Welcome to Lose For Life™
INTRODUCTION
If you're here, I'm guessing this isn't the first time you've thought about losing weight.
It may not even be the first time you've successfully lost it.
Perhaps you've followed diets, joined slimming groups, changed the way you eat, exercised, tracked, planned, started again and promised yourself more than once that this time would be different.
And perhaps some of those things worked.
You lost weight.
Maybe you lost a significant amount of weight.
Maybe you proved to yourself more than once that you were capable of losing it.
But somewhere along the way, something changed.
Things that had felt easier became harder.
Behaviours you thought you'd left behind returned.
One difficult day became several.
You found yourself saying you'd get back to it tomorrow.
Or Monday.
Or after the weekend.
Or when life settled down.
And eventually, perhaps you found yourself needing to lose weight again.
I knew that experience incredibly well.
For years, every time I regained weight, I treated it as another weight-loss problem.
I thought I needed more discipline.
More motivation.
A better mindset.
More consistency.
Maybe I needed a different diet, a different plan or simply another fresh start.
So that was where I kept returning.
Back to losing weight.
Back to what I should eat.
Back to what I shouldn't eat.
Back to exercise.
Back to trying harder.
Back to promising myself that this time I would stick to it.
And for a long time, I never really questioned why I kept finding myself there.
I just assumed the answer was that I hadn't done it well enough the time before.
Lose For Life begins differently.
Not because the physical principles involved in losing weight don't matter.
They do.
We aren't going to pretend otherwise.
But I don't want to begin this transformation by simply giving you another set of instructions and asking you to follow them.
Especially if you've spent years knowing many of those instructions already.
I want us to begin somewhere else.
With understanding.
Because before we can meaningfully change something, I believe we need to understand what we're actually trying to change.
And that means that before we look forward, I'm going to ask you to look back.
Not so that we can dwell on everything that went wrong.
And not so that we can pick apart every decision you've ever made around food or weight.
We're going to look back because your history contains information.
There may be things you've experienced repeatedly without ever recognising their significance.
There may be questions you've spent years answering in one particular way.
There may be things you've interpreted as evidence about who you are or what you're capable of.
And there may be parts of your experience that you've simply never been given a way to understand.
I know that was true for me.
And when I finally started looking at my own history differently, I began seeing things I had overlooked for years.
That understanding became the foundation for everything I changed afterwards.
So before I ask you to change anything, that's where I want us to begin.
This Is a Transformation You Participate In
Lose For Life has been designed as more than something you simply read.
It is a guided transformation combining reading, reflection, practical work and guided experiences.
There will be things I want you to read slowly.
Things I want you to think about.
Questions I want you to consider.
Ideas you may want to return to later.
Sometimes you'll be reading.
Sometimes you'll be reflecting.
Sometimes you'll be writing.
Sometimes you'll be practising something in your everyday life.
And sometimes I want you to be able to stop reading completely, stop trying to remember what you're supposed to do next and simply listen while I guide you.
That's why Lose For Life includes both self-led and guided experiences as part of the transformation.
They aren't bonuses or extras.
They're part of how Lose For Life has been designed to be experienced.
I'll guide you through the journey as we go, so you won't need to work out what you're supposed to be doing or what comes next.
All I want you to do is move through it with me.
And that brings me to something I'd like you to have before we begin.
Your Lose For Life Notebook
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.
A Note About the Practices
Throughout Lose For Life, you'll also encounter different practices.
Some will be self-led.
I'll give you something specific to explore, questions to work through or a process to follow, and you'll take yourself through it.
Your notebook will often be useful here.
Other practices will be guided.
Those have a different purpose.
There are times when reading a set of instructions and then trying to remember them while you're doing the practice would get in the way of the experience itself.
So for those practices, I'll guide you.
You'll be able to stop reading, listen and follow along without needing to think about what comes next.
As we move further through Lose For Life, you'll also learn practical tools and ways of working with some of the things we uncover.
I'll introduce those when they're relevant.
You don't need to learn a whole system before you've even begun.
And you don't need to complete any practice perfectly.
There isn't a correct emotional response you're supposed to have.
There isn't a profound realisation you need to produce.
And you don't need to force something to feel meaningful simply because I've included it.
Sometimes something will land immediately.
Sometimes you may realise its significance later.
Sometimes a practice may show you something unexpected.
And sometimes it may simply give you ten minutes to stop and pay attention to something you usually move straight past.
The purpose isn't performance.
It's participation.
Because I don't only want you to intellectually understand the things we're going to explore together.
Where appropriate, I want to give you opportunities to work with them too.
You may also be someone who wants to understand more about a practice before you participate in it.
That's absolutely fine.
I've created a separate place where you can learn more about the different types of practices used throughout Lose For Life, what they are designed to support, the principles behind them and what you can expect when you encounter them.
Again, this is optional.
You don't need to understand the theory behind every practice before you take part, and I'll always explain what we're doing when we reach one.
But if you'd feel more comfortable knowing more before you participate, you can explore that here.
If You Like to Know the Why
There is no prize for finishing Lose For Life quickly either.
This isn't something I want you racing through because you're desperate to get to the part where I finally tell you what to eat.
I promise we'll get there.
But there's a reason we're beginning where we are.
You may move through some sections quickly because they feel immediately familiar.
Others may make you stop.
You may want to sit with something for a while.
You may want to write about it.
You may want to come back to it the following day.
There may also be sections that don't feel particularly relevant to you.
That's okay.
This is your transformation.
You don't have to relate to every experience I describe for the overall understanding to be valuable.
And occasionally, something that doesn't initially sound like you may still help you understand another part of your experience.
So I would encourage curiosity.
Not pressure.
You don't need to do Lose For Life perfectly.
In fact, as we continue, you'll understand why I don't want perfection to become the standard by which you judge how well you're doing here.
For now, just begin.
Move Through This at Your Own Pace
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.
Your Lose For Life Journey
Lose For Life will take you through a series of stages.
I'm deliberately not going to tell you everything you're going to discover before you discover it.
There are things I want you to have the opportunity to recognise in your own experience before I give them a name.
So while you'll always be able to see where you are in the transformation and where you're going next, there are parts of the journey that we'll uncover together when the time is right.
You'll find the full contents for your Lose For Life transformation at the bottom of this page.
Part One: Understanding
Part One has been designed as one continuous journey, with each section building on and leading into the next.
You'll find a navigation menu throughout, so if you want to return to a particular section later, you can easily find your way back to it.
But the first time through, I'd encourage you to begin at the beginning and allow the journey to unfold in order.
I'm deliberately not going to tell you exactly what you're going to discover.
You don't need the terminology yet.
You don't need to know what I'm looking for.
And I don't want to give you the answers and then ask you to find evidence for them.
I want you to have the opportunity to recognise your own experience first.
We're going to look at your weight-loss history.
At what happened when things were going well.
At what happened when things became harder.
At some of the things that may have happened repeatedly.
At what else may have been going on in your life at the time.
And at what you may have come to believe those experiences said about you.
I'll share my own history with you as we go.
Not because I expect yours to look like mine.
But because my own questions were where this work began.
And I'm going to use what I discovered through mine to help you begin investigating yours.
You don't need to arrive at Part One knowing anything.
You don't need to prepare.
You just need your notebook and a willingness to look.
Before we begin, though, there's one more thing I need to explain, because you may have already completed this part of the journey.
- IF YOU'VE ALREADY COMPLETED THE BREAKTHROUGH GUIDE -
If you came to Lose For Life after completing my Breakthrough Guide, you've already completed the foundational understanding that forms Part One of this transformation.
That's intentional.
The Breakthrough Guide and Part One take you through the same journey of understanding.
So if you've already completed the Guide and that understanding is still fresh, you don't need to complete Part One again.
You haven't skipped anything.
You've already completed this part of the work.
You can move directly into Part Two and continue your transformation from there.
Equally, you may decide you'd like to revisit Part One.
Perhaps some time has passed since you completed the Guide.
Perhaps there were sections that particularly stayed with you.
Or perhaps, now that you're beginning the full Lose For Life transformation, you'd simply like to experience that journey again before moving forward.
That's completely your choice.
Part One will always be there if you want to return to it.
But repeating it isn't a requirement for continuing.
So from here, choose the route that reflects where you are.
If you haven't completed the Breakthrough Guide, or you'd like to revisit your understanding, begin with Part One.