1- A Simple Process, A Not-So-Simple Human Life

At the end of Part One, I left you with a distinction.

There is the information involved in losing weight.

And then there is what it takes for a human being to consistently implement that information in her real life.

Those are not necessarily as simple as each other.

And I think this is where we need to have a very different conversation about what we mean when we say that weight loss is simple.

Because scientifically, the foundational principle of weight loss can be relatively simple.

For body weight to reduce over time, there needs to be an energy deficit. Your body needs to use more energy than you are consuming.

There are lots of different ways of creating that deficit, as my rather extensive wardrobe of weight-loss outfits had already taught me.

But underneath them, that foundational principle remains.

I’m not arguing with that science.

I’m qualified in Nutritional Therapy and Weight Management. I spent years working within the NHS supporting people with weight management. I understand the science, and I understand why people describe the underlying principle as simple.

Where I disagree is when the simplicity of that principle is used to imply that consistently applying it should therefore be a simple process too.

Because a woman doesn’t live inside a scientific principle.

She lives inside a human life.

And the internal and external conditions in which she has to apply that principle every day may be anything but simple.

She may be navigating stress.

Exhaustion.

Grief.

Hormonal changes.

Work.

Children.

Caring responsibilities.

Relationships.

Financial pressure.

A lack of time.

She may also be navigating eating behaviours, learned patterns, emotional responses, beliefs and expectations that have developed over years.

The scientific principle hasn’t changed.

But neither has the fact that a human being has to implement it.

And human beings are complex.

Human? Absolutely.

Simple? No.

That doesn’t mean we need to make weight loss unnecessarily complicated.

It means we need to stop confusing the simplicity of the information with the complexity that can exist in implementing it.

Because they are two different things.

Information tells you what supports weight loss.

Implementation is your ability to keep applying that information within the conditions of your actual life.

And this distinction matters enormously when a woman begins to struggle.

If she doesn’t know what to do, then information may be exactly what she needs.

Teach her.

Help her understand nutrition.

Help her understand energy balance.

Give her a structure or an approach she can use.

But let’s be real for a minute.

Think about the times you have regained weight.

For most of us, regain didn’t happen overnight. Things gradually drifted.

Maybe a behaviour changed here.

Something became harder there.

Things you had been doing regularly became less regular.

Choices changed.

Old behaviours began creeping back in.

Perhaps you stopped doing certain things altogether.

But was that because you suddenly woke up one morning and mysteriously forgot everything you knew about weight loss?

Did you forget the details of the plan you had been following?

Did you forget that what you ate mattered?

Did you forget that calories mattered?

Did you forget that movement could support what you were trying to achieve?

Probably not.

The information was still there.

And just like you didn’t lose that information overnight, you didn’t go to sleep one night at the weight you had lost and wake up the next morning suddenly back at square one either.

There was a space in between.

A period of time in which the information was still there, but your implementation of that information was beginning to change.

Perhaps slowly. Perhaps so gradually that you barely noticed it happening at first.

The things you had been doing consistently became less consistent. Some behaviours drifted away. Others crept back in. And over time, the weight began to come back too.

That space matters.

Because if we only look at the two ends of the story, we miss it completely.

At one end:

“I lost weight.”

At the other:

“I regained it.”

And then we draw a line straight from one to the other and conclude:

“I failed again.”

But you didn’t teleport from one end of that story to the other.

Something happened in between.

Your knowledge of weight loss didn’t suddenly disappear.

Your implementation of that knowledge gradually changed.

And I think we need to stop treating intelligent women as though they’re dumb.

Because when a woman says, “I know what to do. I’m struggling to keep doing it,” repeatedly giving her the same information she already knows misses what she is actually telling you.

She isn’t necessarily experiencing an information problem.

Something is happening in the implementation.

But I want to be really careful here, because I don’t want you to recognise that you may be free from one problem only for me to hand you another, potentially even bigger one.

We have just spent Part One challenging the belief that you are incapable of losing weight.

I’m not now going to replace it with:

“Okay, so maybe I can lose weight. I’m just incapable of implementing consistently.”

Because your history doesn’t support that conclusion either.

You have already demonstrated that you can implement.

You made choices. You planned. You changed things. You followed whatever approach you were using often enough and for long enough for your body weight to reduce.

That required implementation.

So the recognition here isn’t:

“I have an implementation problem.”

It’s:

“I never understood why I wasn’t always able to implement what I knew consistently.”

And there is a huge difference between those two things.

Because one becomes another judgement about you.

The other gives us somewhere new to look.

Think about the cycle we uncovered in Part One.

When things began to drift, where were you usually directed?

Back to the plan.

Back to the rules.

Back to being more disciplined, more motivated, more consistent.

Back to the information.

Or perhaps back to the beginning with a completely different method and a new set of information altogether.

You were repeatedly taught to look at what you were doing.

You weren’t necessarily taught to become curious about why something you had previously been able to do had become harder to keep doing.

So of course you didn’t have an explanation for it.

You hadn’t been taught to look there.

And when you don’t know there is somewhere else to look, what are you left with?

You look at yourself.

I must have lost motivation.

I must not be disciplined enough.

I must have stopped trying hard enough.

I must be inconsistent.

I must have sabotaged myself again.

Maybe I really am just bad at this.

But what if those conclusions were being drawn before we had even investigated the thing that actually changed?

Because you knew what to do.

You had demonstrated that you could do it.

And then, somewhere along the way, doing it consistently became harder.

That is not another problem I want to pin on you.

That is something I want us to understand.

So the question becomes much more useful now.

Not:

“Why am I so bad at implementing?”

But:

“What was happening when implementation became harder?”

And those are very different questions.

One searches for another fault in you.

The other starts investigating what was happening around you, within you and within the way you were trying to lose weight.

And this is where I have a problem with a particular approach to weight-loss coaching.

There are weight-loss coaches who will stand firmly behind the position that weight loss is simple and that continuing to explore why a woman is struggling risks overcomplicating something that doesn’t need to be complicated.

At the level of the underlying scientific principle, I don’t actually disagree with them.

Where I have a problem is when that position becomes a refusal to explore the woman’s struggle with implementing it.

Because if a woman is telling you that she knows what to do but is struggling to keep doing it, she isn’t necessarily asking you to explain the information again.

She is telling you that something is happening in the implementation.

And if your only response is to repeat the instruction, tell her to be more disciplined, remind her to be consistent or point back to how simple weight loss is, you haven’t explored the problem she is actually describing.

Some people might call that a limited approach to coaching.

I call it piss-poor coaching.

And I’m passionate about this because it’s a battle I feel like I’m constantly fighting.

I fight it in real life. I fight it online. I’ve had this conversation more times than I can count, and I’ll continue having it for as long as I need to.

Because I am sick of watching women being blamed for struggling within a narrative that is based on only part of the picture.

As women, we already navigate enough challenges, societal pressures, expectations and unsolicited judgements about our bodies, our choices and how we should live our lives.

We do not need weight loss adding another layer of judgement by reducing a complex human experience to something we should “just” be able to do, and then making us the problem when we struggle to do it.

If a woman doesn’t understand the information, teach her.

If she doesn’t know what supports weight loss, help her understand it.

But when she knows what to do and is telling you that she is struggling to keep doing it, repeating the information more loudly doesn’t suddenly address that struggle.

And pointing back to the simplicity of the underlying principle certainly doesn’t make the conditions in which she is trying to apply it any simpler.

I’ll be completely transparent with you. When I first started looking back at the decade and a half I had spent in my slimming-club membership, I was angry.

I remember thinking that after all those years, the only pounds I had permanently lost were the monetary ones.

And yes, that pissed me off.

At that point, I looked back at all those years of repeatedly losing weight, regaining it, going back and trying again, and wondered why nobody had helped me understand what was actually happening.

But as I learned more, my perspective on that changed too.

I began to recognise that some of the challenges I had been facing reached beyond the food-led weight-loss approach that my membership was designed to provide.

I had been bringing struggles into that room that couldn’t necessarily be resolved by another conversation about what I was eating, whether I had followed the plan or how consistent I had been that week.

And the reality is that most slimming-club leaders, including the one I had worked with, weren’t qualified to provide the kind of support I actually needed with some of those struggles.

That isn’t a criticism of someone for not having qualifications they were never required to have.

It’s something I can recognise now that I couldn’t recognise then.

At the time, I didn’t understand that some of what I was struggling with sat beyond the scope of the food-led weight-loss support I was accessing.

I only knew that I was struggling, I was asking for help, and the answers I was receiving weren’t helping me understand why.

That doesn’t mean an individual coach should be expected to resolve every struggle a woman brings to them either.

There will be things that sit outside somebody’s professional scope, and responsible practice means recognising those boundaries and knowing when a woman may need additional or specialist support.

But for me, recognising that eventually raised a much bigger question.

Why were so many of the things that could influence a woman’s ability to lose weight and keep implementing what supported that weight loss being looked at separately?

Because the woman experiencing them doesn’t experience herself in separate compartments.

Her nutrition doesn’t exist separately from her behaviour. Her behaviour doesn’t exist separately from her thoughts, emotions, beliefs or learned responses. Her physical state doesn’t exist separately from what is happening in her life.

They can interact.

And suddenly, the fact that I had been finding pieces of my own answers in completely different places began to make much more sense.

It also became one of the reasons I wanted to keep learning.

I didn’t want to understand only the food.

I wanted to understand the woman eating it.

I didn’t want to understand only what supports weight loss.

I wanted to understand what can influence a woman’s ability to keep doing those things over time.

And that is exactly why, as I continued my education, I deliberately chose to study across multiple fields and practices.

I studied Weight Management and Nutritional Therapy, but I also trained across behavioural and psychological approaches, including CBT-based approaches, NLP, Clinical Hypnosis and other practices that helped me understand different parts of the human experience.

Because I had come to believe that weight loss needed to be looked at more collectively.

The science of reducing body weight matters.

Nutrition matters.

Behaviour matters.

But so does the woman who has to bring all of those things into her actual life and keep implementing them.

And if multiple things can influence her ability to do that, I wanted to understand how those pieces connected rather than continuing to look at each one in isolation.

That changed the way I looked back at those slimming-club years too.

The approach had taught me how to follow a food-led weight-loss plan.

And I had demonstrated, repeatedly, that I could.

What it hadn’t resolved were some of the wider struggles that were affecting my ability to keep implementing it.

And now I could understand why.

I had been asking a food-led approach, delivered by someone who wasn’t qualified to support me with some of the challenges I was experiencing, to help me make sense of things that reached beyond the food itself.

The bigger problem was that I didn’t know there was anything else to look at.

So when the food-led approach wasn’t enough to help me understand the struggles I was experiencing, I didn’t think:

“Perhaps there are other things influencing my ability to keep implementing this.”

I thought:

“The plan works. Other women can do it. I can’t. So the problem must be me.”

That is the distinction I can see now that I couldn’t see then.

And I’m not telling you this because I want you to look backwards and find someone else to blame.

That would simply replace one blame story with another.

I’m telling you because I want us to start asking better questions.

I don’t want to ask why you couldn’t just stick to it.

I don’t want to ask where you went wrong.

And I don’t want to send you back to the beginning to learn how to lose weight again when your own history may already contain evidence that you know how to do that.

You knew what to do.

You demonstrated that you could do it.

What you may never have understood was why your ability to keep doing it wasn’t always consistent.

And perhaps that wasn’t because there was something obvious that you kept failing to see.

Perhaps you simply hadn’t been taught to look there.

Because there was always a space in between.

Between knowing what to do and gradually doing less of it.

Between losing the weight and regaining it.

Between implementation working and implementation beginning to drift.

That space didn’t disappear simply because nobody taught you to look at it.

It was there.

And instead of sending you back to the beginning again, this time we’re going to stop there and ask a different question.

What was happening in between?