14- What Comes Next

When I finally began to understand why I kept finding myself back at the start, it changed the way I looked at my entire weight-loss history.

But understanding naturally led me to another question.

What do I change?

And I imagine that if you've come here wanting to understand why your weight keeps coming back, for you that question may most definitely also mean:

How do I stop it?

So I don't want to bring you this far, help you understand what has been happening and then leave you with another vague instruction to go away and change it.

Let's be clear about what actually needs your attention.

We've learned about Weight-Regain Patterns.

Those patterns need changing.

We've learned about capacity and how what you have available can influence your ability to implement, respond and recover.

That capacity needs supporting.

We've learned that nutrition can either support your body, appetite and capacity or place additional demands upon them.

So the way you're eating needs reviewing through a different lens.

And we've learned that movement can support your physical and emotional capacity, but it can also become another fixed demand when what you believe movement should look like repeatedly exceeds what you have available.

So the way you're approaching movement needs reviewing too.

The physical principles that support weight reduction still matter.

But now we understand more about what can affect your ability to keep implementing them.

So let's start with your patterns.

Because perhaps you're wondering how you change something that may have been happening for years.

The first thing I want you to know is that longstanding doesn't mean permanent.

Your brain learns through experience and repetition. When the same cue, thought, feeling or situation is repeatedly followed by the same response, that response can become increasingly familiar and easier to access.

Think of it a little like repeatedly walking the same route.

The more often you travel it, the more familiar it becomes.

Eventually, you barely need to think about where you're going.

That's incredibly useful when the pattern is brushing your teeth before bed, fastening your seatbelt when you get into the car or automatically reaching for your keys before leaving the house.

It can feel far less useful when the familiar route is stress followed by food, one unplanned choice followed by I've-ruined-it-now thinking, boredom followed by searching the cupboards, or a difficult week followed by abandoning everything until Monday.

But the same ability that allowed those responses to become learned and familiar also gives us the ability to learn something different.

Our brains remain capable of change and new learning throughout adulthood.

That doesn't mean you simply decide to create a new response and tomorrow the old one disappears.

Patterns that have been reinforced hundreds or thousands of times may continue to appear while something different is being learned.

But you can begin recognising the familiar cue and response.

You can create opportunities to interrupt it.

You can decide what you would rather happen instead.

You can mentally rehearse and practise alternative responses.

And you can repeat those responses so that they too become increasingly familiar and easier to access.

Sometimes you will recognise the pattern before it happens.

Sometimes while you're right in the middle of it.

And sometimes your awareness will come afterwards.

All of those moments can give you information about the pattern.

What tends to happen before it?

What does the pattern give you in the moment?

What keeps reinforcing it?

What could make a different response easier to access next time?

That's very different from simply noticing the behaviour afterwards and deciding you need more willpower.

And if you're sitting there thinking, That's all very well, Sabrina, but you don't understand how deeply ingrained my patterns are, I really do understand why you might feel that way.

Because mine weren't new either.

There was nothing small or occasional about the relationship I'd developed with food.

For years, food had been one of my most familiar responses to how I felt.

Happy?

Food.

Sad?

Food.

Celebrating?

Food.

Bored, lonely, disappointed, stressed or overwhelmed?

Food.

I emotionally ate, overate and binge ate, and by the time I began trying to change those responses they had been reinforced over years and thousands of repetitions.

And I think it's important that you know where I was starting from too.

I wasn't the woman I am now, with years of professional training and experience behind me.

I was a single mum on benefits, living in a high-rise council flat. I was almost 24 stone, reclusive, depressed and binge eating most days.

I wasn't exactly surrounded by behavioural therapists waiting to impart their wisdom.

I had to begin with what I could access.

I researched.

I read.

I listened.

I learned.

And gradually I began discovering ways of working with responses I'd previously only been trying desperately to stop.

But I also realised something else.

My patterns hadn't developed or been reinforced in isolation.

So I didn't try to change them in isolation either.

My emotional eating wasn't simply a behaviour called emotional eating that existed separately from everything else happening in my life.

There were emotions underneath it.

There were familiar cues around it.

There were thoughts and beliefs influencing it.

There was the relief food could provide in the moment.

There were automatic habits that had been repeated so often they could sometimes happen before I'd consciously considered what I was doing.

There was my environment.

There was my stress.

There was what I had available to me at the time.

And there was what happened afterwards, including the guilt, judgement and all-or-nothing thinking that could feed straight into what happened next.

The pattern was connected to other things.

So rather than searching for one magical technique that would somehow fix emotional eating, I began working with different parts of what was keeping those responses going.

For me personally, layering different approaches was incredibly powerful.

Something might help me create space before an automatic response.

Something else might help me regulate the emotion or state that was increasing the pull towards that response.

Another approach might help me work with a belief or thought pattern.

And another might allow me to mentally rehearse the response I wanted to become more familiar with before I was standing in the moment trying to choose it.

Different things were doing different jobs, but they were supporting the same overall change.

And slowly, the woman who had once believed she simply couldn't control herself around food began experiencing something very different.

Patterns I'd repeated for years began to change.

Responses that had once felt inevitable became interruptible.

Food stopped having to answer every emotion.

I began having choices in places where previously it had felt as though there was only one familiar route available to me.

Not overnight.

Not perfectly.

And not because an old response never appeared again.

But it changed.

And if length of time or depth of reinforcement automatically made a pattern permanent, I would be one of the least convincing people to tell you that change is possible.

My old patterns had years of practice behind them.

They still changed.

I found some of the approaches I'd discovered so powerful that I eventually chose to formally train and qualify in them myself, and over the years I continued building on that knowledge through further training and my professional work.

But you don't need to qualify in behavioural approaches to begin changing a behavioural pattern.

The principle is much simpler than that.

Understand the pattern.

Become curious about what cues it, what reinforces it and what purpose it may be serving.

Decide what you want to happen differently.

Create opportunities to interrupt the familiar response.

Practise and rehearse alternatives.

And keep giving your brain opportunities to learn something new.

That's the direction.

But patterns were only one of the missing parts we discovered together.

There was also capacity.

And if capacity can affect what you have available to implement, respond and recover, then it makes sense that we don't only ask:

How do I change my patterns?

We also ask:

How can I support my capacity?

And again, this doesn't need to mean completely redesigning your life.

Start by looking at what your body, mind, emotions and life are continually being asked to carry, and where support is realistically possible.

Physical capacity can be supported through things such as adequate nutrition, hydration, rest and sleep where possible, and movement that supports your body rather than continually depleting it.

That doesn't mean chasing perfect nutrition, perfect sleep or the perfect exercise routine.

It means recognising that asking an exhausted, undernourished or continually depleted body to keep giving you more can affect what you have available for everything else you're trying to do.

It means looking beyond whether your nutrition creates a calorie deficit and considering what it provides in return.

Does the way you're eating support your body, appetite, energy and satisfaction?

Does it provide enough structure to support your weight-loss goal while remaining flexible enough to work when your capacity or circumstances change?

And does your approach to movement recognise both what movement asks from you and what the right movement can give back?

Mental capacity can be supported by reducing unnecessary decisions, simplifying where you can, creating some structure, writing things down instead of expecting your brain to hold everything and making supportive choices easier to access.

Sometimes the answer isn't developing more mental discipline.

It's giving your mind fewer unnecessary things to carry.

Emotional capacity might need boundaries.

It might need support.

It might mean learning ways to regulate difficult emotions, giving yourself somewhere other than food to take what you're feeling, addressing something that is continually draining you or seeking appropriate professional support when that's what you need.

And lifestyle capacity means looking at the reality of the life you're actually living.

What can be simplified?

What can be shared?

Where might you need to ask for help?

Where might you need a boundary?

What are you continually expecting yourself to carry because you've become so used to carrying it that you no longer question whether you should?

And what genuinely cannot be changed right now and therefore needs to be accounted for rather than ignored?

Because supporting capacity isn't about creating a perfect life before you're allowed to change.

Some things can be changed.

Some can be reduced.

Some can be shared.

Some can be supported.

Some can only be softened.

And some circumstances simply have to be acknowledged when you're deciding what is realistic to ask of yourself right now.

The goal isn't unlimited capacity.

It's better supporting the capacity you actually have.

And this is where the connections between everything we've explored become so important.

Your capacity can influence your implementation.

Your patterns can affect your capacity.

Your environment can reinforce a pattern.

Your emotional state can make a familiar response feel louder.

Your nutrition can influence what your body and appetite have available to support you.

Your expectations of movement can affect whether movement feels supportive and accessible or becomes another pass-or-fail demand.

How you respond after an interruption can influence what happens next.

And the way you're trying to lose weight can itself either support what you have available or continually demand more of it.

For me, seeing those connections was incredibly important.

Because I stopped trying to fix isolated behaviours as though the rest of me and the rest of my life had nothing to do with them.

I started looking at the whole picture.

And personally, this was also where I realised that knowing what needed to change still wasn't quite enough for me.

I wanted direction.

I didn't just want somebody to tell me to change a pattern.

I wanted ways to practise changing it.

I didn't just want to be told to regulate my emotions instead of eating them.

I wanted something I could actually do when those emotions arrived.

I didn't just want somebody to tell me to think differently.

I wanted ways of working with the thoughts and beliefs I'd rehearsed for years.

I didn't want another instruction.

I wanted guidance.

And that's why the layering of different approaches became so powerful for me.

Because change stopped being something I was simply hoping I would manage to do differently next time.

I could practise it.

I could rehearse it.

I could support it.

I could repeat it.

And over time, different began becoming familiar.

And this is where I hope I have delivered on the promise I made to you when you arrived here.

You came here looking for understanding.

You wanted to understand why, despite being able to lose weight, you kept finding yourself needing to lose it again.

And I truly hope I've given you that understanding.

But I have a confession to make.

When I brought you here with the promise of understanding, I had quietly hoped that understanding would give you something else too.

Release.

Relief.

And perhaps even a renewed sense of hope.

Because I know what it feels like to look back across years of losing weight and regaining it and make that history mean something about who you are.

To believe you should have been more disciplined.

More consistent.

More motivated.

To wonder why you could lose the weight but couldn't seem to stop yourself ending up back in the same place.

And to carry the weight of all those previous attempts into the next one.

But when you begin to understand what was actually happening, some of that weight can begin to shift.

Not the physical weight.

The emotional weight you've been carrying because of what you thought your history said about you.

Understanding doesn't change what happened.

But it can change what you believe what happened means.

And I hope that somewhere throughout this Guide there has been at least one moment where you've looked at something you've judged yourself for, perhaps for years, and thought:

Oh.

That makes sense now.

Because sometimes understanding doesn't only give us answers.

It gives us somewhere different to stand when we look at ourselves and our history.

And from there, change can begin to look different too.

Understanding isn't the whole of transformation.

But I believe it is the first stage of it.

In fact, understanding became so important to the way I came to think about lasting change that I eventually made it the first part of my own coaching approach.

Because it's very difficult to intentionally change something you don't yet understand, particularly when you've spent years believing the thing that needed changing was you.

And understanding gives you something incredibly valuable to come back to when things don't go perfectly.

Because transformation doesn't happen in a straight line.

There may still be interruptions.

Old patterns may still appear.

There may be periods when life asks more of you and implementation becomes harder.

But when you understand what you're looking at, an interruption doesn't have to immediately become another piece of evidence that you've failed.

You have somewhere else to look.

What pattern might be happening here?

What has interrupted my implementation?

What is happening with my capacity?

Is the way I'm eating supporting what my body and appetite need from me right now?

Is the movement I'm expecting from myself working with what I currently have available?

What might need supporting or changing?

That is why, for me, understanding isn't something we rush through on the way to the real work.

It is part of the work.

It creates a stronger foundation for what comes next.

Now, I can completely understand if part of you is looking at all of this and thinking:

This sounds like a lot more work than eating less and moving more.

And you're right.

On paper, eating less and moving more sounds much simpler.

But if knowing what to eat, how much to eat, how to move your body or how to create the physical conditions for weight loss had been enough to give you the lasting outcome you wanted, there's a very good chance you wouldn't still be here looking for answers.

So before you decide what you want to do next, let's go back to our bike one final time.

Because I don't want you to look at everything we've uncovered and think I've just handed you an even longer list of things you now need to find the energy to do.

Think about how much energy you've already spent trying to reach that destination.

You got on the bike.

You pedalled.

You worked.

You got somewhere.

Maybe you got an incredible distance.

But because there were parts of the bike you didn't yet know were missing, eventually something interrupted the journey.

So you went back and worked on the parts you knew about.

You changed the food.

Changed the plan.

Changed the programme.

Changed the rules.

And then you summoned the energy to get back on the bike and pedal again.

And again.

And again.

No wonder it became exhausting.

Because you weren't lacking effort.

You were repeatedly putting enormous amounts of effort into a journey without understanding all of the things that could influence whether that effort got you where you wanted to go and helped you stay there.

And when it didn't, you were often told the answer was more effort.

Pedal harder.

Be stricter.

Be more disciplined.

Try again.

But I'm not asking you to change your destination.

And I'm not asking you to find some new level of effort you've never managed to give before.

You've already given enormous effort.

Every time you picked yourself back up and tried again, you demonstrated that.

I'm asking you to consider what might happen if that effort was finally applied with an understanding of the whole bike.

Yes, you still pedal.

The physical principles of weight loss haven't disappeared.

Nutrition still matters.

Movement still matters.

The choices that create the physical conditions for weight reduction still matter.

But now nutrition can be considered by what it gives your body and appetite as well as whether it creates a deficit.

Movement can be considered by what it asks from your capacity, what it gives back and how it can remain accessible when your circumstances change.

And some of your attention and effort can also go towards the things that have repeatedly interrupted your ability to keep making those choices.

Changing your Weight-Regain Patterns.

Supporting your capacity.

Practising different responses.

Making those responses increasingly familiar.

Supporting yourself through interruption and recovery rather than immediately turning an interruption into another ending.

You're not changing the destination.

You're changing how you're trying to reach it.

And perhaps most importantly, you're no longer repeatedly pouring all of your effort into the parts of the bike you already knew about while blaming yourself because you didn't know other parts were missing.

That's the difference.

It's not simply more effort.

It's better-directed effort.

Effort that isn't only helping you lose weight.

It's also addressing the things that may have repeatedly contributed to you needing to lose it again.

And after years of effort without the lasting reward you were working for, I want you to imagine what it could feel like for that effort to finally have a greater opportunity to take you all the way to the destination you were trying to reach.

That is the transformation ahead of you.

And the path you take to create it is completely yours to choose.

You may take the direction I've given you and begin exploring your own way forward.

You may choose behavioural or therapeutic support.

You may discover practices or approaches that resonate with you.

You may combine what you've learned here with a weight-loss approach you're already using and look at that journey through completely different eyes.

However you choose to move forward, I genuinely hope this Guide has given you the understanding you needed to do it differently.

And I genuinely hope you succeed.

I'm rooting for you.

Because I know what it feels like to spend years believing freedom is something other people seem able to achieve while you keep finding yourself back in the same place.

And I believe every woman deserves the opportunity to experience that freedom for herself.

But if you've enjoyed the way I've helped you understand what has been happening, and you feel you'd like me to continue walking this path with you, I'd be honoured to do that too.

I've created the Lose For Life Transformation to take the understanding and direction we've built here and turn it into guided transformation.

That's where I stop simply helping you understand the patterns and begin directing you through working with them.

Where we don't simply talk about supporting capacity, but actively work on supporting yours.

Where we review nutrition through the lens of what supports your weight-loss goal, your body, your appetite and your capacity, rather than handing you another fixed way of eating that only works while you can organise your life around it.

Where we work towards movement that supports your body and capacity without requiring it to look punishing, inaccessible or the same in every circumstance.

And where I share the practices I've developed through my own transformation, professional training and years of working with women around weight and behaviour, so you have practical ways to work with what you've now learned.

But whether your next step is with me or somewhere completely different, the understanding you've gained here is yours.

I hope you move forward differently because you understand differently.

I hope you stop using every interruption as evidence that you are the problem.

I hope you get curious about patterns instead of condemning yourself for having them.

I hope you support yourself where previously you may only have demanded more from yourself.

And most of all, I hope the next part of your story feels different from the parts you've already lived.

Before you begin that transformation, whether it's with me or somewhere else, I'd like to leave you with one final thing.

A parting gift.

Something to help you prepare the ground for transformation, whichever path you choose to take.