're frightened of what you'll see.
You avoid returning to the gym because you've been away for so long that going back now feels uncomfortable.
You stop looking closely at your eating because part of you already knows things have changed and you don't want to face how much.
Or perhaps negative self-talk has become so familiar that you barely recognise it anymore.
Why did you do that?
You were doing so well.
You've got no self-control.
You always do this.
You're never going to change.
That's important because the thing that happened and the way you responded to yourself afterwards are two different things.
Eating something you hadn't intended to eat is a behaviour.
Turning that behaviour into evidence that you're weak, greedy, useless or incapable of changing is a response.
And if that response happens repeatedly, it can become a pattern too.
For me, those conclusions could become incredibly personal.
I didn't simply think, I did something I hadn't intended to do.
I could turn it into, What is wrong with me?
Why can't I just be normal?
Why does everything have to be so extreme with me?
At my lowest points, I genuinely wondered whether I was broken.
Whether I was a freak.
I know those are strong words.
But they're the words that describe how different and inexplicable I sometimes felt to myself before I had the understanding I have now.
Sometimes there isn't one obvious moment where everything changes at all.
Sometimes it's a gradual drift.
The meals you were planning become a little less planned.
The portions you were paying attention to become a little less considered.
The walks you were taking regularly become slightly less frequent.
The things you had been doing most of the time start happening some of the time.
And eventually you look up and realise you've moved much further away from them than you intended.
There can also be patterns in how we respond when life becomes more demanding.
When we're tired.
When we're stressed.
When routines change.
When work becomes busier.
When we're caring for everybody else.
When we're grieving.
When life simply asks more of us than it was asking before.
And for a woman with ADHD, changes in routine, increased demands or having more things competing for her attention may also interact with difficulties she already experiences around organisation, attention or following through.
I'm deliberately not explaining why those circumstances can make such a difference yet, because we're going to come to that.
For now, I simply want you to notice whether there are particular behaviours, thoughts or responses that seem to appear repeatedly in your own history.
You don't need to recognise yourself in every example I've given you.
You may recognise several.
You may recognise one.
Or yours may look completely different.
This isn't a diagnostic checklist of ADHD.
And it isn't a diagnostic checklist of all the reasons women regain weight.
Recognising yourself in some of these experiences doesn't tell us that ADHD caused them.
And it certainly isn't another list of things for you to judge yourself for.
It's an invitation to become curious.
What tends to repeat for me?
What happens when things are going well?
What tends to happen when they become harder?
What happens after I do something I hadn't intended to do?
And what tends to happen next?
Because these patterns don't only have the potential to affect our weight.
They can carry an emotional cost too.
The frustration of knowing what you wanted to do and watching yourself do something different.
The guilt after eating.
The disappointment of feeling as though you were doing so well and had ruined it again.
The fear that you're slipping back.
The anxiety of getting on the scales.
The embarrassment of starting again.
The shame of watching weight you'd worked incredibly hard to lose return.
The frustration of recognising exactly what is happening and still struggling to change what happens next.
The confusion of knowing what you want to do, sometimes knowing exactly what will happen if you don't, and still finding yourself unable to follow through in the way you intended.
And when that experience isn't confined to weight loss, the emotional cost can become even greater.
Because maybe you've asked yourself the same kinds of questions around work.
Around keeping your home organised.
Around appointments.
Around exercise.
Around projects you started and didn't finish.
Around messages you meant to reply to.
Around things you cared about deeply and still somehow didn't do.
Sometimes repeated experiences like these can begin changing what you believe about yourself.
Maybe you've called yourself lazy.
Greedy.
Weak.
Undisciplined.
Inconsistent.
Disorganised.
Someone who always gives up.
Someone who can't be trusted around food.
Someone who can lose weight but will inevitably put it back on.
Those aren't small things to carry.
And that's another reason understanding these patterns matters.
A repeated behaviour, thought or response isn't evidence of who you are.
It's something that has been happening.
And once I began looking at my own experiences that way, I could see something else many of my Weight-Regain Patterns had in common.
They had the potential to interrupt my ability to keep doing some of the things I already knew supported my weight loss.
They interrupted implementation.
And this is where another distinction became incredibly important.
Because I think this is one of the biggest misconceptions we have around weight-loss success.
The physical principles of weight loss matter.
Of course they do.
We need information that helps us understand what supports the reduction of body weight through things like nutrition, energy intake and movement.
That information matters.
But the information we can have about weight loss extends much further than simply knowing what to eat or how to exercise.
We can also know what happens when we move away from some of the things supporting our weight loss.
You can know that regularly eating considerably more across a weekend can affect the progress you've made during the week.
You can know that one meal you hadn't planned doesn't undo everything, while also knowing that allowing it to become the rest of the day, the weekend or the week can have a much greater effect.
You can know that repeatedly missing the movement you intended to do means you're moving less than you were before.
You can know that the habits you were following have started to change.
You can recognise the signs that you're gradually drifting away from what you'd been doing.
You can know exactly what it feels like when you're beginning to go off track because you've experienced it before.
You can know that waiting until Monday won't change what happens between now and Monday.
You can know that avoiding the scales doesn't change what may be happening with your weight.
You can know that continuing to eat in a way you hadn't intended to eat may move you further away from the outcome you want.
You may even recognise a familiar pattern while it's happening.
You can be standing in the kitchen knowing you aren't physically hungry, knowing you're reaching for food because you've had a terrible day and knowing you'll probably feel disappointed afterwards.
And still eat it.
You can know on Saturday that you've slipped into the familiar pattern of turning one meal into the whole weekend.
And still struggle to interrupt it.
You can know you've been saying, I'll do it tomorrow, for the last two weeks.
And still say it again.
You can know you're gradually moving away from the behaviours that were supporting your weight loss.
And still find yourself continuing to move away from them.
That's information too.
Information isn't only knowing what supports weight loss.
It can include knowing what isn't supporting it.
Knowing the likely consequences of something you're doing.
Recognising that something has started to change.
Knowing what has happened when you've followed the same pattern before.
And sometimes even recognising exactly what is happening while it's happening.
But having that information and being able to use it to influence what you repeatedly do are still two different things.
That's where implementation comes in.
On paper, the process of weight loss can look relatively simple.
Eat in a way that supports weight loss.
Move your body.
Repeat those behaviours consistently enough over time.
But that word consistently contains an enormous amount of real life.
Because those behaviours don't happen on paper.
They have to be implemented day after day while you're working, parenting, shopping, cooking, socialising, feeling emotions, making decisions, experiencing cravings, navigating disrupted routines and living the rest of your life.
And if you have ADHD, that implementation is also happening while you're living with whatever ADHD looks like for you.
Perhaps managing attention.
Time.
Organisation.
Impulses.
Remembering what you'd intended to do while something else is demanding your attention.
Starting a task that you genuinely intend to do.
Or continuing something once the initial interest and intensity have changed.
Not every woman with ADHD will struggle with all of those things.
But they can become part of the real-life conditions in which information has to become action.
And that's why something that can look relatively simple in principle can be far from simple to repeatedly implement.
Information helps us understand what supports weight loss, what may move us away from it and what may happen when we do.
Implementation is our ability to repeatedly carry that information into what we actually do.
And implementation can be interrupted.
That's the distinction I had been missing.
Information is knowing that planning your meals helps you make more supportive choices.
Implementation is sitting down and actually planning them.
Information is knowing that having food available at home makes it easier to eat in the way you intend to.
Implementation is going shopping and buying it.
Information is knowing movement is beneficial.
Implementation is actually getting out for the walk or doing the workout.
Information is knowing that one meal you hadn't planned doesn't undo everything you've already done.
Implementation is making your next meal a supportive choice instead of allowing one meal to become the rest of the day or week.
Information is knowing that missing one workout doesn't mean you've failed.
Implementation is continuing with movement after a missed workout rather than allowing that one interruption to determine what happens next.
Information is knowing that you don't have to follow your plan perfectly for it to support you.
Implementation is adapting what you're doing when life changes rather than abandoning it because you can't do everything exactly as planned.
And I can give you an example from much later in my own journey that shows just how different information and implementation can be.
By then, I understood nutrition far better.
I was actively changing my eating behaviours.
I could plan an entire week of meals.
Shop for them.
Prepare them.
Put them in the fridge ready to eat.
There could literally be a week's worth of prepared food sitting there.
And then I could become completely fixated on one particular meal and want to eat that same thing repeatedly instead.
I hadn't failed to plan.
I hadn't forgotten what I'd prepared the food for.
I hadn't suddenly lost all my knowledge about nutrition.
The information was there.
The food was there.
The intention had been there strongly enough for me to do all that preparation in the first place.
And yet what I'd planned and what I actually implemented could still be different.
That distinction became incredibly important for me.
Because it meant I could stop assuming that every difficulty following through was proof that I needed more information or another plan.
Knowing what supports your weight loss, recognising what happens when you move away from it and being able to keep using that information in what you actually do are not the same thing.
And if you've been around the weight-loss rodeo for any length of time, there's a good chance you've already accumulated a huge amount of information about weight loss.
I certainly had.
I'd done Slimming World and knew my red days from my green days.
I'd followed Weight Watchers and knew how to lose weight using a points system.
I'd learned about calorie counting, portion control and intermittent fasting.
I'd had nutrition plans written for me by personal trainers, followed plans I'd bought or found in magazines and tried meal-replacement approaches like SlimFast.
I'd done Rosemary Conley.
I'd done the cabbage soup diet.
I'd tried so many different approaches that weight loss had almost become an education in itself.
My cupboards and fridge reflected it too.
There had been Mug Shots, Hi-Fi bars, quark, quinoa and whatever else belonged to the particular version of weight loss I was following at the time.
I knew a lot about losing weight.
And perhaps you do too.
You may know about calories, portions, nutrition and movement.
You may know exactly how the weight-loss approach you're following works.
You may have followed it for years.
And you may know far more than that.
You may know your own warning signs.
You may recognise when your eating has started changing.
You may know when you're beginning to avoid things.
You may recognise the familiar feeling of slipping away from what you'd been doing.
You may know what usually happens after you tell yourself you've ruined it.
You may know what a weekend of bingeing is likely to mean for your progress.
You may know exactly how you'll feel afterwards.
You may have lived through the same sequence enough times that none of it is particularly surprising anymore.
And perhaps you've experienced another particularly confusing version of this.
You can know something is important.
You can genuinely intend to do it.
You can even feel frustrated with yourself for not doing it.
And still not seem to turn that intention into action when you expected to.
For a woman with ADHD, that distinction can be especially important to recognise.
Because difficulty following through does not automatically tell us how much you know, how much you care or how badly you want the outcome.
But information still has to become implementation.
When I looked back at the periods where I'd successfully lost weight, I hadn't simply possessed information about how to do it.
I had implemented it.
Not perfectly.
Not necessarily in exactly the same way every day.
But regularly enough for those behaviours to contribute to me losing weight.
And when my Weight-Regain Patterns appeared, they could interrupt that implementation.
Emotional eating could interrupt what I'd intended to eat.
An automatic habit could interrupt a choice I'd intended to make.
Food noise could make following through on my intentions increasingly difficult.
All-or-nothing thinking could turn one interruption into several.
Negative self-talk could change how I responded after something hadn't gone to plan.
Procrastination could keep moving something I intended to do further into the future.
Avoidance could make returning increasingly difficult.
A restart pattern could keep me waiting for Monday and prolong the interruption.
Trying to do everything at once could create an approach I struggled to keep implementing.
Waiting to feel motivated could mean an intention remained an intention for much longer than I'd expected.
And gradual drift could mean things I'd been doing regularly became less regular without me necessarily noticing how much had changed.
And ADHD gave me additional context for understanding why some of those experiences may have been particularly familiar to me.
Not an explanation for every choice I'd ever made.
Not a reason that change was impossible.
And not something that erased my responsibility for what I did next.
It was information.
Information that allowed me to stop asking only, Why can't I just make myself do this?
And become more curious about what was actually happening when intention wasn't becoming action.
Different patterns.
Different circumstances.
Different things potentially influencing how those patterns showed up for me.
But each had the potential to interrupt the regular implementation of some of the things that had been supporting my weight loss.
And I'd like you to look at your own history through that same distinction.
Think about the times when you struggled to continue with some of the things you'd intended to do.
Was it because the information had somehow disappeared?
Did you suddenly forget the plan you'd perhaps been following successfully for weeks, months or even years?
Did you stop knowing what supported your weight loss?
Did you stop understanding that repeatedly moving away from those things could affect your progress?
Or were there times when you actually knew exactly what was happening and still struggled to change what happened next?
Probably not because you suddenly knew nothing.
You may have known perfectly well what you intended to do.
You may have understood the consequences of what you were doing instead.
You may even have recognised a familiar pattern unfolding while you were in it.
The information was still there.
So what actually happened?
Somewhere between having that information and applying it regularly in your life, there were interruptions.
And now you may be able to recognise some of them.
Maybe the information was never the part you had lost at all.
And for me, that was another enormous shift in understanding.
Because once again, it moved me away from simply asking why I couldn't be more disciplined, motivated or consistent.
I could begin asking what had repeatedly interrupted my ability to keep implementing some of the things I already knew.
But recognising those interruptions led me to another question.
Because even the same pattern didn't always affect me in the same way.
There were times when I could experience an urge to emotionally eat and respond differently.
And other times when that same familiar response felt incredibly difficult to interrupt.
There were times when planning food, making decisions and following through felt relatively manageable.
And other times when those very same things seemed to require far more from me.
There were times when I could organise myself, focus and get things done.
And other times when things I'd previously managed could suddenly feel disproportionately difficult.
There were times when one difficult day remained one difficult day.
And others when recovering from it seemed much harder.
The information could be the same.
The behaviour I wanted to carry out could be the same.
Even the Weight-Regain Pattern interrupting me could be familiar.
So what else had changed?
7- What Else Had Changed?
Something else I noticed when I started looking at my Weight-Regain Patterns was that I didn't always experience or respond to the same pattern in exactly the same way.
And maybe you can recognise that too.
Think about one of the patterns you recognised in the last section.
Perhaps emotional eating.
Food noise.
Impulsive eating.
All-or-nothing thinking.
Procrastination.
Or that familiar urge to think, I've ruined it now, I'll start again tomorrow.
There may have been times when that pattern appeared and responding differently felt relatively manageable.
You noticed the urge to emotionally eat and had enough space to think about what you actually wanted to do.
Food was on your mind, but it didn't completely occupy your attention.
Something didn't go the way you'd intended, but you were able to carry on afterwards without it becoming much bigger.
Maybe you missed a workout and simply went the next time.
Or perhaps you still struggled.
You still ate something you hadn't intended to eat.
You still procrastinated.
You still had the thought that you'd ruined it.
But somehow you found your way back a little more quickly.
Now think about another time when that same familiar pattern appeared.
Maybe the difference wasn't dramatic.
Perhaps you still made the choice you'd intended to make, but it required far more effort.
There was more internal negotiation.
More food noise.
Less patience.
It was harder to focus.
A decision that would normally have taken seconds seemed to require far more thought.
Maybe you did go for the walk, but getting yourself out of the door felt much harder than usual.
Maybe you did prepare the meal you'd planned, but every part of you wanted to choose whatever required the least effort instead.
Perhaps you experienced the same emotional-eating urge and still responded differently, but doing so took much more from you.
Or perhaps the difference was more noticeable.
One difficult meal became the rest of the day.
You put off the walk.
The urge to emotionally eat was harder to interrupt.
You found yourself slipping into a familiar automatic response before you'd really thought about what you wanted to do.
Or it simply took you longer to find your way back afterwards.
And if you look around those different moments, you may notice something else.
Maybe on one occasion you'd slept well, your head felt relatively clear and life felt fairly manageable.
On another, you'd barely slept.
Your head was full.
Everything seemed to be competing for your attention at once.
Work was relentless.
You'd spent the day making decisions and sorting things out for everybody else.
Maybe you were worried about money.
Going through something difficult in a relationship.
Caring for somebody.
Grieving.
In pain.
Or simply going through one of those periods where life seemed to be asking far more from you than usual.
And if you have ADHD, you may recognise another kind of variation too.
There may be periods when you're getting enormous amounts done.
Your mind is firing.
You're interested.
Focused.
Starting things.
Thinking about a hundred things at once and somehow managing to keep moving through them.
And then there may be periods when things that usually feel manageable suddenly seem to require an enormous amount from you.
Starting feels harder.
Thinking feels harder.
Making another decision feels harder.
Things pile up.
You know they're there.
You may desperately want to deal with them.
But somehow wanting to and being able to find what you need to deal with them don't feel like the same thing.
I knew that contrast very well.
Long before I knew I had ADHD, there were periods of my life when I seemed able to operate at an incredible intensity.
And there were other periods when I seemed to crash.
At different points in my life, some of those periods were understood as episodes of depression.
Looking back now, with the additional understanding I gained after my ADHD diagnosis, I understand some of those experiences differently and recognise periods that, for me, felt much more like burnout.
I'm not rewriting a diagnosis for anybody else, or suggesting that depression and burnout are the same thing.
I'm simply telling you how my understanding of my own experiences changed when I had more information about myself.
Because what became really important wasn't only that I behaved differently at different times.
It was recognising how dramatically what I had available could change too.
The difference in what you did may have been significant.
Or it may have been incredibly subtle.
Sometimes the difference isn't whether you did something at all.
It's how much it took from you to do it.
How difficult the decision felt.
How strongly a familiar pattern pulled at you.
How much mental or emotional effort was involved in responding differently.
Or how quickly you were able to recover when something didn't go the way you'd intended.
Same woman.
Same knowledge.
Same intention.
Possibly even the same Weight-Regain Pattern.
But not necessarily the same things available to respond to it.
And there is a word for what we're looking at here.
Capacity.
Capacity isn't a new term I've developed for weight loss.
And it isn't a special quality you need to acquire before you can successfully lose weight.
It's not another skill you need to master or another thing you're about to discover you've been doing wrong.
We all have capacity.
Capacity simply means what you currently have available to meet what is being asked of you.
Once I understood capacity in those terms, the next thing that helped me was understanding what actually contributes to what we have available.
Because capacity isn't just about how much energy you have.
Although physical energy can absolutely be part of it.
There are different things being asked of us, and different things we draw upon to meet those demands.
On my own journey, I found it useful to look at capacity across four areas.
Physical capacity.
Mental capacity.
Emotional capacity.
And lifestyle capacity.
Let's start with physical capacity.
This is what your body currently has available.
Your energy.
Your sleep and rest.
Your physical health.
Whether you're feeling well or unwell.
Whether you're dealing with pain, fatigue, hormonal changes or other physical demands.
There can be a huge difference between getting home and preparing the meal you'd planned when you feel physically well and have some energy available, and preparing that exact same meal when you're exhausted.
You haven't forgotten how to make it.
You haven't necessarily changed your mind about wanting it.
But the physical effort being asked of you can feel very different depending on what your body currently has available.
And ADHD doesn't sit somewhere completely separate from that physical experience.
If you've had a night where your mind simply wouldn't switch off, for example, you're still navigating the following day in a body that hasn't had the sleep you needed.
Whatever you intended to do that day still has to be done with the physical resources you actually have available.
Mental capacity is what you have available to think.
To focus.
Plan.
Remember.
Make decisions.
Problem-solve.
Manage your attention.
And deal with everything else occupying your thoughts.
For me, this is an area where eventually understanding my ADHD added another enormous piece of information.
Because there were things I'd spent years treating as though they should require the same amount from me every time.
Planning.
Remembering what I needed.
Starting something.
Switching from one thing to another.
Pulling my attention away from something that had completely absorbed me.
Keeping track of time.
Making myself deal with something that felt boring when my attention desperately wanted to be somewhere else.
And making yet another decision when my head already felt as though it had twenty tabs open.
Think about deciding what you're going to eat when your head feels relatively clear.
Then think about trying to make that same decision after a day of concentrating, organising, remembering things, solving problems and making decisions for everybody else.
Or after a day where you've spent so much mental energy trying to keep yourself organised and your attention where it needed to be that something as simple as deciding what to eat feels like one decision too many.
You may know exactly what your options are.
But choosing between them can suddenly feel like one decision too many.
Emotional capacity is what you currently have available alongside what you're carrying emotionally.
Stress.
Worry.
Grief.
Anger.
Sadness.
Fear.
Relationship difficulties.
Emotional overwhelm.
Or simply having a lot going on internally that nobody else can necessarily see.
And perhaps you've experienced emotions that seem to arrive with enormous intensity.
Maybe something happens and you don't simply feel annoyed.
You feel completely overwhelmed by it.
Maybe a comment stays with you.
You replay it.
Think about what was meant.
Think about what you said.
Think about what you should have said.
And while nobody else can necessarily see any of that happening, it's still something you're carrying.
There are times when we have more emotional space available to notice what we're feeling, sit with discomfort, think about what we need and choose how we want to respond.
And there are times when we're already carrying so much emotionally that even something relatively small can feel like one thing too many.
Then there is lifestyle capacity.
This is the practical room available within your everyday life.
Your time.
Your workload.
Your responsibilities.
Your caring roles.
Your finances.
Your routines.
Your relationships and family demands.
The appointments, jobs, errands and unexpected things that have to fit somewhere.
And again, if you have ADHD, the amount of time you technically have available and how easy that time is to organise, estimate and use don't necessarily feel like the same thing.
You can have an hour available and somehow not experience it as an hour you can easily use.
You can underestimate how long something will take.
Overestimate how much you'll fit into a day.
Put something off because later still feels available.
Or find that one unexpected change knocks out the sequence you'd had in your head for everything else.
That doesn't mean every difficulty managing time is ADHD.
But for some women with ADHD, difficulties with time management and organisation can be part of the practical reality they're navigating.
There may be periods when shopping, preparing food, fitting in movement and thinking ahead sit relatively comfortably alongside the rest of your life.
And there may be periods when work runs late, somebody needs you, money is tighter, routines change, appointments appear and the time or practical room you expected to have simply isn't there.
Again, none of this tells us what you will do.
Having less available doesn't mean you can't make a choice that supports you.
And having more available doesn't guarantee that you will.
Capacity isn't a measure of how good you are at weight loss.
And ADHD isn't a measure of what you're capable of either.
It gives us additional information about some of the circumstances in which you're trying to implement it.
And capacity isn't fixed.
What you have available today may not be what you have available next week.
It can change through different days, different weeks and different seasons of your life.
You might recognise periods when you had more available physically but less available emotionally.
Or plenty of mental space but very little practical time.
You may recognise times when your attention felt easier to direct but your physical energy was low.
Or times when you had the physical energy to do something but your head felt so full that organising yourself to begin it seemed far harder.
There may even be times when you feel as though you have plenty available across most areas, and others when almost everything feels stretched.
And if you've spent years experiencing those differences without understanding them, perhaps you've interpreted them in much the same way I did.
Why can I do this sometimes and not others?
Why am I so capable one week and struggling with basic things the next?
Why can't I just be consistent?
We're not answering those questions by saying everything is capacity.
And we're not answering them by saying everything is ADHD.
We're adding information that may have been missing when you were trying to make sense of yourself.
We are not looking at any of this to decide whether your capacity is good or bad.
And we're certainly not looking for another thing to judge yourself on.
We're simply beginning to notice something most of us were never taught to include when we thought about weight loss.
What was being asked of me?
And what did I have available to meet it?
8- How It All Affects Each Other
Understanding those four areas helped me make sense of what I had available at different times in my life.
But there was something else I began to notice.
Physical, mental, emotional and lifestyle capacity might be useful ways of understanding what we have available, but real life doesn't divide itself quite so neatly.
Something happening in one area can affect what we have available in another.
Sometimes the effect is small.
Sometimes it spreads much further.
And sometimes one change can affect almost every area at once.
Think about something as ordinary as a few nights of poor sleep.
You might first notice it physically because you're tired.
But perhaps it's also harder to concentrate.
Your head feels foggier.
Decisions require a little more effort.
You have less patience.
You feel more emotionally reactive.
Something that began with sleep is now influencing more than what you have available physically.
And if you have ADHD, perhaps some of those changes feel particularly familiar.
Things you already sometimes have to work harder to manage, like directing your attention, remembering what you intended to do, organising yourself or getting started, may feel different again when you're exhausted.
Not because ADHD has suddenly become a different condition overnight.
And not because poor sleep means you won't be able to do those things.
But because you're not navigating them separately from the physical state you're in.
Or perhaps you're going through a particularly demanding period at work.
There may be the obvious practical demands.
Longer hours.
More responsibility.
Less time.
But maybe you're still thinking about work when you get home.
You find yourself worrying about something that happened that day or mentally running through everything you need to do tomorrow.
Perhaps that begins affecting how you feel emotionally.
Or how well you sleep.
And now something that started in your everyday life is affecting what you have available mentally, emotionally and physically too.
Maybe you've experienced this in a different way.
You become completely absorbed in something.
It might be work.
A project.
Something new you're learning.
Something you're excited about.
Or simply something your attention has locked onto and doesn't seem particularly interested in leaving.
Hours can pass.
Other things you intended to do get pushed further down the list.
Maybe you eat later than you'd planned.
Go to bed later.
Realise you've barely moved.
Or reach the end of the day mentally exhausted because so much of your attention has gone into one place.
Something that began with where your attention was going may now have affected your time, your physical energy and what you have available mentally too.
And I think this is important, because it helped me stop seeing parts of myself in isolation.
The intensity I could bring to something wasn't automatically good or bad.
That same ability to become deeply absorbed had played a part in me researching, learning and trying to understand myself in the first place.
But it still existed within the rest of my life.
And what I gave enormous amounts of myself to in one place could influence what I had available somewhere else.
The same can happen with financial pressure, caring responsibilities, relationship difficulties, illness, grief or any number of things life can bring.
One circumstance can ask something from us in several different ways.
And the influence can move in different directions.
Something physical can affect us mentally or emotionally.
Something we're carrying emotionally can affect our sleep or energy.
Something happening practically can occupy enormous amounts of headspace.
Something occupying enormous amounts of our attention can affect what gets done practically.
And when several things are happening at once, those effects can begin to overlap.
This was something I came to understand very clearly during one particular period of my own life.
9- When I Saw It in My Own Life
There is one period of my life that I can look back on now and see this particularly clearly.
By this point, I was in a very different place from many of my earlier weight-loss attempts.
I'd lost a significant amount of weight.
I'd changed my lifestyle.
I'd done a great deal of work on some of the Weight-Regain Patterns that had affected me for years.
And I had worked both as a weight management specialist for the NHS, and within my own weight management business.
Then I lost somebody who was incredibly important to me.
She was my mentor, but she was also a huge part of my everyday life and the future I imagined for myself.
At the time, I taught exercise classes with her.
After she died, continuing to teach those classes felt too raw.
So I stopped.
She had also managed the gym I went to, and without her there, the gym just felt empty.
So I stopped going there too.
I wasn't walking as much.
Food became more about what felt convenient and manageable than the planning and preparation I'd previously been doing.
And over time, I regained more weight than I was comfortable with.
If I'd looked only at my behaviour, I could have told myself a very simple story about what had happened.
I stopped exercising as much.
I stopped putting as much thought into my food.
I regained weight.
And technically, those things were true.
But they didn't tell the whole story.
Because when I looked at what had happened through capacity, I could see just how much had changed at the same time.
I was grieving.
And grief wasn't simply something sad that had happened alongside the rest of my life.
It was consuming so much of what I had available within it.
Emotionally, sadness was taking up far more space than things like motivation, enthusiasm or excitement about the goals I'd previously been working towards.
Mentally, my focus was constantly being interrupted by grief.
My thoughts would return again and again to what had happened.
And I was wrestling with something I just couldn't make sense of.
How could somebody so healthy and strong, somebody who had spent every day supporting other people through their cancer journeys as a cancer rehabilitation specialist, be dealt the incredibly cruel blow of cancer herself?
I couldn't reconcile it.
And knowing what I now know about myself, I can also recognise just how consuming not being able to make sense of something could become for me.
My mind wanted an answer.
It wanted to understand.
But there wasn't an answer that could make what had happened feel logical or fair.
So grief wasn't sitting neatly in one part of my life.
It was taking up emotional space.
It was occupying mental space.
And then there were all the practical and physical changes surrounding it too.
Stopping my classes changed my physical activity, but those classes had also been part of my routine, my social life and my income.
Stopping the gym meant losing another familiar routine and another part of my movement.
The change in income created additional practical pressure.
My everyday life had changed.
What I was carrying emotionally had changed.
What was occupying my mind had changed.
What I had available physically had changed.
And those things were influencing one another.
Your experience may look nothing like mine.
You may never have experienced grief in this way.
But perhaps you can recognise a period in your own life when something affected what you had available in several different ways.
Maybe it was becoming a parent.
A relationship beginning or ending.
A change in your health.
Hormonal changes.
A demanding period at work.
Financial pressure.
Caring for somebody else.
A house move.
Illness within your family.
Or simply a period when several smaller demands seemed to arrive at the same time.
And perhaps, with ADHD as another part of your experience, some of those periods affected things you'd already sometimes found difficult.
Maybe there was suddenly more to remember.
More to organise.
More decisions to make.
More interruptions.
Less routine.
More competing for your attention.
Or simply far more being asked of you than usual.
That doesn't mean ADHD determines how you'll respond to those circumstances.
But it may be another part of understanding what those circumstances were actually asking of you.
And perhaps your implementation didn't suddenly stop.
Maybe at first it simply became harder.
You planned a little less.
Cooked a little less often.
Moved your body less regularly.
Made more decisions based on what felt manageable in the moment.
Maybe some of the things that had been supporting your weight loss gradually happened less often.
And then less often again.
Until there may even have come a point when much of what you'd previously been implementing had disappeared altogether.
Not necessarily because there was one dramatic moment when you decided to stop.
But because the circumstances in which you were trying to keep doing those things had changed.
That's why looking only at our behaviour can leave such an important part of the story invisible.
We can see that we stopped planning.
Stopped walking.
Started choosing convenience more often.
Or gradually moved further away from what we'd previously been doing.
But if we only look at what stopped, it's very easy to arrive back at the same old conclusions.
I lost motivation.
I stopped trying.
I wasn't consistent enough.
And for an ADHD woman, those conclusions may feel painfully familiar.
Perhaps you've spent years explaining periods of struggle to yourself in exactly those terms.
I need to be more organised.
I need to stop procrastinating.
I need to focus.
I need to stop being so impulsive.
I need to be more consistent.
I just need to try harder.
What capacity allowed me to see was what had been happening around those changes too.
And when I returned to my own story, something else stood out.
My knowledge hadn't disappeared.
I still understood nutrition.
I still knew the behaviours that had previously supported my weight loss.
I still had everything I'd learned through my own experience, my training and my work.
And some of the Weight-Regain Patterns that had once played such a big part in my regain hadn't returned either.
I wasn't binge eating in the way I once had.
I wasn't emotionally eating in the same way I had for so many years.
Those were patterns I'd already done a great deal of work to change.
But another familiar pattern did begin to creep back in.
Self-doubt.
My mentor had been a huge part of the future I imagined for myself.
She had supported me.
Encouraged me.
Believed in what I was capable of.
And suddenly, I was trying to imagine that future without her in it.
I felt alone.
I started questioning myself.
Questioning my goals.
Questioning whether I could really do the things I'd believed I could do when she was beside me.
And at a time when grief was already consuming so much of what I had available emotionally and mentally, I was far more vulnerable to that familiar self-doubt.
It wasn't an eating behaviour.
But remember, Weight-Regain Patterns aren't only about food.
They can be repeated behaviours, thoughts and responses that affect our ability to keep implementing the things that support us.
And this one affected me deeply.
My self-doubt didn't just change how I felt.
It began changing what I did.
Eventually, I took a break from my career.
Looking back now, that helps me understand something I couldn't see at the time.
I hadn't suddenly become less capable.
I hadn't lost my qualifications.
I hadn't lost my knowledge.
I hadn't lost my experience.
And I hadn't lost everything I'd already demonstrated I could do.
My capability hadn't disappeared.
But what I had available had changed enormously.
And within those changed circumstances, I had become much more vulnerable to a familiar pattern that made me question that capability.
That's an important distinction.
My reduced capacity hadn't created my self-doubt.
Self-doubt was already a familiar pattern for me.
And having less available didn't make it inevitable that I would respond to that pattern in the way I did.
But it helped me understand why I may have been more vulnerable to it at that particular time.
Why it was harder to respond to.
And why recovering from its effects took longer.
This helped me see another important role capacity can play in weight regain.
Capacity doesn't create your Weight-Regain Patterns.
But what you have available can influence your vulnerability to a familiar pattern when it appears.
It can influence what you have available to respond to that pattern.
And if the pattern does interrupt you, it can influence what you have available to recover and return afterwards.
And I think this distinction can be particularly important when you're looking at your history through an ADHD lens.
Because ADHD may be part of why some experiences are familiar to you.
But that still doesn't mean you'll experience those things in exactly the same way every time.
You may be impulsive and still find some impulses relatively easy to move past while others feel much harder to interrupt.
You may sometimes struggle with organisation and still have periods when organising what you need feels much more manageable.
You may know that getting started can be difficult for you, but recognise that there are times when starting takes far more from you than it does at others.
You may have an all-or-nothing pattern and sometimes catch it quickly, while at another time it carries you much further before you're able to recover.
The ADHD hasn't necessarily changed.
But the circumstances in which you're navigating those familiar difficulties may have.
Maybe you can recognise that difference too.
Think about the emotional-eating urge you could notice and respond differently to one time, but found much harder to interrupt another.
The food noise that sometimes remained in the background, but at another time seemed to occupy far more of your attention.
The unplanned meal you could shrug off and carry on from, compared with the one that triggered an all-or-nothing response that lasted much longer.
The missed walk that was simply a missed walk one week, but another time became the beginning of gradually doing less and less.
Or perhaps the difference was much more subtle.
You still made the supportive choice.
You still went for the walk.
You still prepared the meal.
You still interrupted the pattern.
But doing it required much more from you.
Capacity doesn't determine what happens in any of those moments.
Having less available doesn't mean a Weight-Regain Pattern will appear.
Having more available doesn't make you immune to one.
And not every difficult response can be explained by capacity.
But it gave me a way of understanding why the same woman could encounter the same familiar pattern at different times and experience it very differently.
Sometimes relatively protected from its pull.
Sometimes more vulnerable to it.
Sometimes able to respond differently without it requiring very much.
Sometimes needing far more to do the same thing.
Sometimes recovering quickly from an interruption.
And sometimes finding that interruption much harder to recover from.
And Weight-Regain Patterns weren't the only place capacity mattered.
Because sometimes there didn't need to be an obvious pattern involved at all.
Planning food still required headspace.
Shopping and preparing it still required time, thought and energy.
Movement still required something from me physically and somewhere for it to fit within my life.
Making decisions still required mental space.
And adapting when circumstances changed still required me to have something available to work out what I could do instead.
For an ADHD woman, some of those everyday acts of implementation may themselves ask more of the things she already has to manage.
Planning requires planning.
Shopping requires remembering what you need and getting yourself there.
Meal preparation requires starting, sequencing and completing a series of tasks.
Movement needs somewhere to exist within your time and attention.
And adapting a plan when something unexpected happens requires you to stop, reassess and work out what comes next.
Again, none of that means ADHD prevents you from doing those things.
It means the instruction itself doesn't tell us everything about what is required to implement it.
The principles of weight loss hadn't changed.
But the circumstances in which I was trying to implement them had.
That was what capacity helped me see.
It wasn't another explanation to replace Weight-Regain Patterns.
And ADHD wasn't another explanation to replace capacity.
Each gave me different information.
ADHD helped me understand more about some of the experiences and difficulties that had followed me through different parts of my life.
Capacity helped me understand why what I had available to navigate my life, my Weight-Regain Patterns and my implementation could vary so much at different times.
It helped me understand the circumstances in which those patterns, my responses to them and my wider implementation were happening.
And perhaps most importantly, it helped me separate two things I'd confused for years.
My capability.
And my capacity.
I hadn't suddenly become less capable.
I hadn't lost my knowledge, my qualifications, my experience or everything I'd already demonstrated I could do.
But what I had available had changed enormously.
Struggling to do something didn't automatically mean I was no longer capable of doing it.
Sometimes what I had available to do it with had changed.
Capability and capacity were not the same thing.
10- When Struggling Makes You Doubt Yourself
Lazy.
Inconsistent.
Undisciplined.
Unmotivated.
Full of excuses.
Not committed enough.
Someone who just doesn't stick to things.
I wonder whether you've ever had any of those words attached to you during your weight-loss history.
And if you have ADHD, or recognise ADHD-related experiences in yourself, I wonder whether some of them were familiar long before weight loss too.
Maybe you've been told you need to be more organised.
That you need to stop leaving everything until the last minute.
That you start things and don't finish them.
That you need to concentrate.
That you're always forgetting things.
That you need to think before you act.
That you have so much potential if you'd only apply yourself.
Or perhaps nobody used those exact words.
But somewhere along the way, you still absorbed the message that things other people seemed able to just do required something from you that you apparently weren't giving.
So when similar messages appeared within weight loss, perhaps they didn't land on completely new ground.
Perhaps somebody actually said them.
Perhaps the words were different, but the message underneath them felt much the same.
Try harder.
Be more disciplined.
You need to prioritise yourself.
You need to want it enough.
Stop making excuses.
You just need to be consistent.
Or perhaps nobody needed to say any of it eventually, because you'd started saying it to yourself.
I know I had.
And now that we're looking specifically at why weight can come back, I think this matters far more than it might first appear.
Because if your implementation becomes harder during a period when you have less capacity, but you interpret that difficulty as evidence that you're lazy, incapable, undisciplined or failing again, you haven't only got the original difficulty to deal with anymore.
You've added something to it.
Frustration.
Disappointment.
Shame.
Self-doubt.
Maybe an all-or-nothing thought.
Maybe the urge to avoid thinking about your weight altogether.
Maybe emotional eating.
Maybe the familiar feeling that you've ruined it again.
And suddenly, the way you interpret the struggle can become part of what happens next.
That doesn't mean blame causes weight regain.
And it certainly doesn't mean we're no longer responsible for our choices.
But if we're trying to understand how one interruption can gradually become several, how implementation can decrease rather than recover, and how we can find ourselves moving further away from behaviours we were previously sustaining, then we have to look at what happens after we struggle too.
Because I spent years doing something that I now recognise very clearly.
Whenever there was a gap between what I knew I wanted to do and what I was actually managing to do, I filled that gap with judgement.
I didn't ask what had changed.
I didn't consider what I was carrying.
I didn't consider what life was asking from me or what I currently had available to meet those demands.
I didn't understand that being capable of something and what I had available to do it with were not the same thing.
And I certainly didn't know that there was another part of my own story I wouldn't understand until much later.
I didn't know I had ADHD.
So when I could focus intensely on something one minute and struggle to direct my attention towards something else the next, I didn't have that information.
When I put something off despite genuinely wanting to do it, I didn't have that information.
When I acted impulsively and later wondered why I'd made a choice that seemed completely at odds with what I'd wanted, I didn't have that information.
When I became completely absorbed in something and then struggled when that intensity changed, I didn't have that information.
When I knew exactly what I needed to do and still couldn't understand why knowing didn't always become doing, I didn't have that information.
I simply looked at what I wasn't doing and made it mean something about me.
Maybe I was lazy.
Maybe I lacked discipline.
Maybe I wasn't motivated enough.
Maybe I didn't want it badly enough.
Maybe everybody else who managed to do this simply had something I didn't.
And because some of those struggles existed in other areas of my life too, the conclusions could become much bigger than weight loss.
I didn't just wonder why I couldn't stick to a diet.
I wondered why I couldn't seem to just do things in the way other people appeared to.
Why everything could feel so intense.
Why I could be so capable in one moment and struggle so much in another.
Why I could desperately want something and still not do what I'd intended to do.
There were times when I genuinely wondered whether something was wrong with me.
Whether I was broken.
Whether I was a freak.
Those words sound incredibly harsh to me now.
But they didn't feel dramatic when I was living them.
They felt like an explanation.
Because when you don't understand why something keeps happening, eventually you can start using yourself to fill in the missing answer.
My ADHD diagnosis came much later in my life.
And it didn't suddenly explain every decision I'd ever made.
It didn't mean every Weight-Regain Pattern I'd experienced was ADHD.
It didn't erase my responsibility for my behaviour.
And it certainly didn't mean I was incapable of changing, because by the time I received that diagnosis, I already had.
Enormously.
But it did give me information about myself that I'd never had when I was making some of those judgements.
And when I looked backwards with that additional understanding, some of the things I'd spent years treating as evidence about my character began to make sense differently.
Not excused.
Understood.
And those are not the same thing.
Because understanding something gives us somewhere to become curious about what might help us change it.
Judging ourselves rarely does.
And I didn't arrive at all of those conclusions on my own.
Some of them were reinforced by messages I received throughout my own weight-loss journey.
You've already heard one of those stories.
I was the woman standing on the scales, asking for help because I knew I was emotionally eating, knew it was affecting my weight, desperately wanted to stop and didn't know how.
I wasn't asking somebody to excuse my behaviour.
I wanted to change it.
I was asking for help because I didn't know how.
But when I was pointed towards the women who had succeeded, I didn't walk away thinking there might be something missing from the answer I'd been given.
I walked away believing:
The difference must be me.
Years later, I would find myself on the other side of those conversations.
First working in weight management within the NHS, and later supporting women through my own work.
And unfortunately, I still see versions of those same messages being given to women today.
A woman says she's exhausted and struggling to prepare the meals she'd planned.
She's told she needs to prioritise herself.
A woman says life has become overwhelming and she's struggling to follow the plan.
She's told she needs to stop making excuses.
A woman keeps starting with every intention of following through, but something repeatedly gets in the way.
She's told she needs more discipline.
A woman says she knows what to do but can't seem to keep doing it.
She's told she just needs to be consistent.
And this is where I have some real beef with parts of the weight-loss coaching industry.
Because I've experienced that judgement personally.
I know what it feels like to ask for help because you genuinely don't understand why you're struggling to do something, only to have somebody turn your struggle into a judgement about you.
And after years of working with women myself, I feel even more strongly about it now.
Because sometimes what I see is a professional reaching the edge of their own understanding and turning it into a judgement about the woman's capability.
They know what they believe she should do.
They can see that she isn't consistently doing it.
But instead of becoming curious about what's happening between those two things, they fill the gap themselves.
She isn't motivated enough.
She isn't disciplined enough.
She isn't prioritising herself.
She's making excuses.
She doesn't want it enough.
And there is another version of this that I think we need to talk about too.
Sometimes the woman has already demonstrated very clearly that she is capable.
She's lost weight before.
She understands what she's doing.
She can plan.
She can organise herself at times.
She can become incredibly focused.
There may be periods when she implements everything brilliantly.
And instead of that evidence making somebody more curious when she begins to struggle, her capability itself gets used against her.
You've done it before.
You've proved you can do it.
You can be organised when you want to be.
You managed it perfectly well last month.
You just need to make yourself do it.
But evidence that somebody is capable of doing something does not tell us what she currently has available to do it with.
And it certainly doesn't tell us everything that may be happening between knowing what she wants to do and being able to keep implementing it.
For a woman with ADHD, that distinction can be incredibly important.
Because many weight-loss professionals are trained to understand weight loss.
That doesn't automatically mean they've been taught to understand ADHD or how ADHD-related difficulties may show up within everyday implementation.
A coach may know a great deal about nutrition.
Energy balance.
Exercise.
Behaviour change.
Goal setting.
Accountability.
And still not understand why a woman can know exactly what she intends to do and repeatedly struggle with things such as organising herself, managing her time, directing her attention, completing tasks or controlling an impulse.
Those are recognised areas in which adults with ADHD can experience difficulties.
So if the professional doesn't understand that, there is a danger that they interpret what they can see using only the tools they do have.
She planned perfectly last week, so she can plan.
She followed the programme for three months, so she can be consistent.
She spent hours researching something she was interested in, so she can focus.
She managed to get herself organised for something important, so she can be organised.
She resisted an impulse yesterday, so she should be able to resist one today.
And all of those observations may contain evidence of capability.
But capability isn't the question we're trying to answer.
We already know she's capable.
The question is:
What is happening when she struggles to access or implement something we already know she is capable of doing?
That's a very different question.
Being able to focus intensely doesn't mean directing attention will require the same thing from her in every situation.
Being capable of organising herself doesn't mean organisation will always be equally easy.
Successfully completing something before doesn't mean starting or completing it will always require the same amount from her.
And having made one considered choice doesn't mean impulsivity can never influence another.
So when a highly capable woman with ADHD is struggling, pointing to all the evidence of what she has previously achieved and saying, See, you can do it, may completely miss what she's actually asking for help with.
She may already know she can do it.
That's part of why she's so confused.
She wants to understand why something she knows she is capable of doing can sometimes feel so difficult to access.
Her capability should never be used as a weapon against her struggle.
It should make us more curious about the struggle.
If I know she's capable, and I can see that she's struggling to access something she's previously demonstrated she can do, I don't need to question whether she's capable.
I need to become curious about what's changed.
What is she experiencing?
What's being asked of her?
What does she currently have available?
Is a familiar Weight-Regain Pattern involved?
Is ADHD adding something relevant to the implementation difficulty we're seeing?
What might actually help?
Because the limit of your understanding as a professional should never automatically become evidence of somebody else's limited capability.
If I were being polite, I'd describe blaming a woman rather than exploring what's actually happening as a narrow-minded approach.
If I were being real, I'd call it a piss poor approach.
Because blame doesn't answer the question.
If anything, it can leave the woman carrying even more while the original reason she's struggling remains completely unexplored.
And when we're trying to understand weight regain, that matters.
Imagine that her implementation is already becoming harder.
Perhaps life is asking more from her and she has less available.
Perhaps she's more vulnerable to an old Weight-Regain Pattern.
Perhaps she's finding it harder to respond differently when that pattern appears.
Perhaps something has already interrupted her and she's finding it harder to recover and return.
Perhaps some of what she's trying to navigate includes ADHD-related difficulties that nobody has even thought to become curious about.
And now we add:
You're failing again.
You're not trying hard enough.
You're making excuses.
You just need more discipline.
What might that add to what she's already carrying?
Shame.
Frustration.
Self-doubt.
Emotional weight.
Perhaps an all-or-nothing response.
Perhaps avoidance.
Perhaps emotional eating.
Perhaps another familiar Weight-Regain Pattern becoming louder at a time when she already has less available to respond to it.
And perhaps, rather than helping her recover from the original interruption, we've just made returning even harder.
Again, blame doesn't automatically cause weight regain.
Capacity doesn't automatically cause Weight-Regain Patterns.
ADHD doesn't automatically cause Weight-Regain Patterns either.
And having less capacity doesn't determine how somebody will respond.
But we've already seen that capacity can influence our vulnerability to familiar patterns, what we have available to respond when they appear and what we have available to recover and return afterwards.
And we've seen that ADHD can provide additional information about some of the experiences a woman may be navigating within that.
So if a woman is already struggling, surely what we add to that struggle matters too.
This is one of the reasons I think we need to be so careful about the conclusions we draw from somebody's behaviour.
Behaviour can tell us what happened.
It cannot, on its own, tell us why.
If a woman hasn't followed her plan, we know the plan wasn't followed.
We don't automatically know that she didn't care enough.
If she has repeatedly started and stopped, we know her implementation has repeatedly been interrupted.
We don't automatically know that she lacks commitment.
If she has put something off that she genuinely intended to do, we know it didn't happen when she'd intended it to.
We don't automatically know she couldn't be bothered.
If she became intensely focused on a new approach and later struggled to continue with it, we know her implementation changed.
We don't automatically know that she gave up because she didn't want the outcome badly enough.
If she made an impulsive choice, we know what she did.
We don't automatically know everything that contributed to that moment.
If she is struggling to make choices she previously managed quite successfully, we know something has changed.
We don't automatically know that she has become lazy, incapable or unmotivated.
And I think my own lived experience has made me particularly sensitive to that distinction.
I don't believe somebody has to have personally struggled with their weight in order to be an excellent weight-loss professional.
And I don't believe somebody has to have ADHD themselves in order to support a woman with ADHD well.
Lived experience isn't a qualification in itself.
Professional knowledge, training and expertise matter enormously.
But none of us can support somebody well by assuming that the things we haven't been taught to understand don't matter.
There are things my lived experience has taught me that I don't think I could ever unknow.
I know what it feels like to desperately want to change something and still struggle to change it.
I know what it feels like to know what to do and wonder why you can't keep doing it.
I know what it feels like to put something off while simultaneously becoming increasingly frustrated with yourself for not doing it.
I know what it feels like to be completely absorbed in something and then not understand where that intensity went.
I know what it feels like to have somebody interpret that struggle as though it tells them something about how badly you want it.
I know what it feels like to be capable of enormous change and still experience periods when accessing that capability feels incredibly difficult.
And I know what can happen when you hear enough messages suggesting the problem is your character.
You can start to believe them.
That's the part I think we underestimate when we're trying to understand weight regain.
Because words like lazy, inconsistent, undisciplined and unmotivated don't always remain descriptions of something you did.
They can become descriptions of who you believe you are.
And for some women with ADHD, that story may have been developing for a very long time.
I didn't just think I had failed to be consistent.
I thought I was inconsistent.
I didn't just think I had struggled to stay motivated.
I thought I was somebody who lacked motivation.
I didn't just think I'd found something difficult to follow through on.
I questioned whether I was capable of following through at all.
And if every interruption becomes more evidence for the belief that you can't do this, what might that mean for what happens after the next interruption?
How quickly do you return when part of you already believes you'll only fail again?
How easy is it to interrupt an all-or-nothing thought when it seems to confirm something you've believed about yourself for years?
How much harder might it be to keep implementing supportive behaviours when you're carrying disappointment, shame and self-doubt alongside everything else life is already asking from you?
Again, none of those things predetermine weight regain.
But if we're genuinely trying to understand why weight can come back, they're too important to dismiss as excuses.
Because this is where confusing capacity with capability can become part of the problem.
Capability asks whether you can do something.
Capacity helps us understand what you currently have available to do it with.
Those are not the same question.
And ADHD gives us additional information that may be relevant to both the circumstances and the implementation we're looking at.
Struggling to focus doesn't automatically tell us what you're capable of understanding.
Struggling to organise yourself doesn't automatically tell us how committed you are to the outcome.
Putting something off doesn't automatically tell us how important it is to you.
Acting impulsively in one moment doesn't automatically tell us what you value or what you intended before that moment.
And struggling to follow through doesn't automatically mean you've stopped caring about what you're trying to achieve.
You can be capable of planning and preparing your meals and still have a period when doing so requires far more from you than usual.
You can be capable of making a different choice when you feel emotional and still experience times when an old pattern has a much stronger pull.
You can be capable of interrupting food noise and still have days when doing so consumes far more of your attention.
You can be capable of returning after an interruption and still have periods when recovery takes longer.
You can be capable of looking after yourself and still find yourself in a season of life where an extraordinary amount is being asked of you.
And sometimes the evidence that you're capable is already sitting there in your own weight-loss history.
You have done these things before.
Perhaps many times.
That doesn't mean the answer is simply:
Well, you've done it before, so you can do it again.
Because that still misses the point.
If she has done it before, but something is different now, I want to know what's different.
What is happening in her life?
What does she currently have available?
Which Weight-Regain Patterns are showing up?
Has something changed her vulnerability to them?
What happens when they appear?
What happens after an interruption?
What helps her return?
And what seems to make that return harder?
And if ADHD is part of her life, what might understanding that add to the picture?
Not:
Is ADHD the reason for everything?
But:
Is there information here that helps us understand her experience more accurately?
That's curiosity.
And curiosity gives us somewhere to go.
Judgement rarely does.
Judgement tells the exhausted woman to try harder.
Curiosity asks why something she is capable of doing is requiring so much more from her right now.
Judgement calls repeated stopping and starting a lack of commitment.
Curiosity asks what keeps happening around the point where implementation becomes difficult.
Judgement sees a woman struggling with a familiar pattern and asks why she keeps doing this to herself.
Curiosity asks what makes her more vulnerable to that pattern, what happens when it appears and what makes returning harder afterwards.
Judgement sees a woman who knows what she needs to do but isn't doing it and assumes the answer must be motivation.
Curiosity asks what might be happening between knowing and doing.
And for some women, ADHD may be one part of that answer.
Not the whole answer.
But information worth having.
That doesn't abandon accountability.
It gives us something far more useful to be accountable for.
If a pattern is repeatedly interrupting you, we can look at the pattern.
If something is consuming your capacity, we can acknowledge what you're actually trying to implement alongside.
If ADHD-related difficulties are repeatedly showing up around implementation, we can become curious about those rather than turning them into character flaws.
If the way you respond to an interruption is adding more emotional weight, we can become curious about that too.
If returning is where things tend to unravel, we can stop treating the original interruption as though it tells us the whole story.
And if you've spent years believing your struggles prove something about your capability, perhaps we can finally question that conclusion.
Because maybe some of your regain wasn't simply about the moment you stopped doing something that had been supporting your weight loss.
Maybe what happened around that moment mattered too.
What you had available.
What you were vulnerable to.
How you responded.
What you made that struggle mean about yourself.
What that added to what you were already carrying.
And how easy or difficult it then became to recover and return.
For years, I reduced all of that to much simpler questions.
What's wrong with me?
Why can't I just do this?
Why can everybody else stick to it?
Why do I keep letting myself down?
My ADHD diagnosis didn't erase those years.
But it did allow me to look back at some of them with information I'd never had while I was living them.
And perhaps that's one of the most important things understanding has given me.
Not a reason to tell myself that nothing was within my control.
A reason to stop assuming that everything I had struggled with was evidence that something was wrong with me.
Now I can look back at that woman very differently.
She wasn't somebody who needed more judgement.
She needed somebody to get curious enough to help her understand what was actually happening.
Because when we're trying to understand why weight comes back, blame tells us very little.
Understanding what happens before, during and after the struggle can tell us far more.
11- When ADHD Meets Midlife (Optional Section)
If you're not yet navigating midlife, perimenopause or menopause, you can absolutely skip this section.
Nothing that follows is necessary for understanding the rest of this Guide.
But if you are, I want to spend a little time here.
Because ADHD didn't suddenly arrive when you reached midlife.
But the conditions in which you're navigating it may have changed.
And if you've reached this stage of life and found yourself thinking:
Why does everything suddenly feel harder?
Why can't I manage things in the way I used to?
Why does my head feel so full?
Why am I forgetting more?
Why is it harder to concentrate?
Why am I so exhausted?
Why does everything seem to require so much more from me?
I think those questions deserve curiosity too.
My own experience of ADHD and midlife happened in quite an interesting order.
I was diagnosed with ADHD later in life.
Suddenly I had information that helped me look backwards and understand experiences I'd been having for years.
Things began making sense.
Not everything.
ADHD didn't become my explanation for every struggle I'd ever had.
But I understood myself differently.
And importantly, I began to understand what ADHD looked and felt like for me.
Then, around three years after my diagnosis, I entered perimenopause.
And something changed again.
This time I wasn't looking backwards at experiences I hadn't understood while I was living them.
I already knew I had ADHD.
I already had language for some of the things I'd previously struggled to understand about myself.
But now I was navigating that alongside changes in sleep, energy, concentration and the wider physical and emotional demands of perimenopause.
And that distinction matters.
Because some experiences associated with perimenopause can overlap with things a woman with ADHD may already recognise.
Difficulty concentrating.
Forgetfulness.
Feeling mentally foggy.
Sleep disruption.
Mood changes.
Fatigue.
Perhaps you're reading those and thinking:
Hang on.
Some of those already sound familiar.
Exactly.
And that's part of what can make this stage of life confusing.
The research into ADHD specifically during perimenopause and menopause is still developing, and there is a lot we don't yet know.
Researchers are investigating the relationship between hormonal changes and ADHD symptoms in women, and some women report changes in ADHD-related difficulties during this stage of life.
But I don't think it would be responsible for me to tell you that every change you're experiencing is ADHD.
Or hormones.
Or menopause.
Real life is rarely that tidy.
And everything we've explored in this Guide should already have shown us why.
You are still living within a whole life.
You may be navigating hormonal change.
But perhaps you're also sleeping badly.
Working.
Caring for children.
Supporting ageing parents.
Managing a relationship.
Navigating financial pressure.
Dealing with changes in your body.
Carrying years of responsibilities.
Perhaps grieving people or parts of your life.
Perhaps questioning what you want the next stage of your life to look like.
And if you have ADHD, you're navigating ADHD within all of that too.
That's why I don't find it particularly helpful to reduce this stage of a woman's life to one explanation.
What I find much more useful is the question we've already learned to ask:
What is being asked of me?
And what do I currently have available to meet it?
Because perhaps something that you've always found a little difficult is now requiring more from you.
Perhaps you've always procrastinated, but recovering from procrastination feels harder when you're exhausted.
Perhaps you've always had periods of intense focus, but poor sleep is now affecting what you have available after those periods.
Perhaps planning and organising have never been effortless, but now you're trying to do them while your head feels foggier.
Perhaps you've always experienced impulsive moments, but you're navigating them at a time when you're also carrying more emotionally or mentally.
Perhaps the same Weight-Regain Pattern you've experienced for years hasn't changed at all.
But what you have available when it appears has.
That's an important distinction.
Midlife doesn't have to have created the pattern for midlife to change the circumstances in which you're navigating it.
And ADHD doesn't have to explain the pattern for ADHD to be relevant to what implementation is asking from you.
This is where everything we've explored about capacity becomes particularly useful.
Maybe your physical capacity has changed because your sleep or energy has changed.
Maybe mentally you're finding concentration, remembering, planning or making decisions more demanding.
Maybe emotionally you're carrying more, reacting more strongly to things or finding it harder to recover when something knocks you.
Maybe practically, the life you're living now simply asks more of you than the life you were living ten or twenty years ago.
And those things don't exist separately.
We've already seen how they can influence one another.
A difficult night's sleep doesn't stay neatly inside physical capacity.
It can affect concentration.
Patience.
Decision-making.
Energy.
What feels manageable.
And if something already requires more conscious effort from you, having less available elsewhere may change how difficult that thing feels too.
This is also why I think we need to be careful with another conclusion women can reach during midlife:
I used to be able to do this.
What's wrong with me now?
We've just spent an entire section talking about the danger of confusing capability with capacity.
Midlife doesn't make that distinction disappear.
You may still be every bit as capable as the woman who successfully lost weight before.
You may still have the knowledge.
The experience.
The skills.
The intention.
But that doesn't mean you're implementing within exactly the same circumstances.
And it doesn't mean everything will require exactly the same amount from you.
For me, that was another important piece of understanding.
My ADHD diagnosis had already taught me that some of the things I'd judged myself for throughout my life could be understood differently.
Perimenopause didn't undo that understanding.
It gave me another reason to remain curious when things changed.
Instead of immediately deciding:
I'm going backwards.
I've lost my discipline.
I'm failing again.
I could ask:
What's different?
What am I navigating now that I wasn't navigating before?
What is requiring more from me?
What do I currently have available?
Which familiar Weight-Regain Patterns are showing up?
Has anything changed how vulnerable I feel to them?
What happens when I'm interrupted?
And what might help me recover?
Those questions don't remove responsibility.
They give us better information to work with.
And perhaps that's particularly important if you spent years not knowing you had ADHD, finally received an explanation that helped parts of your life make sense, and then reached midlife only to feel as though the ground shifted underneath you again.
You haven't necessarily lost everything you learned about yourself.
There may simply be more information to include now.
And if you're reading this because you recognise ADHD-related experiences but don't have a diagnosis, the same principle applies without needing to decide for yourself what is causing them.
Recognition can give you things to become curious about.
It isn't a diagnosis.
And changes in concentration, mood, sleep, memory or other symptoms during midlife can have many possible causes, which is why new, significant or concerning changes are worth discussing with an appropriate healthcare professional.
What I want you to take from this section is much simpler.
ADHD didn't suddenly arrive at midlife.
Your existing Weight-Regain Patterns didn't suddenly become midlife patterns.
And perimenopause doesn't need to explain everything that's happening for it to be relevant to the circumstances you're navigating.
Maybe the more useful question isn't:
Which one of these things is the problem?
Maybe it's:
What does understanding all of them help me see that I couldn't see before?
Because that's what this entire Guide has been about.
Not finding another reason to blame yourself.
Not finding one explanation to pin everything on.
Understanding more of what has actually been happening.
If you've recognised yourself here, carry that additional understanding with you as we continue.
And if this stage of life isn't yours yet, that's okay too.
From here, we're all coming back together.
Because whether or not you're currently navigating midlife, there is another part of weight loss where the relationship between what is being asked of you and what you have available can become particularly important.
Nutrition.
Nutrition advice often focuses on what to eat, how much to eat and whether a particular approach can produce weight loss.
But for a woman with ADHD, eating for weight loss can also involve planning, remembering, preparing, tracking, switching attention, making repeated decisions and responding to hunger, impulses or food that has already captured her attention.
All of that can ask something from you before the food is even eaten.
And the way you're eating can affect what you then have available for everything else you're trying to change.
So next, I want us to look beyond whether a nutrition plan can help you lose weight.
I want us to consider what happens when that plan meets your brain, your capacity and your real life.
12- When Your Nutrition Plan Meets Real Life
We've just looked at how what is being asked of you can interact with what you have available, and how easily a change in capacity can become a doubt about capability.
But there is another part of this conversation that I don't think we can afford to overlook.
Before I explain what I mean, think about what being in diet mode has looked like in your own life.
Perhaps you wake up and one of your first thoughts is about food.
What can I eat today?
What have I got left?
Should I save something for later?
What will I do if everybody else wants a takeaway?
Can I have the thing I'm already thinking about, or do I need to resist it?
Maybe breakfast comes with calculations about lunch.
Lunch comes with negotiations about dinner.
And by the evening, you're mentally reviewing the day.
Did I eat the right things?
Did I eat too much?
Have I ruined it?
Do I need to make up for anything tomorrow?
Maybe the plan is helping you lose weight.
But how much of you is being used to maintain it?
How much attention is going into planning, calculating, resisting, checking and negotiating?
How much space is food occupying when you aren't even eating?
And what does that leave available for everything else your life is asking from you?
I don't know what this has looked like for you personally.
But I know what it looked like for me.
I can honestly say that, for me, when I'm locked into diet mode, my capacity is stretched to its limit.
I'm constantly calculating what I can eat, what I shouldn't eat, what is in everything and whether I have eaten the right things.
If life becomes busy and I haven't kept track of everything properly, I can feel panicked.
I can reach the end of the day mentally reviewing what I've eaten, deciding whether I have done well enough and wondering whether I need to make up for something tomorrow.
That mental workload is one way a nutrition approach can consume capacity.
And for a woman with ADHD, some of the work surrounding food may already rely heavily on attention, working memory, planning, organisation, decision-making and the ability to remain engaged with something after its initial interest has passed.
The food may be only one part of what the plan is asking her to manage.
But there is another side to this too.
A way of eating can ask more from your capacity through everything required to maintain it.
But it can also leave you with less capacity available when it doesn't adequately support your body.
A nutrition plan can create a calorie deficit and produce weight loss while still leaving you persistently hungry, low in energy, physically under-supported or dissatisfied with what you're eating.
In that sense, it may be working for weight loss while not adequately supporting the woman who has to keep implementing it.
That doesn't mean feeling hungry occasionally makes a nutrition plan unsupportive.
It doesn't mean every meal has to be nutritionally perfect.
And it doesn't mean convenience foods, processed foods or tracking calories are automatically the problem.
It means that whether a way of eating produces weight loss isn't the only information that matters.
We also need to consider what the food is giving your body, how it affects your hunger, energy and satisfaction, and what that leaves available for the rest of your life.
There is one particular period I can look back on now and understand very differently through that lens.
I was given a calorie target of 1,600 calories by a Personal Trainer.
I was also told that I could eat any foods I wanted, including fast food, as long as I remained within that calorie allowance.
So the message I took from that was that the calorie deficit was what mattered.
The number itself wasn't automatically the problem.
Calorie awareness can be a useful tool, and being able to include foods you enjoy can make a way of eating feel less restrictive.
The problem wasn't that I had been given permission to eat convenience food or fast food.
There is nothing inherently wrong with eating those foods. I still include convenience food now.
The problem was that I hadn't been helped to consider anything beyond whether my food fitted within the calorie target.
At the time, a lot of my diet consisted of highly processed convenience foods, including fast food.
Some of the foods I chose were relatively high in calories for quite a small amount of food.
So I could use a significant proportion of my daily allowance without physically eating very much.
I wasn't giving enough attention to food volume, protein, fibre or the wider balance of what my body was receiving.
I could reach my calorie target and technically have followed the advice correctly while still feeling as though I hadn't eaten enough to feel properly fed.
On paper, I was adhering to the nutrition plan.
In my actual life, I was asking myself to manage hunger, dissatisfaction and an increasing amount of thought about food while continuing to stay within the same number.
That was unsupportive nutrition for me.
Not because 1,600 calories was automatically wrong.
Not because the individual foods were bad.
But because the way I was using that allowance wasn't adequately supporting my body, my appetite or the capacity I needed to maintain it.
I was evaluating that way of eating by whether it created weight loss.
I wasn't yet asking what kind of experience it was creating for the woman who had to live within it.
And when I reflect on that now, I can honestly admit something.
If eating that way had coincided with my decision to begin changing my Weight-Regain Patterns, I would have struggled.
I would have been asking myself to recognise emotional eating, interrupt all-or-nothing responses, make considered choices and practise something different while hunger and food were already taking up an enormous amount of my attention.
I would have been asking myself to create space between a familiar pattern and my response while the way I was eating was already consuming much of that space.
And when I now understand that experience through an ADHD lens, I can see how much I would also have been asking from the same executive capacity I needed to plan, remember, organise, track and repeatedly make decisions about food.
That doesn't mean changing longstanding patterns should feel effortless when nutrition supports you.
It means the conditions in which you're trying to create behavioural change matter.
The way you're trying to lose weight can affect the capacity you have available to keep implementing it.
Capacity affects your ability to implement your nutrition.
But your nutrition can also affect the capacity you have available for implementation.
The relationship moves in both directions.
All of that mental work wasn't only time spent thinking about food.
It was attention.
Decision-making.
Working memory.
Internal negotiation.
Emotional energy.
Space in my head that wasn't freely available for anything else while food was occupying it.
And the more of that space the plan occupied, the less space I seemed to have for calm, flexible choices.
My options could begin to narrow into resisting, giving in, compensating or starting again.
And even when I didn't eat the food I was trying to resist, the struggle around it had already asked something from me.
That is part of the hidden cost we can miss when we evaluate a way of eating only by whether it produces weight loss.
The cost of an unsupportive approach isn't measured only in hunger or low energy.
It can also be measured in how much attention, restraint and negotiation it requires from you throughout the day.
Thinking about food or planning what you're going to eat isn't automatically a problem.
Food naturally requires some thought, and any intentional change will ask for some attention.
But there is a difference between giving something purposeful attention and feeling as though it is continually occupying you.
There is a difference between making an informed choice and spending half the day in a negotiation with yourself.
And there is a difference between using some capacity to support your goal and having so much capacity consumed by the way you're pursuing it that you have less available for everything else.
That can become particularly important when your attention doesn't always stay where you intended to place it.
Food may occupy enormous amounts of your attention at one time and almost disappear from your awareness at another.
You may spend one day intensely planning, researching, organising or tracking what you're going to eat.
Then find that maintaining the same level of engagement becomes much harder when the interest, urgency or novelty changes.
That doesn't mean every woman with ADHD will experience food in that way.
It means that a nutrition plan may be relying on cognitive processes that are not equally available or engaged every day.
That matters because weight loss doesn't happen separately from the rest of your life.
You still need capacity to work, parent, care, concentrate, remember, organise, make decisions, respond to emotions and deal with whatever that particular day brings.
And if you are trying to change a Weight-Regain Pattern, you may also need enough space to notice the familiar response, pause and do something different.
Now imagine trying to do that when you're genuinely hungry.
When food is already occupying enormous amounts of your attention.
When every choice feels like another calculation.
When you're feeling deprived or dissatisfied.
When you've used much of your available attention and decision-making capacity elsewhere.
When the food you planned no longer feels appealing, but you haven't prepared another option.
When you realise much later than intended that you haven't eaten and now need to make a decision while extremely hungry.
When eating something you hadn't planned immediately becomes guilt.
Or when foods have become so tied to ideas of being good, bad, allowed or forbidden that eating no longer feels like a simple physical act.
Those things can ask from your capacity too.
Some belong to the way you're physically supporting your body.
Some belong to your relationship with food.
Some may interact with attention, impulsivity, sensory preferences, appetite awareness, working memory or the need for interest and reward.
And often, they begin affecting one another.
Hunger can make food occupy more of your attention.
Restriction can make the foods you're trying not to eat feel even more significant.
Food morality can turn a choice into a judgement about you.
Guilt can lead to compensation, greater restriction or an all-or-nothing response.
A food fixation can make one option feel easy for a time, until it suddenly no longer appeals.
Hyperfocus elsewhere can mean hunger cues or the passing of time aren't noticed until the need to eat feels urgent.
An impulsive choice can become another reason to decide the whole plan has been ruined.
And suddenly, the way you're trying to lose weight isn't only asking you to eat differently.
It is asking your body, brain and emotions to keep absorbing everything happening around that way of eating too.
This becomes particularly important when the plan itself is fixed.
Many traditional fixed nutrition plans are presented as though success depends on maintaining the same foods, preparation, tracking, timing and level of adherence, regardless of what is happening within you or around you.
But your capacity isn't fixed.
And neither are many of the ADHD-related experiences that may influence what implementing that plan asks from you.
Your attention can change.
Your interest can change.
Your appetite awareness can change.
Your sensory preferences can change.
The food you were happy to eat repeatedly can suddenly become the last thing you want.
Your ability to begin planning, preparing or tracking can feel different from one day to another.
Your sleep, workload, health, energy, stress, emotions, responsibilities, available time and practical circumstances can all change too.
So a plan may continue asking exactly the same thing from you while what you have available to meet that demand becomes very different.
And when the plan cannot adapt, you are expected to absorb the difference.
Usually through more effort.
More restraint.
More planning.
More remembering.
More mental negotiation.
Or by somehow finding executive capacity that the rest of your life has already used.
This is something I can now understand very differently through my own ADHD diagnosis.
I was being told to consistently follow a fixed plan when my brain patterns, eating preferences and what I had available were far from fixed or consistent.
The version of me who enthusiastically created a plan could genuinely intend to follow it.
But the version of me who later had to prepare, remember, track and eat the food might not have access to the same interest, attention, energy or willingness to eat what had already been decided.
That didn't mean the original intention wasn't real.
It didn't mean I no longer wanted the result.
And it didn't mean I was incapable of losing weight.
It meant that a fixed plan could depend upon a level of consistency from my brain that my brain did not consistently provide.
Now add hunger.
Add chronic food preoccupation.
Add dissatisfaction.
Add changing interest or eating preferences.
Add the planning, remembering, preparation, tracking and repeated decision-making the approach requires.
Add food morality and the guilt that can follow when you believe you haven't eaten in the right way.
Add a fixed plan that continues asking for the same level of adherence while your attention, capacity and the conditions surrounding you keep changing.
Add the fear that anything less than complete adherence means you've failed.
When all of that is happening at the same time, sustaining the way you've been trying to eat becomes about far more than simply knowing what to do or wanting the result badly enough.
It means trying to maintain a fixed set of behaviours while carrying hunger, chronic food preoccupation, food morality, guilt, executive demands, changing preferences, changing capacity and the rest of your life alongside them.
That gives us a very different explanation from simply deciding you should have been more consistent.
That doesn't mean nobody with ADHD can follow a fixed nutrition plan.
Some women can.
Some women enjoy a highly structured way of eating and find that it removes decisions rather than creating them.
Some may find that repetition reduces demand and gives them fewer things to think about.
Some have the capacity, circumstances, preferences and support that make a particular plan relatively easy to implement.
And something that asks an enormous amount from one woman may ask very little from another.
Over the years I've worked with women, I've been asked versions of the same comparison many times.
Why can she follow that plan when I can't?
I understand why women ask it.
You've already seen what happened when I compared myself with women who had successfully followed the same plan.
I assumed that if they could follow it and I couldn't, the difference must be me.
But there was another question I didn't know to ask at the time.
Was the same plan really asking the same thing from every woman using it?
Two women being given the same plan doesn't mean the plan asks the same thing from both of them.
They may have different capacity available.
Different responsibilities.
Different histories with food.
Different preferences.
Different sensory needs.
Different support.
Different executive demands elsewhere in their lives.
Different responses to hunger, repetition, tracking or restriction.
And even two women with ADHD may experience the same plan very differently.
We rarely know what following the plan may be costing another woman behind the result we can see.
There is also another answer we don't always allow ourselves to give.
Perhaps you don't want to eat in that fixed way.
I know I didn't.
There were ways of eating I may have been capable of forcing myself to follow for a period of time, but I didn't want my life with food to require that amount of restriction, repetition or constant management.
And there were foods I could willingly eat for a period of time but couldn't imagine forcing myself to continue eating after they had lost their appeal.
That distinction matters.
Capability asks:
Could I force myself to do this?
Fit asks:
What does doing this require from me, what does it cost me, and do I want to live this way?
The fact that another woman can follow a plan doesn't prove that you should be able to follow it in the same way.
It doesn't prove the plan is right for you.
And it doesn't make the demands of that plan a price you must be willing to pay if you want your weight to change.
I also want to be very clear about what I'm not saying.
This isn't an argument against having a nutrition plan.
It isn't an argument against structure, calorie awareness, tracking, planning or intentionally making different choices if you want to lose weight.
The physical principles of weight loss still matter.
How much you eat matters when you want to reduce your weight.
What you eat matters because your body needs more from food than a calorie number.
And structure can support capacity.
For some women with ADHD, structure can be especially helpful.
Planning can mean fewer decisions later.
Tracking can give you information and remove uncertainty.
Preparing food in advance can make supportive choices easier when you're tired, busy or already using your attention elsewhere.
Having some boundaries around what or how much you eat can help you create the conditions required for weight loss without needing to renegotiate every choice.
The question isn't whether a tool requires any capacity.
Every way of eating requires something.
The question is what it asks from you and what it gives you in return.
Take tracking as an example.
For one woman, tracking might take a few minutes, give her useful information and allow her to get on with her day.
For another, those same numbers might occupy an enormous amount of mental space.
She may repeatedly check what she has left, worry when she can't calculate something accurately, rearrange her eating to stay within the number or feel anxious when life makes tracking difficult.
For a woman with ADHD, tracking may provide a helpful external structure when remembering and estimating feel difficult.
Or it may become something she hyperfocuses on, repeatedly forgets to do, loses interest in or experiences as another unfinished task following her through the day.
The tool is the same.
What it asks from each woman is different.
And what it asks from the same woman may not feel identical every day.
Tracking can be a tool you use.
Or it can begin to feel like a system you're continually being supervised by.
The problem isn't automatically the tracking.
It is what happens in your relationship with it, how much capacity it requires and whether it is helping you make informed choices or keeping food at the centre of your thoughts all day.
Tracking should serve you.
You shouldn't feel as though you are serving the tracker.
The same principle applies to structure more broadly.
Flexibility doesn't mean having no direction.
Supporting your capacity doesn't mean only implementing something when it feels easy or interesting.
And recognising that an approach asks too much from you doesn't mean you expect weight loss to require nothing from you.
Meaningful change asks for attention, decisions and effort.
But there is a difference between effort that supports a life you want to live and effort spent continually trying to make yourself and your brain fit an approach you don't want to live with.
For me, sustainable nutrition came to mean enough structure to support my direction and enough flexibility to remain workable within a real life.
As I came to understand my ADHD, it also meant recognising that the same version may not remain equally workable when my attention, interest, eating preferences or available capacity changed.
Not one fixed version I had to perform perfectly regardless of what I had available.
An approach that could change shape without losing its purpose.
So perhaps the question isn't only:
Why couldn't I stick to it?
Perhaps there are other questions worth asking too.
What was this way of eating asking from me?
What was it giving my body?
How did it affect my hunger, energy and satisfaction?
How much space did it occupy in my mind?
What happened to my relationship with food while I was following it?
What parts of the plan were relying on planning, memory, sustained attention, organisation or interest?
What happened when my attention or interest changed?
What happened when the food I had planned no longer appealed to me?
Was the structure supporting me or continually asking me to fight the way my brain was functioning?
What happened when my capacity changed?
Did the plan have another version available, or did anything less than full adherence feel like failure?
Was I unable to follow it, or was I unwilling to keep living in the way it required?
And was I judging myself according to how well I could conform to the plan without ever asking how well the plan supported me?
Those questions don't remove personal responsibility.
They give you more of the information needed to take responsibility usefully.
Because perhaps you weren't simply failing to implement your nutrition.
Perhaps the nutrition you were trying to implement was sometimes making implementation harder.
And perhaps what you need isn't a complete absence of structure.
Perhaps you need structure that supports your body, works with your brain and capacity, and can adapt without every adaptation becoming another ending.
Understanding this was one of the reasons I drew upon my Nutritional Therapy qualifications to create a more capacity-led way of eating for myself.
I didn't want another fixed diet that worked only while I could organise my life and force my brain around it.
I wanted enough nutritional structure to support my weight-loss goal, my body and my appetite, with enough flexibility to remain workable when my attention, preferences, capacity or circumstances changed.
Those are the same principles I now use when supporting my clients.
13- When Movement Becomes Another Demand
Now that we have begun looking at nutrition through a different lens, it feels only natural that we move to movement.
Because when weight loss is explained through its physical principles, the instruction many of us have repeatedly been given sounds relatively simple:
Eat less.
Move more.
And the science of energy balance does matter.
Reducing body weight requires an energy deficit, and both nutrition and movement can contribute to creating one.
But just as “eat less” tells us very little about whether the way somebody is eating supports her body, appetite and capacity, “move more” tells us very little about what that movement is asking from her.
It doesn't tell us what she has been taught movement must look like before it counts.
It doesn't tell us how much time, energy, attention, preparation or recovery it requires.
It doesn't tell us how difficult beginning, transitioning into or remaining engaged with that movement may feel.
It doesn't tell us whether it works with her current capacity or repeatedly exceeds it.
And it doesn't tell us what happens when she cannot maintain the amount, intensity or routine she believes she should be following.
Perhaps you recognise some of this in your own relationship with movement.
You decide that this time you are going to exercise properly.
You create a plan.
Perhaps you are going to attend the gym several times a week.
Complete a full workout.
Reach a certain number of steps every day.
Follow a structured programme.
Exercise for a specific amount of time.
Push yourself hard enough to feel as though it counted.
And perhaps, while your motivation, interest and circumstances allow it, you manage to implement that plan.
Maybe you become completely absorbed in it.
You research workouts.
Buy equipment.
Plan your week around exercise.
Track your progress.
And feel genuinely excited about what you are doing.
But then something changes.
You sleep badly.
Work becomes busier.
Your energy decreases.
Your body feels uncomfortable.
Your emotional load increases.
You have less time available.
You become unwell.
Somebody else needs more from you.
The initial interest begins to fade.
Starting the workout feels more difficult than it did before.
Or you simply reach a day when the movement you planned asks for more than you currently have available.
And what happens then?
Do you see that as information?
Do you recognise that the amount, type or structure of movement you planned no longer matches what you currently have available?
Do you consider whether the interest that helped you begin is no longer providing the same momentum?
Or does it become another moment in which you believe you have failed?
Perhaps you tell yourself that a shorter walk would be pointless.
That gentle movement would not burn enough calories.
That stretching does not count as exercise.
That moving your body for ten minutes is not worth doing if you cannot complete the full session.
That if you cannot reach the step target, there is no point going out at all.
That adapting the plan means you are making excuses.
That losing interest means you were never genuinely committed.
That anything less than what you originally intended is evidence that you are slipping again.
And before long, movement has become another pass-or-fail test.
I can honestly say that this was part of my own weight-loss history.
Every missed workout became more than a missed workout.
It became evidence.
Evidence that I was losing motivation.
Evidence that I was becoming inconsistent.
Evidence that I was falling away from the plan.
Evidence that I was heading back towards the place I had been before.
I did not automatically see a change in what I could manage or remain engaged with as a reason to become curious about what had changed.
I saw it as another reason to doubt myself.
And because I had absorbed the belief that exercise only really counted if it looked and felt like exercise, adapting it could feel like lowering the standard.
A full workout counted.
Something intense counted.
Something that made me sweat counted.
Something that felt difficult enough to prove I had made an effort counted.
But shorter, gentler, more enjoyable or less structured movement could be dismissed before I had even considered what it might give me.
Looking back through an ADHD lens helped me understand another part of that experience.
The desire to move could be completely genuine.
The plan could feel exciting and important.
And I could be deeply engaged with it for a period of time.
But that did not mean my attention, interest, energy or ability to initiate the movement would remain the same every day.
I was expecting myself to follow a consistent movement routine while the brain processes I was relying upon to begin and remain engaged were not always consistent.
When that changed, I interpreted the change as a loss of commitment rather than becoming curious about what the movement plan had been relying upon.
That is one of the distorted perceptions many of us have inherited about movement.
We have been taught to measure its value almost entirely through effort, intensity and calorie expenditure.
How hard did you work?
How much did you sweat?
How many calories did you burn?
How long did you exercise for?
Did you hit the target?
Did you push yourself enough?
And when movement becomes attached to weight loss, another layer can be added.
Burn off what you ate.
Earn your food.
Make up for yesterday.
Undo the damage.
Work harder because the scales did not move.
Movement can begin to feel less like something supportive and more like a repayment plan.
Something you owe because you ate.
Something you must use to compensate when you believe you have eaten too much.
Something you are failing at when your body, brain or circumstances cannot repeatedly meet the demand.
When movement carries that meaning, it makes sense that resistance can build around it.
Not because you are lazy.
Not because movement is unimportant.
And not because you are incapable of being active.
But because what you have come to associate with movement may require a considerable amount from you before you believe it has any value at all.
For a woman with ADHD, the demand may also begin long before the movement itself.
You may need to interrupt what you are already doing.
Shift your attention.
Estimate how long the workout will take.
Find what you need.
Change your clothes.
Leave the house.
Travel somewhere.
Remember the sequence you planned.
And begin something that may not feel immediately interesting or rewarding in that moment.
None of those individual steps may look particularly large from the outside.
But together, they can create a considerable transition between intending to move and actually beginning.
If that transition remains unseen, difficulty starting can quickly become another reason to call yourself unmotivated or inconsistent.
Perhaps movement also asks you to enter spaces where you have learned to expect judgement.
You may find yourself bracing before you even arrive.
Bracing for somebody to look at your body.
Bracing for comparison with people who appear fitter, slimmer or more confident.
Bracing because you are worried about what you are wearing, how your body moves, whether you can keep up or whether you will know how to use the equipment.
Bracing because you may lose track of an instruction, forget the sequence or need something repeated.
Bracing because the music, lights, mirrors, noise, crowds or physical sensations of the environment already feel overwhelming.
Bracing for the possibility that somebody might interpret your pace, your coordination, your attention or the amount you can manage as evidence that you are not trying hard enough.
Perhaps that expectation comes from something somebody has previously said or done.
Perhaps you have felt watched, underestimated, patronised or out of place in movement spaces before.
Or perhaps nobody has said anything directly, but years of feeling judged because of your weight or misunderstood because of the way you function have taught you to anticipate judgement anyway.
Bracing for judgement is not a neutral experience.
It can mean monitoring the room while trying to move your body.
Wondering who is looking.
Trying not to draw attention to yourself.
Positioning yourself where you are less visible.
Comparing what you can do with what everybody else appears to be doing.
Trying to follow instructions while part of your attention is focused on how you might appear.
Preparing explanations in case you need to stop, slow down or adapt something.
All of that can consume mental and emotional capacity before the physical demand of the movement has even been considered.
So when a plan asks you to attend a gym, join a class, walk outside or exercise where other people can see you, it may be asking far more from you than completing the movement itself.
And if that additional demand remains unseen, avoiding the movement can easily be interpreted as laziness, lack of motivation or another excuse.
But once again, the behaviour tells us what happened.
It does not, on its own, tell us everything that woman was trying to overcome in order to do it.
And if you feel too apprehensive, overstimulated or uncomfortable to join a class, work out in a gym or walk where other people can see you, that does not have to be your starting point.
Movement does not become less valuable because you begin somewhere private, familiar or more accessible to you.
You may begin by moving at home.
Walking somewhere quieter.
Moving while seated.
Stretching in a space where you feel comfortable.
Or choosing another form of movement that does not require you to overcome such a large emotional, sensory or practical demand before you can begin.
Starting where movement feels more accessible is not evidence that you are giving in to fear or avoiding challenge.
It is recognising what you currently have available and removing an unnecessary demand from the starting point.
It does not mean you can never choose to enter those other spaces.
It means they do not have to be the price of beginning.
A workout does not begin and end with the minutes spent exercising.
It may require planning.
Decision-making.
Remembering.
Estimating time.
Stopping another activity.
Changing clothes.
Travelling somewhere.
Arranging childcare.
Finding privacy or space.
Managing sensory or physical discomfort.
Beginning something when you already feel mentally or physically tired.
Remaining engaged after the initial interest has faded.
And recovering afterwards.
None of those things means the movement is wrong for you.
But they are all part of what that movement may ask from you.
If we ignore them and look only at whether you completed the workout, we lose the opportunity to understand why implementation may become more difficult at some times than others.
A fixed movement plan can ask you to produce the same output regardless of what is happening within you or around you.
The same number of workouts.
The same duration.
The same intensity.
The same step target.
The same weekly schedule.
But your sleep may not be the same.
Your energy may not be the same.
Your health may not be the same.
Your emotional load may not be the same.
Your physical comfort may not be the same.
Your attention may not be the same.
Your interest may not be the same.
Your ability to begin or transition away from something else may not be the same.
And what the rest of your life is asking from your executive capacity may not be the same.
You may be capable of completing the movement.
That does not mean you will always have the same capacity available to initiate and implement it in the same way.
This is not an argument against structured exercise.
It is not an argument against routines.
It is not an argument against challenging yourself.
It is not a suggestion that intense movement is automatically unsupportive.
For some women with ADHD, a clear exercise routine removes decisions and makes movement easier to begin.
Structured or higher-intensity exercise may feel stimulating, energising, enjoyable and empowering.
Some women genuinely enjoy the gym, fitness classes, running, strength training or having a clear performance goal.
There may also be times when you have both the desire and capacity to challenge yourself more.
The question is not whether challenging or structured movement is good or bad.
The question is whether the way you are trying to move is supportive and workable for you.
What does it rely upon?
What happens when your attention, interest or capacity changes?
And can you remain connected to movement when the original version becomes harder to initiate or maintain?
Because the relationship between movement and capacity is not one-directional.
Movement requires something from you.
But the right movement, at the right time, can also give something back.
It may support your energy.
Lift your mood.
Create thinking space.
Release physical tension or restless energy.
Help emotional pressure soften.
Support strength, mobility and physical confidence.
Help you feel more connected to your body.
Or simply give you a moment in which you feel like yourself again.
Walking became one of the most important regulation tools in my own life.
It gave my body somewhere to put restless energy.
It gave my thoughts room to move when my head felt overcrowded.
It could help me process emotions, soften internal pressure and return feeling more able to focus on what came next.
Sometimes I walked because I wanted the physical benefits.
But often, what the walk gave me mentally and emotionally was every bit as valuable.
It was not only movement I had completed.
It was something that helped me regulate my state.
And that changed what movement meant to me.
Movement does not always need to look like a traditional workout to offer those things.
It might look like walking.
Gentle cycling.
Arm cycling.
Stretching.
Mobility work.
Moving your body to music.
Or another accessible form of movement that works with your brain, body and circumstances.
That does not mean every movement option will be suitable or accessible for every woman.
It means movement can take more forms than many of us have been taught to recognise.
One of the most regulating forms of movement I discovered for myself was simply putting on music and allowing my body to move.
Not a structured dance class.
Not choreography.
Not movement that needed to look a certain way.
Just allowing my body to respond to the rhythm.
It gave my attention something immediate to connect with.
It helped shift energy that felt as though it had become stuck.
It helped release tension I had not always realised I was carrying.
And it could lift my mood in a way that felt completely different from forcing myself through exercise because I believed I had to burn calories.
The movement had not become meaningless because it was enjoyable.
It had not stopped counting because it was not punishing.
It was supporting me in a different way.
That understanding eventually influenced the movement I began offering within my own work.
In my community classes, I combined dance, toning, rhythmic movement and somatic principles so movement could become about more than changing how the body looks.
It could also help women feel stronger, more energised, more connected and more supported within their bodies.
And the response reinforced something important for me.
Movement can be valuable because of what it gives you, not only because of what it burns.
That changes the conversation.
Instead of only asking:
Did I do enough?
We can also become curious about:
What did that movement ask from me?
What did it give back?
What was beginning it relying upon?
Did it support the capacity I had available, or did it require me to repeatedly override it?
Did the environment support me, or was I using a significant amount of capacity managing distraction, discomfort or sensory demand?
What happened when the initial interest changed?
Have I been dismissing forms of movement that could support me because they do not match my idea of what exercise should look like?
And what happens to my relationship with movement when I cannot meet the standard I originally set?
Again, this does not remove personal responsibility.
It helps us understand what we are asking ourselves to be responsible for.
If the only movement you believe counts requires more time, energy, executive capacity or sustained interest than you regularly have available, sustaining it will naturally be harder.
If every change to your plan feels like failure, adaptation becomes difficult.
If a drop in interest is interpreted as proof that you no longer care, you may abandon movement rather than recognising that engagement has changed.
If missing one workout activates an all-or-nothing response, one interruption can begin to affect far more than one day.
And if movement has become attached to guilt, punishment, compensation, sensory overwhelm or anticipated judgement, it may carry an emotional and mental cost before you have even begun.
None of that means you cannot build a supportive relationship with movement.
It means there may be more to understand than whether you moved enough.
When we look at nutrition and movement only through the instruction to eat less and move more, we see what somebody is being asked to do.
We do not see what implementing those instructions may be asking from her.
We do not see whether her nutrition is supporting the capacity she needs to make changes.
We do not see whether her expectations of movement are working with her brain and capacity or repeatedly exceeding them.
And we do not see what happens emotionally when she cannot maintain either of them in the fixed way she believes she should.
Once we begin to include all of that, the picture becomes much wider.
You were not only trying to know what to eat and how much to move.
You may have been trying to manage hunger, food preoccupation, food morality, fixed nutritional expectations, planning, remembering, initiation, transitions, changing interest, sensory demands, demanding movement goals, anticipated judgement, changing capacity, Weight-Regain Patterns and the rest of your life at the same time.
When we understand the full weight of what you were trying to carry, your struggle begins to tell us a very different story.
14- It's No Wonder You've Felt Stuck
We've covered a lot together, and now that we have, I hope something is beginning to make far more sense.
It's no wonder you've felt stuck.
Because up until now, you may have believed you had a weight-loss problem.
So every time you found yourself back at the start with weight to lose again, you did what made complete sense: you tried again to solve your weight-loss problem.
Maybe that meant another diet, another plan or another programme.
Maybe you returned to something you'd used successfully before and decided that this time you just needed to be more consistent, more disciplined or more committed.
But we've already discovered something important.
If you've successfully lost weight before, you'd already solved that part of the problem.
You knew how to lose weight because you'd demonstrated that you could.
The part you hadn't understood was what kept happening between losing the weight and finding yourself needing to lose it again.
Imagine it like this.
Imagine you're trying to reach a destination on a bike.
The bike has enough working parts to get you moving, and it works well enough to get you somewhere.
Perhaps it even gets you an incredible distance.
But there are also important parts missing.
You don't know they're missing and you don't even know they're supposed to be there, so eventually those missing parts interrupt the journey and the bike can no longer get you where you're trying to go.
You find yourself back at the beginning.
You still want to reach the destination, so you do the obvious thing.
You try to fix the bike before setting off again, but you can only work on the parts you know about.
So you adjust them, change them or replace them with different versions, and then you set off again.
Once again, the bike gets you somewhere, perhaps even another incredible distance.
But the parts that were missing are still missing.
Eventually the journey is interrupted again.
You find yourself back at the beginning, work on the parts of the bike you know about and start the journey again.
And the same thing happens again and again.
But here's the part that changed how I saw my own history.
The parts I kept changing weren't necessarily broken. They had already demonstrated that they worked because they were the parts that had allowed me to get as far as I had.
In my weight-loss history, those were the things I understood as weight loss: the food, the diet, the plan, the calories, the portions, the exercise, the tracking and the particular weight-loss approach I was following.
Many of those things had successfully helped me lose weight.
But when the weight returned, I went back and worked on them again because I didn't yet know there were other parts of the journey I needed to understand.
I didn't understand my Weight-Regain Patterns, and I didn't understand the difference between information and implementation.
I didn't understand capacity, or what could influence my vulnerability to a familiar pattern, what I had available to respond when it appeared or how difficult it might be to recover afterwards.
And for most of that history, I didn't know I had ADHD.
I didn't have that information when I was trying to understand why I could know exactly what I wanted to do and still struggle to do it.
Why I could become completely absorbed in something and then struggle when that intensity changed.
Why I could desperately want something, put enormous effort into it and still find some parts of following through so difficult.
I couldn't include information I didn't have.
I kept changing the parts I knew about because I couldn't work with parts I didn't yet know were missing.
And somewhere along the way, all of the judgement I'd accumulated around those repeated journeys, both from myself and from other people, had led me to another conclusion.
I didn't think I was riding a bike that was missing parts.
I thought I was the bike.
I know that sounds slightly funny when I put it like that, but essentially, I thought I was the problem.
Every time I found myself back at the beginning, I added it to the evidence.
I was inconsistent.
I lacked discipline.
I couldn't stick to anything.
I wasn't committed enough.
And because some of those judgements extended far beyond weight loss, they could feel even more convincing.
I was disorganised.
I procrastinated.
I was impulsive.
I started things and didn't finish them.
I could be completely focused one minute and struggle to focus the next.
Other women seemed able to do things I struggled with, so there must be something different about me.
I didn't know there were parts of the journey, and parts of myself, I hadn't yet been taught to understand.
So I made sense of what kept happening with the explanations I did have.
And eventually, those explanations became beliefs about who I was.
And that's what kept me stuck.
Not because the weight-loss information I'd been given was necessarily wrong, because some of it had worked incredibly well for weight loss.
But every time I regained weight, I returned to solving the part of the problem I'd already demonstrated I could solve.
Weight loss.
And it's no wonder I did.
Because when the weight comes back, what does it look like you need?
Weight-loss advice.
And for years, that's exactly what the weight-loss industry kept telling me I needed to return to.
Return to the food.
Return to the plan.
Return to tracking.
Return to the calories, portions, rules or exercise.
Return to the things I'd already demonstrated could help me lose weight, and try again.
I'm not saying that information was useless.
Far from it.
We've already talked about why the physical principles of weight loss matter, and some of those approaches worked incredibly well for me when it came to losing weight.
But what they didn't necessarily help me understand was why I kept finding myself needing to lose it again.
And because the weight came back, I naturally returned to weight-loss advice.
Then when that advice helped me lose weight again, it reinforced the belief that weight loss was still the problem I needed to keep solving.
Until eventually, I started asking a different question.
Why did I keep needing to solve it again?
And this is where I think we need to acknowledge something much bigger than my story or yours.
Weight regain after weight loss is common.
In fact, when you look at the research around long-term weight management, the statistics around weight regain are significantly higher than the statistics around long-term weight-loss success.
Exactly how much weight people regain and over what period varies between studies, populations and approaches, so I don't think it's helpful to throw one dramatic percentage at you and pretend it applies to everybody.
But the overall picture is difficult to ignore.
Weight loss can absolutely be achieved and maintained.
But weight regain following weight loss is extremely common.
For me, that's too big a thing to ignore.
Because if significantly more people are struggling with weight regain than achieving long-term weight-loss success, surely understanding what happens after weight loss deserves far more of our attention.
And I have my own beliefs about why, despite those overwhelmingly obvious statistics, so much of the weight-loss industry continues to focus predominantly on helping people lose weight rather than helping them understand why they keep regaining it.
After more than a decade of being submerged in this industry, first as somebody desperately trying to lose weight and later as a professional working within it, believe me, I have plenty of thoughts about that.
But I'm not here to change the weight-loss industry.
I'm here to help you understand why your weight keeps coming back.
And when I finally began looking at my own history with that question in mind, something else surprised me.
I thought again about that day at my slimming group.
The day I stood on those scales and admitted I was emotionally eating, knew what I was doing, desperately wanted to stop and asked how.
I was pointed towards the women who had successfully lost their weight and maintained it.
Look at them.
And I did.
I looked at those women and walked away with one devastating conclusion.
The difference must be me.
But when I looked back at that room years later, with everything I now understood, I realised something I hadn't noticed at the time.
Those successful women weren't the only women in that room.
There were actually more women there who were struggling just like I was.
Women who had lost weight before and regained some or all of it.
Women who were back trying again.
Women who knew the plan because they'd followed it before.
Women who had already demonstrated that they could lose weight, but couldn't understand why they could do so well for a period of time and then find themselves struggling again.
I hadn't been the only woman in that room who couldn't understand why she kept ending up back at the start.
Far from it.
And suddenly the conclusion I'd carried from that room for years looked very different.
The difference must be me.
Was it?
And years later, there was something else I would come to understand about the woman who had been standing on those scales.
She had ADHD.
She just didn't know it yet.
That didn't rewrite what happened in that room.
It didn't make ADHD the explanation for every struggle she'd experienced with her weight.
And it didn't mean the person she'd asked for help could have known something she didn't know herself.
But it did mean I had spent years judging that woman using information she hadn't had while she was living it.
The history hadn't changed.
What I understood about that history had.
If the statistics around weight regain were significantly higher than those around long-term weight-loss success, and I'd been surrounded by women experiencing the same struggle, why had I spent years treating mine as evidence of something uniquely wrong with me?
Why had so many of us repeatedly returned to weight-loss solutions when we'd already demonstrated that we could lose weight?
Why weren't we asking what happened between losing it and needing to lose it again?
For me, those questions were too big to ignore.
And I'll be completely truthful.
They also pissed me off.
Because I'd spent years believing I was repeatedly failing to solve a problem I'd actually demonstrated over and over again that I could solve.
I could lose weight.
What I hadn't understood was what kept happening afterwards.
And yes, I have some beef with the weight-loss industry about that too.
Turns out, for a vegetarian, I have a surprising amount of beef.
But as I said, I'm not here to change that industry.
I'm here to help you understand how to change your own life.
15- What Comes Next
When I finally began to understand why I kept finding myself back at the start, the next questions were obvious:
What do I change?
How do I stop it from happening again?
Those are important questions.
But before we answer them, I want to be clear about what everything we've explored means.
Your Weight-Regain Patterns may need changing.
Your capacity may need supporting.
Your nutrition may need reviewing, so that it supports your body, your appetite, your weight-loss goal and what you realistically have available.
Your approach to movement may need reviewing, so that it supports your physical and emotional capacity rather than becoming another fixed demand.
And if you have ADHD, the conditions in which you're being asked to implement change may need to be understood and supported too.
Because ADHD can affect some of the processes weight-loss implementation relies upon.
Attention.
Working memory.
Planning.
Organisation.
Initiation.
Transitions.
Time awareness.
Emotional regulation.
Impulse regulation.
The ability to remain engaged when something is repetitive or no longer feels interesting.
That does not mean ADHD is responsible for every Weight-Regain Pattern you experience.
It does not mean you are incapable of change.
And it does not mean we need to change, fix or remove your ADHD before you can lose weight sustainably.
ADHD is not a Weight-Regain Pattern.
But it may affect what implementation asks from you, what you have available to meet those demands and the circumstances in which some of your patterns appear.
Those realities need to be included in your understanding.
Not turned into more evidence that you don't want it enough.
Not used to remove your responsibility.
And not ignored while you continue trying to implement approaches that depend upon your brain functioning in exactly the same way every day.
The physical principles of weight loss still matter.
But we now understand that knowing those principles is not the same as being able to implement them consistently within a real brain, body and life.
So where do we go from here?
Let's begin with your Weight-Regain Patterns.
A pattern being longstanding does not make it permanent.
Your brain learns through experience and repetition.
Think about a route you regularly walk or drive.
In the beginning, you may need to concentrate.
You notice every turn.
You check where you're going.
You think about what comes next.
But the more often you travel that route, the more familiar it becomes.
Eventually, you may find yourself arriving without consciously remembering every part of the journey.
Your brain has learned the route.
Many of our behavioural and emotional responses become familiar in a similar way.
Something happens.
Your brain recognises the cue.
A familiar response follows.
Relief, comfort, escape or reward may reinforce it.
And the more often that sequence is repeated, the more automatic it can begin to feel.
ADHD may sometimes influence the circumstances surrounding that pattern.
Perhaps the pattern is more likely to appear when you're under-stimulated.
Overwhelmed.
Emotionally dysregulated.
Mentally exhausted.
Seeking stimulation.
Acting impulsively.
Trying to transition between tasks.
Or recovering from a period of intense focus in which your needs disappeared from your awareness.
But the ADHD-related circumstance and the learned response are not necessarily the same thing.
You do not need to make your brain less ADHD in order to become curious about the response that follows.
You can recognise the pattern.
Understand what has been activating or reinforcing it.
Interrupt it.
Decide upon an alternative response.
Mentally rehearse that response.
Practise it.
And repeat it often enough for something different to become more familiar.
That process may not always be smooth.
You may recognise the pattern before it happens one day, while you're inside it on another day and only afterwards on another.
That does not mean awareness has failed.
Each point of recognition gives you information.
Information you did not have when the pattern was happening automatically and being interpreted only as another failure.
My own emotional-eating patterns did not disappear because somebody gave me a better list of foods.
I had already received food plans.
I had already been given calorie targets.
I had already been told what I should and shouldn't eat.
What I had not been helped to understand was why food had become my response to so many different experiences.
When I began changing my own life, I was a single mum living on benefits in a high-rise council flat.
I was almost 24 stone.
I was deeply unhappy.
I had become increasingly reclusive.
I was struggling with depression.
And I was binge eating most days.
I did not yet have all the professional language I have now.
I did not have somebody standing beside me explaining every connection.
So I began learning.
Reading.
Researching.
Observing myself.
Becoming curious about the moments in which eating felt automatic.
I began recognising that my eating patterns were connected to more than hunger.
They were connected to emotions.
Cues.
Beliefs.
Relief.
Reward.
Stimulation.
Habit.
My environment.
Stress.
What I had available.
And what happened afterwards when guilt and all-or-nothing thinking pulled me further away from the choices I wanted to make.
Because those patterns had more than one layer, changing them required more than one kind of understanding.
Over time, the patterns changed.
Food gradually stopped being the answer to every emotion, difficult moment or need for relief.
I later trained professionally and developed a deeper understanding of the processes involved.
But the principle that began changing my life remains central to the work I do now.
Understand what is happening.
Replace judgement with curiosity.
Decide what you want to do differently.
Interrupt the familiar response where you can.
Mentally rehearse and practise the alternative.
Repeat it.
And when ADHD is part of your experience, remain curious about what your brain may need for that alternative to become accessible.
Because deciding what you want to do differently does not automatically make it easy to remember, initiate or remain engaged with that choice.
Desire does not create unlimited executive capacity.
Knowledge does not guarantee that the right information will be available in your mind at the exact moment you need it.
And an intention formed while you feel focused, regulated and motivated may become much harder to access when your attention, emotions, interest or capacity change.
That is not a reason to decide change is impossible.
It is a reason to stop building change as though your brain will always provide the same conditions.
This brings us back to capacity.
Once you understand capacity, the question changes.
Instead of only asking:
Why can't I make myself do this?
You can also ask:
What is this asking from me?
What do I currently have available?
And how can I support my capacity?
Sometimes that support may be physical.
Nutrition.
Hydration.
Rest.
Sleep.
Movement.
Recovery.
Sometimes it may be mental or executive.
Reducing unnecessary decisions.
Simplifying what has become too complicated.
Creating enough structure to make the next step easier to recognise.
Making important information more visible instead of expecting yourself to hold everything in your working memory.
Understanding that what feels easy to organise on one day may feel far more demanding on another.
Sometimes the support may be emotional.
Boundaries.
Connection.
Appropriate professional support.
Regulation.
Understanding what sits beneath an urge instead of only fighting with the urge itself.
Sometimes it may involve the reality of your life.
Simplifying what can be simplified.
Sharing what can be shared.
Asking for help where help is available.
Creating boundaries where something is repeatedly depleting you.
And acknowledging the things you cannot immediately change, so that your approach does not depend upon pretending they are not there.
If you're also navigating midlife, supporting capacity may include recognising that sleep, energy, concentration, emotional regulation or recovery have changed.
That does not mean midlife created every struggle or that ADHD explains every change.
It means there may be more information to include when deciding what your current approach is asking from you.
The goal is not to create a perfect life in which you always have unlimited capacity.
The goal is to stop expecting yourself to implement as though you do.
It is to support the capacity you have and build change that can remain workable when that capacity fluctuates.
This is also where nutrition deserves a different conversation.
Nutrition is not only relevant because of the energy deficit required for weight loss.
What you eat can affect your appetite.
Energy.
Satisfaction.
Food preoccupation.
Physical wellbeing.
And what you have available for the rest of your day.
But the structure around your eating also asks things from you.
Planning.
Remembering.
Shopping.
Preparing.
Tracking.
Making decisions.
Remaining interested enough to continue.
Working around changing appetite, sensory preferences or periods of food fixation.
A fixed nutrition plan may ask for consistency in all of those areas, even when your attention, preferences, interest and executive capacity are not fixed or consistent.
That does not mean structure is bad for an ADHD brain.
Structure can be enormously supportive.
It can reduce decisions, create predictability and make choices easier.
But structure is only supportive when it supports you.
When it becomes another rigid standard you must organise your brain and life around, it can add to the very capacity demands already making implementation difficult.
This is why nutrition needs to be reviewed through more than one question.
Does it support your weight-loss goal?
Does it give your body and appetite enough support?
What does it ask from your brain?
Can it remain workable when your attention, interest, food preferences or capacity change?
Does it create enough structure to help you without becoming so fixed that one disrupted day makes the whole approach feel lost?
We can apply the same curiosity to movement.
Movement can support health, energy, mobility, mood and emotional regulation.
But a movement plan can also involve initiation.
Transitions.
Planning.
Remembering.
Time awareness.
Sensory demands.
Remaining engaged when novelty fades.
And recovering when a routine is interrupted.
If those demands are ignored, movement can quickly become another place where you believe you're failing.
But when movement is considered by what it gives you as well as what it asks from you, the conversation changes.
Walking became one of the most important regulation tools in my own life.
It gave my body somewhere to put restless energy.
It gave my thoughts room to move when my head felt overcrowded.
It could help me process emotions, soften internal pressure and return feeling more able to focus on what came next.
That does not mean walking will be the right movement for every woman.
Some women may find regulation, interest or enjoyment through dancing, strength training, swimming, fitness classes, cycling, stretching or something entirely different.
The point is not to prescribe one correct form of movement.
It is to understand that movement does not have to be punishment for your body or another test of whether you can maintain a perfect routine.
It can become something that supports the brain, body and life in which weight-loss implementation is taking place.
When we begin bringing all of this together, we can see that the different parts of your experience are connected.
Your capacity can affect implementation.
Your Weight-Regain Patterns can consume capacity.
Your environment can activate patterns or increase what implementation asks from you.
Your emotions can influence eating, decisions and what feels available in the moment.
Your ADHD may affect attention, remembering, initiation, regulation, transitions and how consistently you can access an intention.
Your nutrition can support your appetite, energy and capacity, or it can create hunger, food preoccupation and additional mental demands.
Movement can give something back to your physical and emotional capacity, or become another expectation you feel unable to meet.
An interruption can become a temporary change in circumstances, or it can activate the belief that everything has been ruined.
And the weight-loss approach itself can either work with those realities or demand that you override them every day.
This is why sustainable change requires more than information.
It requires direction.
Practice.
Repetition.
Support.
And an approach designed around how change actually happens.
When I was trying to change my own life, I did not want somebody to simply issue another set of instructions.
I wanted to understand what was happening.
I wanted guidance that helped me use that understanding.
I wanted to know what to do when the old response appeared.
What to do when my capacity changed.
What to do when my attention moved elsewhere.
What to do when the initial interest faded.
What to do when life interrupted the version of the plan I had imagined.
And how to keep building change without turning every difficult moment into proof that I could not be trusted.
That is why understanding has been the purpose of this Guide.
I wanted you to leave with more than another instruction to eat less and move more.
I wanted you to understand why knowing that may never have been the part you were struggling with.
I wanted you to recognise that implementation can be affected by patterns, capacity, nutrition, movement, emotion, environment and the demands being placed upon your brain.
I wanted you to see that ADHD can be relevant without becoming an explanation for everything.
And I hoped that understanding would bring some release.
Some relief.
Some hope.
Because many women arrive here carrying far more than body weight.
They are carrying years of shame.
Broken promises to themselves.
Confusion.
Comparison.
Self-doubt.
The belief that they are lazy.
Inconsistent.
Undisciplined.
Too much.
Not enough.
Or simply incapable of doing what everybody else appears able to do.
Sometimes the first meaningful shift is not on the scales.
It is the moment a woman looks back at her experience and thinks:
Oh.
That makes sense now.
Not as an excuse.
Not as a reason to give up.
As an explanation she can finally use.
Understanding is not the whole transformation.
But it is the first stage of changing what you have previously been trying to fight without fully being able to see it.
It gives you something more useful to return to when implementation becomes difficult.
Instead of immediately asking:
What's wrong with me?
You can begin asking:
What pattern is appearing?
What interrupted my implementation?
What did that moment ask from me?
What capacity did I have available?
Did something change in my attention, interest, emotions or environment?
Was I expecting myself to remember, organise or initiate more than I had available?
Is my eating supporting my body, appetite and capacity?
Is the structure around my eating working with my brain and real life?
Is movement giving something back to me, or has it become another demand?
What needs understanding?
What needs supporting?
And what may need changing?
Perhaps part of you is reading this and thinking:
This sounds like far more work than simply eating less and moving more.
But I want you to consider how much work you may already have been doing.
Trying to force yourself back onto a plan.
Arguing with yourself.
Thinking about food.
Starting again.
Feeling guilty.
Trying to recreate motivation.
Recovering from approaches that asked too much and supported too little.
Carrying the emotional aftermath when you could not maintain them.
And repeating that cycle while believing the answer was to try harder the next time.
Imagine being given a bicycle with important parts missing.
You are told that everybody else can ride it.
You are shown the destination.
You understand that you need to pedal.
But whenever you struggle, the only advice you receive is:
Pedal harder.
So you do.
You use enormous effort.
You blame your legs.
You question your determination.
You watch other people moving forward and wonder why the same instructions do not seem to work for you.
Understanding the missing parts does not remove the need to pedal.
It helps ensure that your effort can move you somewhere.
And when ADHD is part of your life, we are not trying to replace the person riding the bicycle.
We are not trying to give you a different brain.
We are understanding what your brain may need, what the journey asks from it and what support has been missing around it.
The physical principles of weight loss remain.
But nutrition can now be considered by what it gives your body and appetite, alongside the energy deficit required for weight loss.
The structure around eating can be considered by whether it remains usable when attention, interest, preferences and executive capacity fluctuate.
Movement can be considered by what it asks, what it gives back and how accessible, engaging or regulating it feels.
Your patterns can be approached as learned responses that can be understood and changed.
Your capacity can be supported rather than repeatedly treated as irrelevant.
And interruptions can become something you learn to recover from, rather than the point at which the entire journey ends.
This is not necessarily more effort.
It is better-directed effort.
What you choose to do with this understanding is entirely yours.
You may decide to begin exploring these areas in your own way.
You may seek behavioural, therapeutic, nutritional or medical support that feels appropriate for you.
You may decide that another weight-loss approach already gives you what you need.
Or you may decide that you would like me to guide you through the next stage.
The Lose For Life Transformation takes the understanding you've developed here and helps you begin applying it.
We explore your Weight-Regain Patterns individually, so that they are not treated as one vague problem called self-sabotage.
We look at what activates them, what reinforces them and what alternative responses you can begin building.
We explore how to support the different areas of capacity that implementation relies upon, including the mental and executive demands that can be particularly relevant when you have ADHD.
We approach nutrition in a more capacity-led way, with enough structure to support your weight-loss goal, body and appetite, and enough flexibility to remain workable when your brain, capacity or circumstances change.
We explore movement as something that can support health, capacity and regulation, rather than another fixed standard you must force yourself to meet.
And throughout the Transformation, you will encounter practices that help you move beyond recognising what is happening and begin creating something different.
Whatever you decide, I hope this Guide has already changed the conversation you are having with yourself.
I hope you can see that struggling to maintain a weight-loss approach does not automatically mean you did not care enough.
I hope you can recognise that inconsistency in your attention, interest or capacity does not make your desire for change insincere.
I hope you understand that ADHD may form part of the circumstances in which your patterns developed or appeared, without making those patterns permanent.
And I hope that, instead of leaving with another reason to judge yourself, you leave with better questions.
More curiosity.
More compassion.
And a clearer understanding of what sustainable weight loss may actually need to include for you.
Before you go, I have one final gift for you.
Something you can return to when the old conclusions begin to appear again.
When you hear yourself thinking that you've ruined everything.
That you're back at the beginning.
That you should have been able to do better.
That everybody else can manage this.
Or that your ADHD means you will never be consistent enough to change.
I want you to pause.
Come back to what you understand now.
And remember:
You are not starting from nothing.
You are starting from understanding.
16- Self-Led Practice:
Your Past Is Information, Not a Prediction
For much of this Guide, I've been asking you to look at your weight-loss history differently.
Not to change what happened.
Not to pretend the difficult parts weren't difficult.
And not to explain away choices you might wish you'd made differently.
But to look at that history with more of the information you have now.
Because when you were actually living through those experiences, you didn't have the full picture.
You may have known how to lose weight.
You may have had plenty of information about food, calories, portions, movement or whatever approach you were following at the time.
But you may not have understood the difference between having that information and being able to keep implementing it in real life.
You may not have recognised the Weight-Regain Patterns repeatedly interrupting you.
You may not have understood capacity, how much it could change, or how that could affect what you had available to keep implementing what you knew and respond when something interrupted you.
And if ADHD is part of your experience, there may have been another piece of information missing too.
Perhaps you didn't know you had ADHD.
Perhaps you knew, but didn't yet understand how some of the difficulties you experienced could show up in everyday life.
Or perhaps you're here without a diagnosis but have recognised experiences throughout this Guide that have given you something new to become curious about.
Either way, there may now be things you can see in your history that you couldn't see while you were living it.
Times when knowing what you wanted to do and being able to follow through weren't the same thing.
Times when you became completely absorbed in something and then couldn't understand why that intensity changed.
Times when you struggled with things such as attention, organisation, procrastination, impulsivity or keeping an intention present amongst everything else competing for your attention.
And perhaps, because you didn't understand what was happening, you gave those experiences a meaning about yourself instead.
Because you couldn't see all of those things, you may have made what happened mean something very different.
I failed.
I gave up.
I wasn't disciplined enough.
I can never stick to anything.
I can't trust myself.
I'll always end up back here.
Those conclusions can become incredibly powerful when we carry them forward without ever looking at them again.
Because eventually, your past stops feeling like something that happened and starts feeling like evidence of what will happen next.
But your past is information.
It isn't a prediction.
And that's what we're going to explore in this practice.
You'll need a notebook or paper for this practice.
You don't need to work through every diet you've ever followed or account for every pound you've ever lost and regained.
We're simply going to look at some of the experiences that stand out and revisit them with the understanding you have now.
- START WITH WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED -
Choose one experience from your weight-loss history.
Try to describe what happened before you describe what you think it meant about you.
For example:
I lost two stone and later regained it.
I followed my plan for three months and then stopped.
I was exercising regularly and gradually stopped going.
I had one difficult weekend and things became harder afterwards.
I lost weight several times but couldn't sustain what I was doing long term.
Keep this part as factual as you can.
Then ask:
What actually happened?
What changed?
What was happening in my life around that time?
What became harder to keep implementing?
Can I recognise any Weight-Regain Patterns now that I didn't recognise then?
What was happening with my physical, mental, emotional or lifestyle capacity?
Was there anything affecting my ability to follow through that I interpreted differently at the time?
And if ADHD is part of my experience, is there anything I understand about myself now that I didn't understand then?
Was there something I interpreted as not caring, not trying or not being committed enough that I might look at differently with the information I have now?
You're not trying to make ADHD the explanation for everything that happened.
And you're not trying to explain everything away.
You're trying to see more of the picture.
- NOTICE WHAT YOU MADE IT MEAN -
Now write down what you told yourself that experience meant about you.
Be honest.
Perhaps it was:
I failed again.
I have no willpower.
I always give up.
I'm lazy.
I can't stick to anything.
I'm useless at this.
I'm not disciplined enough.
I can't trust myself.
There's something wrong with me.
I'm broken.
Why can everybody else seem to do this except me?
I'll always end up back here.
And perhaps some of those conclusions weren't limited to weight loss.
Maybe you'd already spent years describing yourself as disorganised, forgetful, impulsive, unreliable, somebody who procrastinated or somebody who started things and never finished them.
Maybe another experience with weight simply seemed to confirm a story about yourself that was already there.
Don't worry about whether you agree with those thoughts now.
You're simply identifying the meaning you attached to the experience then.
Now ask yourself:
How did believing that make me feel?
Ashamed?
Disappointed?
Angry with myself?
Embarrassed?
Hopeless?
Afraid to try again?
Did it change the way I saw myself?
Did it make the next attempt feel heavier before I'd even begun?
Did I start expecting the same thing to happen again?
Did it become part of a bigger story I was already carrying about who I was and what I could or couldn't do?
You don't need to do anything with those feelings yet.
For now, I simply want you to notice what the experience left you believing and what you may still be carrying because of that meaning.
We'll come back to that.
- LOOK AGAIN WITH MORE OF THE PICTURE -
Now come back to the same experience using what you understand today.
Ask yourself:
If I had understood Weight-Regain Patterns, implementation and capacity at the time, would I have interpreted this in exactly the same way?
And if ADHD is part of my experience, what information do I have about myself now that I didn't have then?
What can I see now that I couldn't see then?
Perhaps:
I failed again
becomes:
I successfully lost weight, but I didn't yet understand what was repeatedly interrupting my ability to keep implementing what I knew.
Maybe:
I can never be consistent
becomes:
There were periods when implementation became more difficult, and I didn't yet understand everything that was affecting it.
Maybe:
I gave up
becomes:
Something changed or interrupted what I was doing, and at the time I interpreted what happened as evidence that I'd given up rather than becoming curious about what had changed.
Maybe:
I have no willpower
becomes:
I was trying to navigate real life, familiar patterns and changing capacity without understanding how any of those things could affect my ability to keep implementing what I knew.
And perhaps:
I obviously didn't want it badly enough
becomes:
Wanting something and being able to consistently implement everything required to achieve it weren't always the same thing.
Maybe:
I always start things and give up
becomes:
I could become intensely engaged with something and put enormous effort into it. When that intensity changed, I didn't yet understand why continuing could sometimes feel so different from starting.
Maybe:
I'm lazy because I keep putting things off
becomes:
There were things I genuinely wanted to do that I still struggled to begin or follow through with, and I interpreted that struggle as a character flaw because I didn't have another explanation for it.
Maybe:
I'm too impulsive to ever do this
becomes:
Impulsivity may be something I need to understand and work with. It doesn't have to become a prediction of every decision I'll make in the future.
Maybe:
I can't lose weight
becomes:
I've already lost weight before. My history actually contains evidence that I can.
Notice what we're doing here.
We're not changing the facts.
We're updating the meaning using information you didn't have before.
And where ADHD gives you relevant information, you're allowing that information into the picture too.
Not to erase your choices.
Not to erase your agency.
And not to turn ADHD into the explanation for your entire history.
But neither do you have to keep judging your past as though information you know now was available to you then.
- TURN FAILURE INTO EXPERIENCE -
Now ask yourself:
What did this experience teach me?
What do I know now because I lived through it?
What worked?
What didn't?
What did I enjoy?
What made things harder?
What felt sustainable?
What didn't?
What did I learn about food?
What did I learn about movement?
What did I learn about my habits?
My emotions?
My thinking?
My routines?
My capacity?
What did I learn about the difference between starting something and sustaining it?
What helped me remember and follow through with what I wanted to do?
What made that harder?
Were there approaches that worked particularly well when they were new or interesting but became harder to sustain when that changed?
Were there things I kept expecting myself to remember, organise or manage mentally that could have been supported differently?
Can I recognise patterns now that I couldn't recognise while I was living through them?
Are there warning signs I can see now that I couldn't see then?
What would I want to understand differently if something similar happened again?
This is where something you may have labelled only as failure begins to reveal the experience inside it.
Because experience gives you information.
And you are not starting what comes next without it.
- FIND THE EVIDENCE YOU MAY HAVE OVERLOOKED -
Now look for the parts of your history that may have disappeared when you focused only on what happened afterwards.
Have you lost weight before?
Reached milestones?
Changed your eating?
Learned to cook differently?
Planned meals?
Moved your body consistently?
Kept going through difficult periods?
Made choices you once thought would be impossible?
Changed an old behaviour?
Asked for support?
Found ways of doing something that worked better for you?
Created routines, reminders, structures or strategies that supported you?
Adapted when something stopped working?
Kept trying even when you didn't understand why things felt so difficult?
Write down the evidence.
Then ask:
What does my history prove that I am capable of?
What achievements have I dismissed because I later regained weight?
What did I successfully implement, even if I wasn't able to sustain it forever?
What strengths can I see now that I wasn't giving myself credit for?
What knowledge or skills do I already have because I've done this before?
And if ADHD is part of my experience, what have I already learned to do, change, adapt or support even before I fully understood why some things were more difficult for me?
Because this mattered enormously when I looked at my own history after my diagnosis.
I had ADHD before I knew I had ADHD.
And yet I'd already changed enormously.
I'd changed behaviours.
I'd changed my relationship with food.
I'd learned different responses.
I'd found ways of doing things that supported me better.
My diagnosis gave me more information about myself.
It didn't erase all the evidence that change had already been possible.
The fact that something didn't last forever doesn't mean it never happened.
And what happened afterwards doesn't erase what you successfully did before it.
Let your successes count as evidence too.
- RECOGNISE WHAT YOU'RE BRINGING WITH YOU -
Now create a space in your journal and write:
What My Past Gives Me Now -
This might include:
Knowledge.
Experience.
Lessons.
Evidence of your capability.
Foods and meals that work for you.
Movement you enjoy.
Skills you've developed.
Things you've learned about your body.
Things you've learned about your behaviour.
Weight-Regain Patterns you can recognise now.
Things you've learned about your capacity.
Things you understand about implementation that you didn't understand before.
And perhaps things you now understand about ADHD and how it shows up for you.
Things that help you focus.
Things that make following through easier.
Ways of supporting yourself that work better than simply demanding more from yourself.
Mistakes that taught you something useful.
Strengths you may previously have overlooked.
The fact that you kept trying.
The fact that you're still here looking for understanding.
Anything from your past that can inform or support what comes next belongs here.
Take a moment to look at what you've written.
Because this is important.
You are not starting from scratch.
You are starting from experience.
- NOTICE WHAT YOUR PAST MAY HAVE LEFT YOU CARRYING -
Now we're going to look at something slightly different.
Create another space in your journal and write:
What My Past Has Left Me Carrying -
You might recognise:
Shame.
Self-blame.
Regret.
Fear of failing again.
The belief that you're lazy.
The belief that you have no willpower.
The identity of being somebody who always gives up.
The belief that you're disorganised.
The belief that you're unreliable.
The belief that you never finish anything.
The belief that you should be able to just make yourself do things.
The belief that there's something wrong with you because other people seem to find things easier.
Distrust in yourself.
The expectation that one difficult moment means everything is about to unravel.
The belief that because you've regained weight before, you'll inevitably regain it again.
The need to punish yourself for decisions you would make differently now.
You may still feel some of these things.
And we're not asking you to release them here.
We're simply recognising that alongside all of the knowledge, evidence and experience your past has given you, it may also have left you carrying things that don't tell the whole story anymore.
And some of those things may have been carried for far longer than your weight-loss history.
Because when you've spent years struggling with things you couldn't explain, the meanings you attach to those struggles can become deeply personal.
For now, just notice them.
- UPDATE THE MEANING -
Finally, choose one of the experiences you wrote about at the beginning.
Finish these sentences:
At the time, I believed this experience meant...
Knowing what I know now, I can see...
What this experience taught me was...
The experience I gained from it is...
The evidence it gives me now is...
What I understand now that I didn't understand then is...
If ADHD is relevant to this experience, what I understand about that now is...
What I want to take forward from this experience is...
What I recognise I've been carrying because of this experience is...
And then answer one final question:
Knowing what I know now, what do I want my weight-loss history to mean to me?
Take your time.
For years, my own history meant failure.
Eventually, I realised it contained something very different.
It contained evidence that I could lose weight.
Evidence that I'd successfully changed behaviours before.
Evidence that I'd implemented things successfully for significant periods of time.
Evidence that I'd kept trying even when I didn't understand why I was struggling.
Evidence of everything I'd learned.
And later, my ADHD diagnosis gave me even more information with which to understand some of that history.
It helped some things that had confused me for years make more sense.
But it didn't turn my past into proof that I couldn't change.
If anything, when I looked properly, my past contained evidence that I already had.
And eventually I realised something that completely changed the way I looked at what came next.
I wasn't arriving back at the beginning at all.
I was arriving with experience.
That's what I want you to begin taking from yours.
You don't need to turn your history into a wonderfully positive story.
You don't need to pretend everything happened for a reason.
And you don't need to be grateful for the parts that hurt.
You simply get to tell the story with more of the information now available to you.
You can acknowledge what happened without turning it into an identity.
You can take responsibility without making responsibility the same thing as self-condemnation.
You can learn from a mistake without making that mistake evidence of who you are.
You can recognise what didn't work while still allowing what did work to count.
And if ADHD gives you information that helps you understand something differently, you can include that information without allowing ADHD to become another prediction of what you're capable of.
Your diagnosis, or your recognition of ADHD-related experiences, doesn't have to become another version of:
This is just who I am.
This is how I'll always be.
There's nothing I can do about it.
You can understand something about yourself and still ask:
What can I change?
What can I support?
What can I adapt?
What can I practise?
And what might simply need understanding rather than judgement?
Because previous experiences don't only contain evidence of where things became difficult.
They contain knowledge.
Learning.
Capability.
Experience.
Your past is information.
It isn't a prediction.
And you are not starting from scratch.
You're starting with everything you know now that you didn't know then.
But there may still be a difference between understanding that consciously and releasing some of the emotional weight those experiences have left behind.
You've just identified some of what you may still be carrying.
That's where our final guided practice comes in.
We're going to Lighten the Load.
17- Guided Layered Cognitive Hypnotherapy Practice:
Bracing for Success
In the self-led practice, you looked back at your weight-loss history with more of the understanding you have now.
You separated what happened from what you made it mean about you.
You recognised the knowledge, evidence and experience your past has given you.
And you identified some of what those experiences may still have left you carrying.
This guided practice has a different job.
We're going to begin lightening some of that load.
Because understanding something differently doesn't necessarily mean the feelings attached to it immediately disappear.
You can understand that an experience wasn't evidence that you were lazy, incapable or destined to fail and still feel the disappointment, shame, regret or fear it left behind.
You can know that your past isn't a prediction and still find yourself bracing for the same ending.
That's what we're going to work with here.
This is an LTL, Lighten the Load, guided practice.
We'll begin by helping your body and mind settle before gently revisiting some of what you've been carrying from your previous experiences.
Not to erase the past.
Not to rewrite what happened.
And not to force yourself to feel positively about experiences that were genuinely difficult.
We're simply beginning to separate the experience you want to carry forward from the emotional weight you don't need to keep carrying in the same way.
The learning can come with you.
The knowledge can come with you.
The evidence can come with you.
The experience can come with you.
Without every old judgement, disappointment or fear having to come with it.
Because bracing for success doesn't mean convincing yourself that nothing difficult will ever happen again.
It means allowing what comes next to be informed by your past without assuming it has to repeat it.
You aren't beginning from scratch.
You're beginning with experience.
And this time, you also have understanding you didn't have before.
Before we begin, if you’d like to learn more about this practice, what to expect and why I’ve layered it this way, you can do so below.
If you’re happy to continue, find somewhere comfortable where you can safely relax without needing to concentrate on anything else.
You can sit or lie down.
And when you’re ready, press play.
Let’s begin lightening the load.
18- Before You Go
And that's where I'm going to leave you.
Not with another lesson.
Not with another thing you need to work out today.
Just with the hope that you leave this Guide carrying your past a little differently from the way you arrived with it.
You've taken the time to understand more about what has happened between losing weight and finding yourself needing to lose it again.
And whatever happens next, that understanding comes with you.
If you're now moving forward into transformation in your own way, thank you for trusting me with that first step of understanding.
I genuinely hope it changes the way you approach what comes next.
And if you'd like to continue this guided journey from understanding into transformation with me, you can learn more below about the Lose For Life™ Transformation, what it involves and what we'll work through together.
Love and all the very best wishes,
Sabrina xxx