part one:
Understanding Why Weight Loss Never Lasts
On This Page...
1 - Why Do I Keep Ending Up Back Here?
This is where we begin looking more closely at your own experience with weight loss, and I realise that already, this may feel a little different from other approaches to weight loss you've tried before.
We haven't started with a diet.
I haven't given you a list of foods to eat or avoid, set you a calorie target or asked you to create a new exercise routine.
In fact, I'm about to ask you to spend some time looking backwards before we start looking forwards.
There's a reason for that.
Nutrition and movement will both form part of the journey ahead.
But before we look at either of them through a different lens, we need to understand why knowing what to eat and how to move hasn't necessarily helped you make weight loss last.
Sometimes, if you want to achieve a different outcome, you have to be willing to begin with a different approach.
So that's what we're going to do.
Maybe you've been trying to lose weight 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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Your experiences with weight loss may be completely different from mine.
Your answers may be different too.
But if you've spent years wondering why weight loss hasn't lasted for you, or how you can stop another attempt eventually becoming another return to the beginning, that's where we're going to begin.
By looking at what has actually been happening.
Not just the ending.
Not just the weight that came back.
The journey that brought you there.
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.
So before I ask you to begin looking differently at your own weight-loss history, I'm going to share some of mine 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 before.
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 think perhaps I'd finally found the answer.
But sooner or later, I would struggle again.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Maybe you've drawn a similar conclusion from yours.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
We're not trying to identify all of yours yet.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe you've had periods where you've thrown yourself completely into weight loss.
You've planned everything.
Tracked everything.
Changed everything.
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.
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.
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.
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 all the reasons women regain weight.
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 sometimes, repeated experiences like these can begin changing what you believe about yourself.
Maybe you've called yourself lazy.
Greedy.
Weak.
Undisciplined.
Inconsistent.
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 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.
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.
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.
Different patterns.
Different circumstances.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It gives us information about 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.
There may even be times when you feel as though you have plenty available across most areas, and others when almost everything feels stretched.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 I have a serious problem with that.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Lived experience isn't a qualification in itself.
Professional knowledge, training and expertise matter enormously.
But 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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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?
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 Your Nutrition Plan Meets Real Life
We've just looked at 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.
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.
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.
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 matters because weight loss doesn't happen separately from the rest of your life.
You still need capacity to work, parent, care, concentrate, 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 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.
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.
And suddenly, the way you're trying to lose weight isn't only asking you to eat differently.
It is asking your body, mind 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.
Your sleep can change.
Your workload can change.
Your health, energy, stress, appetite, emotions, responsibilities, available time and practical circumstances can all change.
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 mental negotiation.
Or by somehow finding capacity that the rest of your life has already used.
Now add hunger.
Add chronic food preoccupation.
Add dissatisfaction.
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 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, 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 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 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 support.
Different responses to hunger, repetition, tracking or restriction.
And 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.
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.
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 or busy.
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.
The tool is the same.
What it asks from each woman is different.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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 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 capacity or circumstances changed.
Those are the same principles I now use when supporting my clients.
12- 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, preparation or recovery it requires.
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 or intensity she believes she should be doing.
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 is high and your circumstances allow it, you manage to implement that plan.
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.
Or you simply reach a day when the workout 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 or type of movement you planned no longer matches what you currently have available?
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 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 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 or less structured movement could be dismissed before I had even considered what it might give me.
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, mind 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.
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 for the possibility that somebody might interpret your pace, your ability 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 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.
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 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 demand before you can begin.
Starting where movement feels more accessible is not evidence that you are giving in to fear.
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.
Changing clothes.
Travelling somewhere.
Arranging childcare.
Finding privacy or space.
Managing physical discomfort.
Beginning something when you already feel tired.
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.
And what the rest of your life is asking from you 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 implement it in the same way.
This is not an argument against structured exercise.
It is not an argument against challenging yourself.
It is not a suggestion that intense movement is automatically unsupportive.
For some women, structured or higher-intensity exercise feels 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 movement is good or bad.
The question is whether the way you are trying to move is supportive and workable for you.
And whether you can remain connected to movement when your capacity or circumstances change.
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.
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.
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 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 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?
Did it support the capacity I had available, or did it require me to repeatedly override it?
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 or physical capacity than you regularly have available, sustaining it will naturally be harder.
If every change to your plan feels like failure, adaptation becomes difficult.
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 or anticipated judgement, it may carry an emotional 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 that capacity or repeatedly exceeding it.
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, 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.
13- 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 because 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.
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.
Other women could do this, so there must be something different about me.
I didn't know there were parts of the journey I hadn't 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?
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.
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 after everything we've explored together in Part One, I imagine you may be asking that question too.
How do I actually stop this from happening again?
That's where we're going next.
But before we do, I want to give you a moment to recognise what you've already done here, because understanding wasn't simply something I wanted you to get through before we could begin the real transformation.
Understanding is part of the transformation.
You began Part One with a question about why weight loss hadn't lasted.
And instead of immediately giving you another set of instructions about what to eat, how much to move or how to become more consistent, I asked you to look backwards.
At your history.
At what had repeated.
At what happened between losing weight and finding yourself needing to lose it again.
And now you have a very different picture of what may have been happening.
You know that successfully losing weight and successfully sustaining that loss aren't necessarily the same problem.
You know what Weight-Regain Patterns are and how repeated behaviours, thoughts and responses can interrupt implementation.
You understand the difference between having information and being able to repeatedly implement it within a real life.
You understand capacity, and how what you have available can influence implementation, your vulnerability and response to familiar patterns, and your ability to recover when something interrupts you.
You understand that struggling to do something doesn't automatically mean you aren't capable of doing it.
You understand that nutrition can support your body, appetite and capacity, or place additional demands upon the woman trying to implement it.
And you understand that movement can support your physical and emotional capacity, but can also become another fixed demand when what you believe it should look like repeatedly exceeds what you have available.
And you know that none of this means the physical principles of weight loss no longer matter.
They do.
What has changed is the amount of the picture you can now see.
And I hope that understanding has given you more than information.
I hope it has given you some release.
Some 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 Part One 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.
That's why Lose For Life begins here.
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.
Understanding can turn something you've been judging yourself for into something you can become curious about.
It can help you recognise a pattern where previously you only saw failure.
It can help you understand the difference between knowing and implementing.
It can help you see what may have been affecting your capacity instead of automatically assuming you weren't trying hard enough.
And it 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 now, when that happens, you have more information about what you're looking at.
Instead of an interruption immediately becoming another piece of evidence that you've failed, there are different questions available to you.
What pattern might be happening here?
What has interrupted my implementation?
What is happening with my capacity?
Is the way I'm eating supporting my body, appetite and capacity?
Is my approach to movement giving something back to me, or has it become another demand?
What might need supporting or changing?
That is why Understanding is Part One of Lose For Life.
It isn't something we rush through on the way to the real work.
It is part of the work.
And it creates the foundation for what we're going to do next.
Now we can begin working with what you understand.
And we're going to do that in a very deliberate order.
There is something else I want to make clear before we move forward.
Because for years, I was told many of the things I needed to change.
I needed to change my mindset.
I needed to stop emotional eating.
I needed to become more consistent.
I needed to stop thinking negatively, stop sabotaging myself, become more disciplined and learn how to stick to things.
And perhaps you've been told some of those things too.
The problem wasn't always that the direction itself was wrong.
One of my biggest frustrations was that nobody seemed to be showing me how to actually get there.
How do I change a mindset I've been living with for years?
How do I respond differently when food has become one of my most familiar responses to how I feel?
How do I become more consistent when the very things that repeatedly interrupt my consistency haven't changed?
How do I stop an automatic response simply because somebody has told me I need to stop doing it?
I didn't need another instruction describing the woman I was supposed to become.
I needed help creating the change that could help me become her.
And that's an important part of what we're going to do throughout Lose For Life.
We're not simply going to talk about changing your mindset.
We're going to actively work with the thoughts, beliefs and familiar ways of interpreting your experiences that have been shaping it.
We're not simply going to tell you to stop turning to food.
We're going to explore what sits underneath that pull, work with the patterns surrounding it and practise ways of creating more space between the pull and your response.
We're not simply going to tell you to be more consistent.
We're going to look at what has repeatedly interrupted your consistency, support the capacity you're trying to be consistent with, and change what happens when something doesn't go to plan.
Because consistency isn't something I want to demand from you.
It's something I want to help you build.
And mindset isn't something I'm going to tell you to change.
It's something we're going to actively work on changing.
That's the difference between being told what needs to change and being given ways to participate in changing it.
And that is what the rest of this transformation has been designed to help you do.
First, we're going to build and support your capacity for transformation.
Because I don't want to hand you a long list of things to change without first looking at what you're asking yourself to change them with.
We're going to look at the physical, mental, emotional and practical demands you're already carrying, and begin creating more support around the capacity you actually have.
That doesn't mean waiting until life is perfect before you can change.
And it doesn't mean trying to create unlimited capacity.
It means learning how to work with and support what is available, rather than continually demanding more from yourself without accounting for what you're already carrying.
And before I ask you to begin changing longstanding patterns, I'm also going to teach you something I wish I'd understood years earlier.
How to return without turning every interruption into a restart.
Because I don't expect you to transform perfectly.
I don't want one difficult meal, one missed walk, one difficult day or one familiar response to become evidence that everything has gone wrong again.
We're going to change what happens after an interruption too.
Then we're going to work directly with your Weight-Regain Patterns.
Not by simply telling you to stop emotional eating, be less all-or-nothing, think more positively or become more disciplined.
We're going to understand the individual patterns that have been affecting you and actively work on changing them.
You'll learn ways to recognise familiar cues and responses, interrupt what has become automatic, practise alternatives, work with the thoughts, emotions and beliefs connected to those patterns, and begin making different responses more familiar through repetition.
And throughout all of that, the physical principles that support weight reduction still matter.
Nutrition matters.
Movement matters.
The choices that create the physical conditions for weight reduction matter.
So we're going to review nutrition through more than whether it can produce weight loss.
We'll look at whether it supports your body, appetite and capacity, and work towards enough structure to support your weight-loss goal with enough flexibility to remain workable within your real life.
And we'll approach movement by considering what it asks from you, what it gives back and how it can support your health and capacity without becoming another fixed standard you must force yourself to meet.
But now we're going to work with those things alongside the patterns and capacity that can influence your ability to keep implementing them.
And finally, we're going to look beyond active weight loss itself.
Because Lose For Life isn't only about what supports you while weight loss has your full attention.
It's about helping you carry what you've learned into the changing circumstances of your life, so that when life changes, your response doesn't have to be to abandon yourself and eventually begin all over again.
So 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.
I understand.
On paper, eating less and moving more sounds much simpler.
But 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 that's not what I'm going to ask you to do.
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.
What we're going to do now is begin applying that effort with an understanding of the whole bike.
Yes, you still pedal.
The physical principles of weight loss haven't disappeared.
But now we're going to work with the things that have repeatedly interrupted your ability to keep applying them too.
Nutrition that supports your body, appetite and capacity.
Movement that works with what you have available and gives something back.
Your capacity.
Your Weight-Regain Patterns.
Your responses when something doesn't go to plan.
Your ability to recover and return.
You're not changing the destination.
You're changing how you're trying to reach it.
It's not simply more effort.
It's better-directed effort.
And this time, you're not standing at the beginning without understanding why the previous journeys ended where they did.
You're starting from somewhere different.
You understand.
And now we're going to use that understanding to transform.
Before we move into that next stage, though, there are two practices I'd like you to complete.
They are here for a reason.
You've spent Part One looking back at experiences that may have carried years of disappointment, judgement, shame or self-doubt.
So before I ask you to begin building what comes next, I want to give you the opportunity to work with some of what you've been carrying from what came before.
The first will help you revisit your past with the understanding you have now.
The second will help you explore what it might feel like to move towards success without carrying the same expectation that eventually everything will go wrong again.
Then we'll move forward.
15- Self-Led Practice:
Your Past Is Information, Not a Prediction
For much of Part One, 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 because you couldn't see 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.
- 1) 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?
You're not trying to explain everything away.
You're trying to see more of the picture.
- 2) 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'll always end up back here.
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?
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.
- 3) 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?
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.
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.
- 4) 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?
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.
- 5) 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?
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?
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.
- 6) 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.
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.
- 7) 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.
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.
For now, just notice them.
- 8) 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...
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 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 you can recognise that 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.
16- 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.
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.
17- You're Ready for Part Two
You've reached the end of Part One.
Before you move forward, I want you to recognise what you've just done.
You didn't begin Lose For Life by trying harder.
You began by understanding differently.
You looked back at your weight-loss history with more of the picture available to you.
You began recognising the Weight-Regain Patterns that may have repeatedly interrupted your implementation.
You explored capacity and how what you have available can influence your ability to implement, respond and recover.
And perhaps most importantly, you've begun separating what has happened from what you've believed it meant about you.
That understanding is the foundation we're going to build on from here.
In Part Two, we're going to begin Building Capacity for Transformation.
This is where we move from understanding what capacity is and why it matters to actively looking at yours.
We'll begin exploring what you're already carrying, what may be asking more from you than you realise, and how we can better support the capacity you have as you begin creating change.
You don't need to do anything else here first.
When you're ready, continue into Part Two: Building Capacity for Transformation.
I'll meet you there.