PART 2:
Building Capacity for Transformation
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1- Introduction
You’ve spent Part One looking back at your weight-loss history differently.
Not simply at the diets you followed, the weight you lost or the times you regained it, but at what was happening around the behaviours you were trying to sustain.
You’ve begun recognising some of the patterns that may have repeatedly interrupted your implementation.
You’ve looked at the difference between knowing what to do and being able to keep doing it when real life gets involved.
And you’ve been introduced to something I spent years completely overlooking.
Capacity.
The energy, attention, emotional bandwidth, mental space and practical resources I actually had available to keep doing the things that supported my weight loss.
Understanding that changed the way I looked at my own history.
But understanding it was only the beginning.
Because once I could see that my capacity wasn’t always the same, and that it could influence my ability to keep implementing the behaviours that supported my weight loss, another question became impossible for me to ignore.
What had I actually been asking myself to change my life with?
I had spent years asking what I needed to do.
What should I eat?
How much should I eat?
How often should I exercise?
How could I be more disciplined?
How could I become more consistent?
How could I stop emotional eating?
How could I stop giving up?
How could I finally become the woman who could lose the weight and keep it off?
But I had rarely stopped to consider the condition of the woman I was asking to do all of those things.
And when I eventually did, I saw something I had completely missed.
So many times, I had begun another attempt to change my life when I was already running on fumes.
I was tired.
I was stressed.
At times, I was underfuelling my body while expecting more from it.
I was battling food noise while trying to think about food less.
I was carrying responsibilities that didn’t disappear just because I had decided to lose weight.
I was putting myself last and then expecting myself to somehow find the time and energy to take care of myself properly.
My internal dialogue could be relentlessly critical.
And underneath all of that, I was carrying emotional weight from parts of my life that had absolutely nothing to do with weight loss.
Stress that had never really settled.
Pressure that had become normal.
Heartbreak.
Grief.
Responsibility.
Experiences I had survived but perhaps never really had the space to process.
The exhaustion of holding everything together.
Some of it had been there for so long that I didn’t even recognise it as something I was carrying.
It was just life.
And then, on top of all of that, I added weight loss.
Planning.
Shopping.
Preparing.
Tracking.
Thinking ahead.
Making different choices.
Resisting familiar ones.
Exercising.
Monitoring my progress.
Trying to stay motivated.
Trying to stay consistent.
Trying not to mess it up this time.
I was asking more from myself at precisely the times I sometimes had less available to give.
And when I couldn’t maintain everything I had asked myself to do, I rarely questioned the amount I was carrying or the demands I had placed on top of it.
I questioned myself.
Why can’t I just stick to this?
Why was I doing so well and now I’m struggling again?
Why can everybody else seem to keep going when I can’t?
Why do I always do this?
And my answer was usually to demand even more from myself.
Try harder.
Be stricter.
Get more organised.
Exercise more.
Eat less.
Get back on track.
Be more disciplined.
Be more consistent.
I kept responding to depleted capacity by increasing the demand.
I didn’t know I was doing it.
Nobody had ever taught me to look at weight loss this way.
I knew how to calculate what my body needed to lose weight.
I had never been taught to consider what I might need in order to keep implementing the behaviours that helped me do it.
And those are two very different questions.
2- What Are You Asking Yourself to Transform With?
Perhaps your circumstances have been completely different from mine.
But I want you to think about that question for a moment.
What have you been asking yourself to transform with?
Maybe there have been periods when following an eating plan felt relatively straightforward and others when making the same choices seemed to require far more effort.
Perhaps meal planning was easy when life was relatively settled but felt like another enormous job when you were already mentally overloaded.
Maybe you could prepare meals, exercise and think ahead when you were sleeping well and had more time available, but found yourself reaching for whatever was easiest when you were exhausted, stressed or trying to juggle too much at once.
Perhaps you have spent years taking care of everybody else and trying to squeeze yourself into whatever was left.
Maybe your mind rarely switches off.
Perhaps stress has become such a normal part of your life that you barely recognise it as stress anymore.
Maybe you are carrying grief, heartbreak, responsibility, worry or experiences from your life that still ask something from you emotionally.
Perhaps the voice you live with inside your own head is demanding, critical or constantly reminding you of all the ways you believe you should be doing better.
Or perhaps the way you have been trying to lose weight has itself been asking far more from you than you realised.
You may have been hungry because you were eating too little.
Spending huge amounts of mental energy thinking about food.
Trying to follow complicated rules.
Constantly monitoring yourself.
Pushing yourself to exercise when you were exhausted.
Or expecting yourself to maintain a version of weight loss that required an enormous amount of planning, preparation, attention and restraint.
None of these things means you had no choice in what you did next.
Capacity does not make our choices for us.
But it can influence what those choices ask from us.
And that distinction became incredibly important for me.
Because once I stopped treating my capacity as though it had nothing to do with the changes I was trying to make, I could start asking much more useful questions.
Not only:
What do I need to do?
But:
What do I have available to do it with?
What is already asking something from me?
What might be making this harder to implement than it needs to be?
What can I support?
What can I strengthen?
What can I protect?
What am I carrying that may need some attention too?
And when something genuinely cannot be changed right now, how can I work with the capacity I actually have instead of continually designing my expectations around capacity I don’t?
That changed the way I approached weight loss.
And eventually, it changed far more than weight loss.
3- Supporting the Woman Who Is Going to Do the Work
There is a reason we are doing this now.
You could finish Part One, recognise some of your Weight-Regain Patterns and immediately begin trying to change them.
In fact, that might feel like the obvious next step.
I understand what has been happening.
Now tell me how to fix it.
But I don’t want to repeat something I believe has already happened to too many women.
I don’t want to show you what needs to change and then send you straight back into your life with another list of things you need to do differently.
Because transformation asks something from you too.
Recognising an automatic response and interrupting it asks something from you.
Responding differently to an emotion you have soothed with food for years asks something from you.
Practising a new behaviour when the old one feels familiar asks something from you.
Challenging a belief you have carried for decades asks something from you.
Rehearsing a different response asks something from you.
Returning when part of you wants to abandon everything asks something from you.
Repetition asks something from you.
Change asks something from you.
And if I ignored the capacity you have available to do that work, Lose For Life would risk repeating part of the very problem I have spent Part One helping you understand.
We would still be focusing entirely on what you need to do differently without paying enough attention to the woman being asked to do it.
So before I ask you to begin changing the Weight-Regain Patterns that may have been interrupting your ability to implement and sustain the behaviours supporting your weight loss, I want us to support the woman who is going to be doing that work.
That is what Part Two is for.
4- Working With Capacity, Not Against It
I want to make an important distinction here.
Capacity for transformation does not mean creating a life in which nothing difficult ever happens.
I’m not going to ask you to eliminate stress, sleep perfectly, organise every area of your life, establish flawless boundaries, eat perfectly, exercise every day, heal every difficult experience you have ever had and somehow become a permanently calm human being before you are allowed to transform.
If that were the requirement, most of us would be waiting a very long time.
Your capacity will continue to change because your life will continue to change.
There will be times when you have more energy, attention, emotional bandwidth and practical space available.
And there will be times when other parts of your life require more from you.
We cannot control all of that.
And supporting capacity does not always mean increasing it.
That matters.
There may be things we can change that give you more capacity.
There may be things we can support that help strengthen or stabilise what you have available.
There may be unnecessary demands we can reduce.
There may be capacity you can learn to protect instead of continually giving away.
And there will also be circumstances you cannot change.
If you have children, they will still need you.
Jobs can remain demanding.
Financial pressure does not disappear because we understand capacity.
Health circumstances may need to be navigated rather than eliminated.
Grief cannot be placed on a timetable.
Sleep cannot always be fixed simply because we know it matters.
Life will still happen.
Sometimes the work will therefore be about increasing or supporting what you have available.
Sometimes it will be about protecting it.
And sometimes it will be about accepting the capacity you have today and learning how to work with it without turning that reality into another reason to judge yourself.
That is not lowering the bar on your transformation.
It is learning how to keep supporting it when your circumstances change.
And it doesn’t remove responsibility from your choices either.
It gives you more useful places to apply that responsibility.
Instead of only asking:
Why am I not doing what I should be doing?
We can also ask:
What is this behaviour currently asking from me?
What capacity do I have available to meet that demand?
Is there something making this unnecessarily difficult to implement?
Is there something I can support, change or simplify?
Is there something I need to protect?
And what can I still do with the capacity I have available today?
That last question matters.
Because capacity can influence your choices.
But it doesn’t take them away.
Learning how to work with both of those truths became an important part of changing the way I lost weight.
5- Looking at the Whole Woman
Throughout Part Two, we are going to look at several areas of your life that can influence the capacity you have available for transformation.
But I don’t want you to think of them as separate boxes.
They interact.
A poor night’s sleep can affect your energy, attention, appetite, mood and ability to regulate your emotions.
Stress can make sleep harder.
Underfuelling your body can leave you tired, hungry, preoccupied with food and with less available to deal with everything else life is asking from you.
The emotional weight you are carrying can leave you mentally exhausted before the day has really begun.
The way you speak to yourself can either add another layer of pressure or help you navigate a difficult moment more constructively.
What you believe about yourself can influence what you expect from yourself, what you attempt and what you decide a struggle means.
Constantly putting yourself last can leave very little of you available by the time you eventually turn your attention towards yourself.
And movement can either become another demand you are forcing yourself to meet or something that supports your body, mind and wellbeing.
This is why I don’t want to give you another instruction to simply “manage your stress”, “get more sleep”, “eat better” or “practise self-care.”
You deserve more than another list of things you should be doing.
We are going to take these areas apart.
We will look at nutrition.
Movement.
Emotional weight.
Identity, self-talk and the beliefs about yourself that may make transformation harder to navigate.
Stress.
Sleep.
And what it means to begin protecting and preserving some of your own capacity in a life that may have taught you to give so much of yourself away.
Some of these areas may feel more relevant to you than others.
Some may reveal something you had never considered.
Some may confirm something you already knew but had never connected to your weight-loss behaviours.
And some may not be things you can substantially change right now.
That is okay.
The goal is not to create perfect capacity.
The goal is to stop pretending capacity has nothing to do with transformation.
By the time we move into Part Three, I want you to understand more than the Weight-Regain Patterns we are going to work through.
I want you to understand what you are bringing to that work.
What supports you.
What drains you.
What can be strengthened.
What needs protecting.
What can be changed.
What needs flexibility.
And what you may need to accept and work with differently.
Because eventually, all of this has to live outside these pages.
There is still another stage beyond understanding your patterns and learning how to interrupt them.
You have to live the transformation.
On ordinary Tuesdays.
During stressful weeks.
When you are tired.
When life changes.
When an old response appears.
When you have more capacity.
And when you have less.
That is where we are ultimately going.
But first, we are going to make sure the woman who will be doing that work is part of the conversation.
And we’re going to start with something that has probably been at the centre of almost every weight-loss attempt you have ever made.
Food.
6- Why We’re Starting With Nutrition
There is a reason I’ve chosen nutrition as the first place we’re going to begin.
If you’ve spent years trying to lose weight, there is a good chance you’ve also spent years being taught to place enormous importance on what you eat.
What should I eat?
How much should I eat?
How many calories do I need?
Should I eat more protein?
Should I cut carbohydrates?
Which foods will help me lose weight?
What should I stop eating?
After years, and sometimes decades, of weight-loss messages like these, it would hardly be surprising if nutrition remained one of the first things you thought about when you decided to lose weight again.
And I’m not going to tell you that focus is misplaced.
Nutrition matters.
How much you eat matters to weight loss, and what you eat matters for far more than the number on the scales.
So we’re going to give nutrition the attention it deserves.
But this time, we’re going to ask more than one question of it.
We’re not only going to ask:
Will this way of eating help support my weight-loss goal?
We’re also going to ask:
Does it support my body while I’m losing weight?
What does it ask from my capacity to implement it?
Can I realistically make it work within my life?
What happens when the capacity I have available changes?
And does the way I am trying to lose weight help support the woman who has to keep living while she does it?
Because something helping you lose weight doesn’t automatically tell us how well it supports you in continuing to do the things that helped you lose it.
For years, that was a distinction I never knew to make.
Now you do.
From here, I’m going to take you through Part Two one area at a time.
We’ll begin with nutrition, and when you’re ready, each page will take you naturally into the next area we’re going to work through together.
You don’t need to remember everything or worry about finding your way back to something you want to revisit.
At the bottom of this page, you’ll find the full contents for Part Two, so at any point in your journey you can return here and go directly back to any of the areas we’ve worked through.
For now, though, we only need to start with the first one.
Let’s talk about nutrition.