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1- I Thought I Needed To Try Harder
My name is Sabrina, and before we go any further, I’d like to share a little of my own weight-loss history with you.
Not because this guide is all about me, and certainly not because I expect your experiences to look exactly like mine.
I’m sharing it because, as we work through this guide, I want to help you begin looking beyond what happened and become curious about what may have been happening underneath it.
The circumstances of your story may be completely different from mine, but you may recognise some of the same mechanisms underneath it.
The thoughts, beliefs, behaviours and responses.
The things you were told.
The conclusions you drew.
The questions you asked yourself when you couldn’t understand why something you wanted so badly could become so difficult to keep doing.
Because learning to look differently at my own experiences was eventually what allowed me to see things in my history that I simply couldn’t see while I was living them.
And my hope is that by sharing some of that history with you, you might begin to recognise things in your own too.
For more than fifteen years, I tried to lose weight and make that weight loss last.
During those years, I lived with morbid obesity, struggled with binge eating and desperately wanted 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.
Perhaps you recognise some of that too.
Maybe you’ve tried completely different approaches from me, but you know that feeling of finding something new and allowing yourself to hope that perhaps this will finally be the thing that makes the difference.
And sometimes, for me, 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 just needed to be more motivated.
I just needed a more positive mindset.
I just needed to be more disciplined.
I just needed to show more self-control.
I just needed to be more consistent with following the plan.
And if I struggled with my eating, I just needed to get myself back on track.
Maybe you’ve been given the same advice, or some version of it.
Just follow the plan.
Just get back on track.
Just be more disciplined.
Just be consistent.
Just stop giving in.
Just try harder.
Maybe nobody has ever said those exact words to you. But perhaps you’ve heard the message underneath them often enough that somewhere along the way, it became the way you started talking to yourself too.
That’s certainly what happened to me.
If I wasn’t getting the result I wanted, I just needed to try harder.
If I wasn’t following the plan consistently, I just needed to become more consistent.
If I kept struggling, I just 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, 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 just 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?
And perhaps you’ve felt that frustration too.
Maybe you’ve known perfectly well what you were supposed to be doing, but knowing what to do wasn’t answering the question you were actually struggling with.
How do I stop doing this when I’m stressed, upset, overwhelmed or exhausted?
How do I become consistent when consistency is exactly what I’m finding difficult?
How do I change the behaviours I keep promising myself I won’t repeat?
How do I change my mindset when nobody has ever really explained what changing my mindset means, beyond telling me to think differently, be more positive or try harder?
Maybe, like me, you’ve had moments where you’ve thought there must be something more to understand here.
Because being told what you need to do isn’t always the same as understanding how to change the thing that is making it difficult to do.
Back then, that was the part I was trying to understand.
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.
Just be more positive.
Just follow the plan better.
Just show more self-control.
Just 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 maybe you recognise that feeling even if you’ve never stood on a set of scales in a slimming group in your life.
Maybe you’ve stood on your own scales at home after a difficult week and felt that familiar drop in your stomach.
Maybe you’ve looked at a number you didn’t want to see and immediately started going through everything you believed you’d done wrong.
Maybe you’ve felt ashamed because you’d told yourself this time would be different.
Maybe you’ve compared yourself with somebody who seems able to manage their eating, exercise or weight without the struggle you experience and wondered why you can’t just do what they seem able to do.
Or maybe you’ve simply had that horrible feeling that you’ve failed again.
Different circumstances.
But perhaps some of the same conclusions.
I need to try harder.
I need more discipline.
I need to be more consistent.
I need to change my mindset.
Why can’t I just do this?
For me, standing on those scales was one of the moments when those conclusions became even more deeply attached to the way I saw myself.
And afterwards, 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.
2- When Desperation Took Over
After that experience at the slimming group, I wasn’t ready to give up on losing weight. Far from it. I still desperately wanted my life to change.
But I was beginning to believe something else. Maybe I couldn’t do this on my own. Maybe I needed assistance.
And before I tell you what happened next, there is another part of this story that matters.
I had already been to my doctor and asked for help.
By that point, my weight had reached 23 stone 12 pounds, which put me within the category medically classified as severe, or class III, obesity. And my concerns about my weight weren’t simply about the way I looked.
My mobility was really limited. I struggled to do very much physically, I was becoming increasingly isolated and reclusive, and emotionally I was incredibly low.
I knew I was depressed. But I also explicitly told my doctor that one of the biggest reasons I felt so depressed was my weight and the effect it was having on my life.
I was prescribed antidepressants.
And I want to be careful about how I explain this, because I’m not suggesting that my depression didn’t deserve to be taken seriously or that there was anything wrong with treating it.
But from my perspective at the time, something important had been left unaddressed.
I had gone to my doctor saying, in effect, “My weight is having a huge impact on my life. My mobility is limited. I’m struggling to do things. I’m becoming increasingly isolated. I feel incredibly low, and my weight is a major part of why I feel this way.”
And I came away with treatment for depression, but still feeling completely alone with the weight problem I had actually gone there asking for help with.
My weight hadn’t stopped affecting my mobility or what I felt able to do. It hadn’t stopped contributing to the isolation I was experiencing. And I still desperately wanted help to change it.
So when I began thinking that perhaps I needed some kind of assistance to lose weight, I didn’t go back to my doctor. I looked elsewhere.
And this is where desperation began overriding better judgement.
I was struggling financially at the time, so I didn’t seek out legitimate private medical treatment either. Instead, I bought cheap, unlicensed diet tablets.
Dodgy diet tablets, if we’re calling them what they were.
I’d heard some of the mums at the school gates talking about them. They were supposed to help you lose weight rapidly, and at that point, that promise was enough for me.
I didn’t research them. I didn’t properly investigate what was in them or stop and carefully weigh up whether something bought this way was remotely sensible or safe.
The promise of rapid weight loss was enough.
Looking back now, of course I can see how reckless that decision was. But I also remember the woman who made it.
She had spent years trying to lose weight. She was struggling physically and emotionally, she had already asked for help, and she was beginning to believe that perhaps she couldn’t do this by herself.
She had also started believing some of the judgements she had heard about herself, while desperately wanting something to change.
None of that made taking those tablets safe, and none of it made the decision a good one. But it does help explain how I reached the point where I was willing to make it.
And what makes that decision even harder for me to look back on is that I already knew I had reasons to be cautious. I had previously experienced a blood clot.
So I wasn’t somebody who had never experienced a serious health scare or who believed there could never be consequences to the choices I made around my weight. I knew there could be risks.
I took them anyway.
Because at that point, the possibility that these tablets might finally help me lose weight felt more powerful than the possibility that taking them might harm me.
Sadly, the outcome wasn’t the one I had been hoping for.
Instead of those tablets giving me the rapid weight-loss result I was chasing, I ended up in hospital after they caused a bowel obstruction. And 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 had been willing to risk my health to do it.
And there was something about that reality that would become incredibly significant to me later.
Remember what I told you in the previous section. Somewhere along the way, I had started absorbing the suggestion that perhaps I didn’t want it enough.
Part of me had begun to believe that narrative.
And yet there I was.
Lying in a hospital bed because of how desperately I had wanted it.
I hadn’t wanted weight loss too little. I had wanted it so desperately that I had made a reckless decision and put my health at risk in pursuit of it.
At that point, I didn’t yet understand everything that contradiction would eventually teach me.
Later, when I began learning about perception, the beliefs we form and the way those beliefs can influence the reality through which we interpret ourselves and our experiences, I would think back to moments like this one.
Because objectively, I knew how badly I had wanted to lose weight. I had lived that desperation.
And yet somebody else’s judgement about what my struggle meant had landed deeply enough that it had started seeping into my own beliefs about myself.
That mattered, because I would eventually begin discovering that some of the things I believed my history proved about me weren’t necessarily what my history proved at all.
But I wasn’t there yet.
At that point, I was simply lying in a hospital bed facing the consequences of a decision I should never have made.
And I want to be careful here too. I’m not presuming that you have ever made, or would ever make, a decision like mine.
You may never have taken diet tablets. You may never have put your health at risk in pursuit of weight loss. Your experiences may look nothing like this.
But perhaps you recognise something underneath it.
Perhaps you know what it feels like to become desperate enough for something to change that you start considering things you wouldn’t normally consider. Things that, at another point in your life, you might have looked at and thought, I would never do that.
Because desperation around weight can show up in many different ways.
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, or agreeing to rules around food that you already know make you miserable because you’re willing to tolerate almost anything if it means you might finally get the result you want.
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, the worrying about it, the promises you make to yourself, the disappointment when things don’t go to plan and the hope 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 desire for relief can become incredibly powerful.
Mine eventually took me somewhere dangerous.
But strangely, it was lying in that hospital bed that finally made me stop.
For years, whenever another attempt hadn’t worked out, my attention had almost automatically gone forwards. What diet would I try next? 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. At all of it.
The years I’d spent trying to lose weight. The diets I’d followed. The slimming groups I’d joined. The weight I’d lost and regained. The emotional eating I’d struggled with. The promises I’d made to myself and the times I’d started again.
And all those questions I had 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.
Maybe I needed to start looking somewhere different.
I decided I wasn’t going back to the slimming group. Instead, I took the money I had been spending on my 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 while I was still in hospital. And when I came home, I continued reading and bought myself a notebook to keep track of what I was learning.
On the front, I wrote four words.
LOSE THIS WEIGHT FOR LIFE.
I didn’t have a framework. I certainly didn’t have everything worked out, and I had no idea where that search for understanding would eventually lead me.
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 the answer, I started searching for it myself.
3- What Does Your History Actually Say?
When I came home from hospital, I started doing exactly what I had decided I was going to do.
I started learning.
At that point in my life, I was still on benefits and I didn’t have much money to spend. So I began with the books I could afford, and when I had exhausted those, I went to the library.
I read their books. I used their computers to research. One of my children would be at school while the other sat beside me in a buggy as I tried to understand as much as I possibly could about the things I had spent years struggling with.
I researched nutrition, psychology, NLP and CBT.
I wanted to understand behaviour, emotions, beliefs and why we can know something logically and still find ourselves behaving in ways that seem to contradict what we know.
I’ve always had an innate need to understand things. Telling me that something happens has never been quite enough for me. I want to know why it happens, what sits underneath it and how the different pieces connect.
I also went back to my doctor and was referred for talking therapy.
So gradually, from lots of different places, I started collecting pieces.
There were things I was learning about nutrition.
Things I was learning about thoughts and behaviour.
Things about emotions, beliefs, perception and the way we respond to what is happening around us.
And the more I learned, the more I began noticing something that I couldn't quite ignore.
These things didn’t feel completely separate.
They looked like individual pieces of something that should have belonged together.
But nobody had ever taught weight loss to me that way.
Every time I had tried to lose weight, the focus had largely been on the weight-loss method itself, while many of the other things I was now learning about had existed somewhere else entirely.
So at first, I worked on them separately too.
I listened to hypnosis recordings I found on YouTube.
I followed tutorials and practised different ways of regulating my emotions.
I read about thoughts, behaviour and beliefs.
I learned more about nutrition. I tried different things and paid attention to what I noticed in myself.
I didn't have some grand theory about how all of this fitted together. I was simply trying to understand myself better and find answers to questions I had been asking for years.
And then I learned something that gave me my first real aha moment.
Perception.
I began to understand that the way we perceive something influences the meaning we give to it, and that the meaning we give an experience can shape what we come to believe about ourselves and our reality.
That immediately took me back to something I had heard repeatedly during the years I had struggled with my weight.
Maybe you’re not disciplined enough.
Maybe you just don’t want it enough.
I had heard versions of those messages often enough that somewhere along the way I had started to absorb them. They had stopped being only other people's judgements of me and had begun influencing the way I judged myself.
But now I had something I hadn't had when I was standing on those slimming-group scales.
I had evidence that made me question that perception.
Because whatever else could be said about the decision I had made to take those tablets, lying in a hospital bed because I had risked my health in pursuit of weight loss was hardly evidence that I didn't want it enough.
Quite the opposite.
It was evidence of just how desperately I had wanted it.
That didn't make what I had done sensible. It didn't make it safe. But it did make me realise that something I had started to believe about myself wasn't necessarily true simply because I had heard it often enough.
And that raised a much bigger question for me.
If I had been looking at myself through a perception that wasn't giving me the full story there, what else had I accepted as truth about myself because it was the explanation I had been given over and over again?
There was one belief that stood above almost all the others.
I can’t lose weight.
I had said it countless times.
I genuinely believed it.
After more than fifteen years of dieting, losing weight, regaining it and starting again, that seemed like a perfectly reasonable conclusion to draw.
Look at my history.
Surely my history was the proof.
Except this time, instead of using my history to confirm what I already believed about myself, I decided to actually look at what the evidence said.
Had I ever lost weight?
Yes.
Not once, either.
I had lost a stone. I had lost two stone. I had lost three stone. At one point, I had lost around five stone.
I had done it using different approaches at different points in my life.
And initially, my brain wanted to do what it had always done.
Yes, but I put it back on.
Yes, but I couldn't keep it off.
Yes, but I always ended up back where I started.
But for once, I made myself stop at the first part of the sentence.
Had I lost weight?
Yes.
That mattered, because I had spent years using the fact that I had regained weight as evidence that I couldn't lose it.
But those are not the same thing.
If the question was simply, “Are you capable of reducing your body weight?”, my own history had already answered it.
I had done it.
More than once.
The history I had been using as evidence of my inability to lose weight actually contained repeated evidence that I could.
And that was a very uncomfortable thing to realise, because it meant the question I had spent years asking myself might have been the wrong question.
Instead of immediately asking myself why I couldn't lose weight, I started asking something different.
If I can lose weight, why do I keep finding myself back at the beginning?
Now I want you to look at your history for a moment.
Not through what you currently believe it says about you. Not through the disappointment of having regained weight, or how many times you have started again.
Just look at the evidence.
Have you lost weight before?
Maybe it was half a stone. Maybe it was one stone, three stone, five stone or considerably more. Maybe you've done it once. Maybe, like me, you've done it many times.
You don't need to tell me whether you regained it yet.
I know why your mind wants to add the “but”. Mine did too.
For this question, I want you to leave the “but” alone.
Did your body weight reduce?
If the answer is yes, then your history contains evidence that perhaps you haven't been giving yourself credit for.
You have lost weight.
That doesn't mean everything worked. It doesn't mean your previous approach was right for you, and it certainly doesn't mean that regaining the weight doesn't matter.
It means something much more specific.
Regaining weight cannot be used as evidence that you are incapable of losing weight when the same history contains evidence that you did exactly that.
And if you've spent years believing, as I did, that your repeated attempts prove you simply can't do this, I want you to notice what happens when we separate those two things for the first time.
Because I had spent years looking at my entire history as one repeated failure.
Lose weight. Regain it. Start again.
Failure.
Lose weight. Regain it. Start again.
Failure.
But now I could see something I hadn't seen before.
There was a part of that process I had repeatedly succeeded at.
I could lose weight.
Which meant there was another question sitting inside my history that I had barely investigated at all.
If losing the weight wasn't the part I was incapable of doing, what was actually happening that kept bringing me back to the beginning?
4- What If Losing Weight Wasn't the Problem?
Once I had recognised that I could lose weight, it changed where I looked next.
Because if I stopped treating the weight coming back as evidence that I couldn’t lose weight, I was left with a very different question.
Why did I keep finding myself back at the beginning?
And when I started looking at my history through that question, I noticed something I had never really questioned before.
I had spent years trying to solve weight loss.
Another diet.
Another plan.
Another way of eating.
Another attempt to become more disciplined, more consistent or more motivated.
I’d think about what I should eat, how much I should eat, what I needed to cut down on, what I needed to do more of and which approach I should follow this time.
And that made complete sense to me at the time.
I wanted to lose weight.
So of course I was looking for ways to lose weight.
But there was something slightly strange about that when I really stopped to think about it.
Because I wasn’t repeatedly failing to learn how to lose weight.
I had repeatedly demonstrated that I already knew how to do that.
Slimming World had helped me lose weight.
Weight Watchers had helped me lose weight.
Rosemary Conley had helped me lose weight.
SlimFast had helped me lose weight.
Calorie counting had helped me lose weight.
At different points, so had approaches involving fasting, lower-carbohydrate eating and other ways of organising what and how much I ate.
The rules were different.
The language was different.
The foods I focused on were sometimes different.
Some used calories. Some used points. Some used portions, food categories, eating windows or different rules around what I ate and when.
But underneath those different approaches sat the same foundational requirement for weight reduction: over time, my body needed to be using more energy than I was consuming.
There were lots of different ways of creating that.
And I had successfully used more than one of them.
So every time I searched for another weight-loss solution, I wasn’t necessarily learning how to do something I had never been able to do.
In many ways, I was learning another way to do something I had already demonstrated I could do.
It was the same problem being approached in different outfits.
And I want you to think about whether any of that feels familiar.
If you’ve lost weight more than once, how many different ways have you learned to lose it?
How many plans have you followed?
How many sets of rules have you learned?
How much information have you accumulated about calories, portions, points, protein, carbohydrates, fats, food swaps, recipes, exercise, what to eat more of and what to eat less of?
Perhaps you could practically write a weight-loss manual yourself by now.
I certainly felt as though I could.
I knew how to follow a plan.
I knew how to change my eating.
I knew how to become more active.
I knew many of the things that could result in weight loss.
And more importantly, I had evidence that I could actually do them.
Because I had lost weight.
Repeatedly.
Sometimes significant amounts of it.
So I had to ask myself something that, strangely, I had never really asked before.
What if losing weight wasn’t actually the problem I kept failing to solve?
What if I had been repeatedly trying to solve a problem I had already demonstrated I could solve?
That question changed something for me.
Because for the first time, I stopped looking at my history as one long story of unsuccessful weight loss and separated what had actually happened.
There was the part where I lost weight.
And there was the part where the weight came back.
Until then, I had treated the second part as evidence that I had failed at the first.
But my history no longer supported that conclusion.
I had successfully lost weight.
The fact that the weight later came back didn’t erase that.
It meant something else had happened afterwards.
And that was when something finally clicked for me.
I didn’t have a weight-loss problem.
I had a weight-regain problem.
And those two things were not the same.
That distinction might sound obvious when it is written down in front of you.
For me, it wasn’t.
It completely changed the problem I thought I was trying to understand.
Because weight loss asks one set of questions.
How do I create the conditions for my body to lose weight?
What and how much am I eating?
What role does my activity play?
What nutritional approach am I going to use?
What behaviours will support that weight loss?
Those are important questions.
As part of my collective qualifications, I’m qualified in both Nutritional Therapy and Weight Management, so I fully understand the role nutrition plays and the scientific principles of weight reduction.
Those principles matter.
Nutrition matters.
Energy balance matters.
Movement matters.
The behaviours that support weight reduction matter.
Recognising that I had a weight-regain problem did not make any of those things irrelevant.
It simply meant they were answering a different question.
They could help explain how I lost weight.
They did not, by themselves, explain why weight I had successfully lost later came back.
That was a different question.
And suddenly I could see that I had spent years accumulating answers to one side of my experience while barely investigating the other.
I knew a great deal about what could support weight loss.
What I didn’t understand was what had happened afterwards.
What happened between successfully losing weight and eventually finding myself needing to lose it again?
Because if I had already demonstrated that I could lose weight, then simply learning more about how to lose it couldn’t be the whole answer.
I needed to understand what was happening in between.
5- Why Do You Keep Getting Sent Back to the Beginning?
I don’t mind admitting that it took a minute for that realisation to really sink in.
I could lose weight.
After more than fifteen years of believing that I couldn’t, there was something almost strange about allowing myself to say that without immediately adding everything that had happened afterwards.
But the evidence was there.
I had lost weight before. More than once. Using more than one approach.
I could lose weight.
And once that finally sank in, there was another question I couldn’t ignore.
This time, though, the question came with quite a lot of frustration.
If I could lose weight, why was I continuously being sent back there?
Because that was exactly what had been happening.
Whenever I struggled, the messages I received generally pointed me back towards doing weight loss better.
Be more disciplined.
Be more motivated.
Stick to the plan.
Be more consistent.
Get yourself back on track.
Try harder.
And when an attempt eventually ended in regain, I would usually do one of two things.
I would go back to an approach I had already used and promise myself that this time I would do it better, or I would go looking for another way to lose weight.
Different diet. Different plan. Different rules. Different method.
But underneath those differences, at their foundational core, they were all doing the same thing. They were creating the conditions for my body to use more energy than I was consuming.
The basic weight-loss model was the same.
It was the same thing wearing a different outfit.
And my goodness, did I accumulate a lot of those outfits over the years.
That wasn’t entirely without value. Trying different approaches taught me things. I learned what I liked and what I didn’t. What suited me and what didn’t. What felt easier for me to live with and what I never wanted to do again.
But the fact remained.
They worked.
Not necessarily forever. Not necessarily in a way I could keep living with long term. Clearly something was happening afterwards that I still didn’t understand.
But if the question was simply whether those approaches had enabled me to reduce my body weight, the answer was yes.
My evidence now proved that.
So every time I regained weight and went searching for yet another way to lose it, I was being sent back to solve a problem I had already solved.
I would lose weight, regain it and interpret the regain as evidence that I still hadn’t solved my weight-loss problem.
So I would go back to weight loss.
I would lose weight again, regain it again and reach the same conclusion.
Back I went.
Round and round in a cycle where regain kept sending me back to the beginning.
If you have lost weight before, regained it and then started again, perhaps you can see that cycle in your own history too.
You lose weight.
The weight comes back.
You conclude that something about the weight loss didn’t work, or that you didn’t do it well enough.
So you start another weight-loss attempt.
Maybe you choose something completely different. Maybe you return to something that worked before and promise yourself that this time you’ll do it properly.
Either way, you’re back at the beginning again.
And we are far from alone in that experience.
In fact, research shows that following intentional weight loss, weight regain is more common than long-term weight-loss maintenance.
That became particularly interesting to me once I started looking at my experiences through what I had learned about perception.
Because I didn’t only start questioning my beliefs differently.
I started looking back at my experiences differently too.
And one of the experiences I returned to was that day at the slimming club.
Originally, when I thought about that room, my attention went straight to the women my group leader had pointed towards.
The women who had succeeded.
Remember what I had taken from that moment?
Those women were proof that it worked.
And because they could do it while I was struggling, I had used their success as evidence against myself.
But when I revisited that memory with a wider lens, I remembered that they weren’t the only women in the room.
There was a much larger group of women there too.
Women trying. Women struggling. Women returning. Women starting again. Women having good weeks and difficult weeks. Women who, like me, hadn’t simply walked through those doors once, lost weight and disappeared forever having solved the problem.
I wasn’t an anomaly.
And those women weren’t evidence that there was something fundamentally wrong with us.
I simply hadn’t been looking at that part of the room.
My attention had been directed somewhere else.
Look at the women who succeeded.
So I did.
And I made what I saw mean something about me.
I have my own beliefs about why the weight-loss world keeps sending women back to the start, but I’m not here to change the weight-loss world.
I’m here to help you change your mindset about weight loss, so you can change your life.
And there was something else about that slimming-club experience that I understood very differently once I started learning more about language, perception and the way our minds can respond to the meaning contained within words.
“Where do you think you’ve gone wrong this week?”
At the time, I had simply answered the question.
Years later, I realised how much was already contained within it before I had said a single word.
I had gone wrong.
That was already established.
The question simply asked me to identify where.
And when you ask someone where they have gone wrong, you direct their attention towards searching for evidence of exactly that.
Where did I fail?
What did I do wrong?
Where wasn’t I good enough?
What should I have done differently?
For a woman who is already disappointed with herself, that search can very quickly become about far more than food.
It can bring shame. Regret. Frustration. Defensiveness. Self-blame.
And instead of helping her understand what happened, it can reinforce the feeling that she is what happened.
That distinction became incredibly important to me.
Because there is a very different psychological starting point between asking a woman:
“Where did you go wrong?”
and asking her:
“What happened?”
One begins with a verdict.
The other begins with curiosity.
One directs her attention towards building a case against herself.
The other gives her somewhere to look for understanding.
It doesn’t remove responsibility. It gives her a better position from which to take it.
Today, as a weight-loss specialist myself, I would never begin with, “Where have you gone wrong?”
I would want to know where she struggled. What was happening around that struggle. What made things more difficult. What she noticed. What she needed. What we could learn from it and what might support her differently going forward.
Because struggling with something and being the problem are not the same thing.
But for years, I had treated them as though they were.
And there was one more piece of language I started noticing everywhere once I learned to pay attention to it.
One tiny word.
Just.
Actually, look it up in a dictionary.
Among the meanings you’ll find for “just” are words like simply and only.
And then think about how often that tiny word finds its way into conversations about weight loss.
Just eat less.
Just move more.
Just stick to it.
Just be disciplined.
Just be consistent.
Just get back on track.
Just believe in yourself.
I had even been using it against myself.
Why can’t I just do this?
Once I noticed it, I couldn’t really unnotice it.
Because if “just” carries the meaning of simply or only, think about the message that can sit underneath those sentences.
This is simple.
This is something you should be able to do.
And then think about what can happen when you can’t seem to keep doing something you have repeatedly been told should be that simple.
It doesn’t always feel like, “I’m finding this difficult.”
It can start to feel like, “I’m incapable of doing something that is supposed to be so simple.”
And there it is again.
Another layer of self-doubt.
Another experience added to the evidence you may already have been collecting against yourself.
Another reason to believe that perhaps everybody else can do this and there is something about you that means you can’t.
We are going to come back to why carrying those experiences with you matters later.
For now, I want to leave you with one final distinction.
Because perhaps the word “just” has been asking one word to describe two very different things.
There is the information involved in losing weight.
And then there is what it takes for a human being to implement that information in her real life.
Those are not necessarily as simple as each other.
And that is where we are going next.
That may be a lot of new information to absorb, particularly if you have spent years looking at your weight-loss history through a very different lens.
You may want to step away and let it settle. You may want to come back and read Part One again. Or you may already feel ready to move straight into Part Two.
This is your journey, so navigate it your way.
But when you’re ready for Part Two, I’ll meet you there.