5- What Does Your Way of Eating Ask From You?

Before you decide whether you want to continue with your own way of eating or use one of the nutrition pathways I’m going to give you, I want you to take an honest look at what you already have.

Because you may not need a different nutrition plan at all.

Sometimes, after years of losing and regaining weight, we become so accustomed to looking for the next approach that we forget to ask whether there is actually anything wrong with the one we already have.

And I don’t want Lose For Life to become another reason to throw everything away and start again.

So instead, I want you to get curious.

Think about the way you are eating now.

Or, if you aren't currently doing anything specifically for weight loss, think about the approach you are most likely to return to.

Does it help you create the conditions you need to lose weight?

Does it give your body enough nutritional support?

How hungry are you while following it?

How satisfied are you by the food you eat?

How much of your attention does it require?

How much planning?

How much preparation?

How many decisions?

How much negotiation around food?

What happens when you are tired?

What happens when work gets busy?

What happens when you haven't slept?

What happens when something unexpected lands in the middle of your week?

What happens when you simply don't have as much capacity available as you did when you made the plan?

There is a sentence I have heard more times than I could possibly count during all the years I have been in the weight-loss world, both personally and professionally.

But the plan does work.

As long as I stick to it.

And there is nothing inherently wrong with that statement.

Of course a nutrition plan generally needs to be implemented for it to produce the outcome it was designed to produce.

But I have heard women say those words five years into their weight-loss journey.

Ten years into it.

Sometimes decades into it.

I know because I was one of them.

And when the premise remains:

The plan works. I just need to stick to it.

The focus naturally becomes:

How do I make myself stick to it harder?

More discipline.

More motivation.

More rules.

Another fresh start.

Another promise that this time I really will keep going.

And the question that can get completely overlooked is:

Why do I repeatedly struggle to implement and sustain it?

That is a very different question.

And there isn't one universal answer.

For some women, there may be absolutely nothing wrong with the nutrition approach itself.

It suits them.

They enjoy it.

It supports their body.

It fits the way they like to eat.

But their available capacity keeps changing.

Life becomes harder.

Sleep disappears.

Stress increases.

Responsibilities change.

Their emotional bandwidth reduces.

And suddenly implementing something they are completely capable of doing becomes much harder.

In that situation, replacing the nutrition plan may solve absolutely nothing.

We need to support the woman implementing it.

But for another woman, when we look honestly at what keeps happening, the nutrition approach itself may be part of what is making long-term implementation difficult.

Perhaps it is too rigid.

Perhaps it requires an amount of preparation she can sustain for six weeks but not six years.

Perhaps it keeps her hungry.

Perhaps it requires more attention than she wants food to occupy for the rest of her life.

Perhaps it works beautifully when everything else in life is relatively settled but has nowhere to bend when life isn't.

I know that one particularly well.

Give me a fixed plan and enough determination and I can follow it beautifully in the short term.

I've proved that plenty of times.

But ask me to live inside that same fixed structure indefinitely?

Eventually, I self-collapse.

Because I am busy.

Life challenges me.

My capacity changes.

My circumstances aren't particularly interested in what I wrote on the meal plan on Sunday.

And my beautiful female hormones have never once checked my diary before deciding what kind of week we're having.

So for me, eventually, the problem wasn't that I needed to become better at forcing myself back into a fixed structure.

I needed a way of eating that had somewhere to move when I did.

And this is one of the things that has genuinely saddened me during my years of working with women.

Sometimes you can see that the way a woman is trying to eat may no longer be serving her particularly well.

She may have been cycling in and out of it for years.

She may repeatedly lose weight with it and then find herself unable to maintain the behaviours it requires.

She may be miserable while following it.

She may tell you how difficult it is to live around.

She may even tell you that she cannot imagine eating that way forever.

And yet letting go of it, or even allowing herself to question it, can feel incredibly difficult.

So instead, the conclusion becomes:

The plan works.

I'm the bit that doesn't.

I understand that more than I wish I did.

Because I struggled to let go of the approach I had followed for years too.

I had lost weight with it.

More than once.

I knew how to do it.

I knew the system.

I knew the rules.

And every time I returned to it, there was a familiarity in thinking:

This works. I just need to do it properly again.

It took one final realisation for me to look at that differently.

For well over a decade, I had been cycling in and out of the same slimming-club approach trying to achieve my goal.

Losing weight.

Regaining it.

Going back.

Trying again.

And after all those years, the only pounds I had permanently lost were monetary.

That was a hard thing for me to admit.

Not because the slimming-club approach couldn't produce weight loss.

It had.

I was living proof of that.

But I could no longer judge whether it was the right long-term approach for me solely by asking whether I could lose weight when I followed it.

I had more than a decade of information about what happened when I tried to live with it too.

And eventually I had to be willing to include that information in my assessment.

That brings us to something called the sunk cost effect.

Very simply, when we have already invested a lot into something, whether that is time, money, energy, effort or emotion, that investment can make it harder to walk away from it or change direction.

We don't want everything we have already put into it to feel wasted.

And weight loss can carry an enormous sunk cost.

Maybe you have spent years learning a particular system.

You know its rules inside out.

You've paid membership fees.

Bought the books.

Downloaded the apps.

Learned the points, calories, syns, macros or whatever system sits underneath it.

Perhaps you have lost a significant amount of weight with it before.

Maybe you've had periods when you felt fantastic doing it.

You may have clothes, photographs, certificates or memories attached to the version of you who was succeeding with it.

There can be a lot tied up in that plan.

So questioning whether it still fits can feel like questioning all of that investment too.

But none of what you have already invested is wasted simply because you decide to do something differently now.

You learned things.

You discovered things about yourself.

You may have developed skills you want to keep.

There may be parts of the approach that still support you beautifully.

You don't have to throw all of that away.

But you also don't have to keep asking your present self to live inside something simply because your past self invested heavily in it.

And importantly, recognising that a nutrition approach may not suit you long term is not the same as saying the plan doesn't work.

Those are two completely different statements.

A plan can create weight loss.

It can be nutritionally sound.

It can work brilliantly for thousands of other women.

And it can still not be the way you want, or are realistically able, to eat for the long term.

That doesn't make the plan bad.

And it doesn't make you bad at the plan.

It gives us information about fit.

And I want to make something else really clear here.

There is no such thing as the best diet plan.

And I say that as a qualified Nutritional Therapist and Weight Management Specialist who is perfectly capable of creating one.

I could give you a beautifully structured nutrition plan.

I could calculate it.

Balance it.

Build meals around nutritional targets.

Make it look fantastic on paper.

But none of those qualifications allow me to create one universal way of eating that will be the best fit for every woman reading this.

Because the best nutrition approach is not simply the one that looks best on paper.

It has to meet a human being.

Your preferences.

Your health.

Your lifestyle.

Your responsibilities.

Your budget.

Your available time.

Your appetite.

Your capacity.

The foods you actually enjoy.

The amount of structure you find helpful.

The amount of flexibility you need.

And the life you are expecting that nutrition to live inside.

So there isn't a best diet plan.

There is only the one that is the best fit for you.

And even that fit is allowed to change as you do.

This is why the same behaviour can affect two women very differently.

One woman might love planning all of her meals for the week.

She spends a little time doing it once, and then barely has to think about food again.

For her, planning gives capacity back.

Another woman might create the same meal plan and then spend the entire week feeling as though she has another schedule she needs to keep up with.

For her, it may consume capacity.

One woman might find calorie tracking incredibly freeing.

She knows roughly what she has available, she makes her choices, logs them and gets on with her day.

It gives her information without taking over her attention.

Another might find herself checking numbers repeatedly, changing meals to make everything fit, thinking about what she has left and spending far more time mentally engaged with food than she wants to be.

Same tool.

Different woman.

Different experience.

And even for the same woman, the answer can change.

Something that supports you when your capacity is higher may become difficult to maintain when your capacity drops.

That doesn't automatically make the approach wrong.

And it doesn't automatically mean you need another one.

It may simply mean the way you use it needs more flexibility.

This is why I want us to move away from asking only:

Can I do this?

Because if you have spent years dieting, there are probably plenty of things you know you are capable of making yourself do.

I certainly was.

I could restrict harder.

I could tolerate hunger.

I could obsessively plan.

I could say no.

I could keep going when I was exhausted.

I could force myself back onto a plan after I had gone off it.

Capability was rarely the whole problem.

A much more useful question became:

What does doing this require from me?

What does it cost me?

What does it give me?

And do I want to live this way?

That last question matters.

Because I don't only want you choosing nutrition for the version of you who is actively trying to lose weight.

Eventually, active weight loss ends.

You still have to eat.

And while the amount you eat may change when you are no longer creating a calorie deficit, I want the foundations of the way you eat to feel like something you can imagine carrying into the life that comes afterwards.

Not something you are enduring until you finally earn the right to stop.

That doesn't mean your nutrition has to be effortless.

It doesn't mean you will love every choice.

It doesn't mean you will never need structure, planning or conscious decision-making.

And it certainly doesn't mean you have to find one way of eating now and follow it unchanged for the rest of your life.

Your needs will change.

Your circumstances will change.

Your preferences may change.

Your capacity will change.

Your nutrition is allowed to evolve too.

So before you choose what comes next, I want you to ask yourself something different.

Not:

Does this plan work if I stick to it?

Ask:

Why does implementing it become difficult for me?

Is the difficulty coming from the plan?

Is it coming from changes in my capacity?

Is it some of both?

What parts genuinely support me?

What parts make implementation harder?

What might simply need more flexibility?

And is this broadly a way of eating I want to continue living with?

You don't need to answer all of that perfectly.

You are simply gathering information.

Because if the approach you already have supports your goal, supports your body and broadly fits the life you actually live, brilliant.

Keep it.

I genuinely mean that.

Lose For Life doesn't need you to eat according to a Lose For Life nutrition plan in order for you to do the wider transformation.

You can bring your own nutrition pathway with you.

And remember, I will still lend you the Capacity Floor™ and Return, Don’t Restart™ principles so that your existing approach has somewhere to flex when your available capacity changes.

If, however, you're beginning to realise that your current approach isn't supporting you particularly well, that doesn't mean you've failed at another diet.

It gives us information.

Maybe the approach needs adapting.

Maybe you want more guidance.

Maybe you want less complexity.

Maybe you want to understand calorie tracking differently.

Maybe you would prefer not to track at all.

That is why I’m going to give you options.

You don't need to choose the “best” nutrition pathway.

There isn't one.

You need to choose the one that fits you best.

And then we can start building the support around it.