7- Movement Through A Wider Lens

By now, I hope you can see that capacity has been there all along.

It was there on the days when doing the things that supported your weight loss felt relatively manageable, and it was there on the days when those exact same things seemed to require far more from you.

It was there when life was relatively settled and you had more headspace to plan, prepare, make decisions and think about yourself. And it was there when life became demanding, your sleep disappeared, your stress increased, somebody needed you, something changed or simply getting through the day began asking more from you.

It was there in some of the eating approaches you followed, in the movement expectations you created, in the emotional weight you carried and in the things you began bracing for before they'd even happened.

And because capacity can influence your ability to plan, concentrate, make decisions, regulate emotional responses, prepare food, move your body, interrupt familiar patterns, adapt when something changes and keep implementing the behaviours that support your weight loss, it can also influence what happens to your weight over time.

Not because capacity somehow changes the scientific principles of weight loss. It doesn't.

But it can change the conditions in which you're trying to keep implementing them.

And at this point you may quite reasonably be thinking, "Okay, great. I understand capacity now. But I still don't really know what I'm supposed to do with it."

Fair point.

There is much more we could explore here, but I don't want to turn capacity into another complicated set of instructions or another thing you leave this Guide believing you now need to do perfectly.

So for now, I want to keep it much simpler.

When you begin working with your capacity rather than ignoring it, there are a few different things you can start considering.

Sometimes you can support it.

That can mean looking at some of the things your physical and mental capacity depend upon and asking whether they are being adequately supported.

Nutrition is one example we've already explored.

If you're trying to lose weight in a way that leaves you constantly hungry, exhausted, preoccupied with food or inadequately nourished, that can affect far more than the number on the scales.

It can affect the woman who still has to think, work, make decisions, manage emotions, move her body and live the rest of her life while losing weight.

Movement can support capacity too.

The right movement for you may support your physical health, strength, fitness, function and how you feel, rather than existing only as a way of burning calories. As we've just explored, that doesn't mean more is automatically better. Something intended to support you can become another demand if the expectations surrounding it continually exceed what you can realistically sustain.

Sleep and rest matter too.

So does recovery.

So does having periods when your brain isn't being asked to solve another problem, make another decision or meet another demand.

Supporting capacity doesn't mean creating a perfect life in which you're beautifully nourished, wonderfully rested, exercising regularly and floating around in a permanent state of calm.

Good luck with that.

It means recognising that the woman doing the work has needs too.

And sometimes, rather than asking only, "What else should I be doing?", it can be useful to ask, "What might help support me in doing what I'm already asking of myself?"

Then there are times when capacity needs protecting.

This is where boundaries can matter.

Because sometimes the answer isn't finding a way to magically create more capacity.

Sometimes it's worth looking at where the capacity you already have is going.

Are you automatically saying yes when you desperately want to say no?

Are you taking responsibility for things that don't always need to belong to you?

Are you allowing other people's expectations, demands or opinions to repeatedly take priority over your own needs?

That doesn't mean becoming selfish or refusing to help anybody because you're "protecting your capacity".

We live in relationships, families, workplaces and communities.

Sometimes people genuinely need us, and sometimes we willingly choose to give our time and energy because those people and responsibilities matter to us.

But there is a difference between choosing where you give yourself and feeling as though everybody else automatically gets first access to whatever you have available.

Protecting capacity can sometimes mean recognising that your time, attention, emotional energy and physical energy are resources too, and that boundaries can help you decide where those resources are going.

There may also be drains on your capacity that aren't necessary at all, or at least don't need to be as large as they've become.

We've already seen some of them throughout this Guide.

Bracing for judgement that hasn't happened.

Replaying something somebody said years ago.

Expecting yourself to do something perfectly.

Comparing yourself with somebody living a completely different life.

Creating movement expectations that leave no room for tiredness, work or family.

Spending enormous amounts of mental energy fighting hunger because eating less has become a competition with yourself.

Turning one choice that wasn't part of the plan into a reason to spend the rest of the day criticising yourself.

Even the constant mental negotiation of all-or-nothing thinking can ask something from you.

Should I carry on?

Have I ruined it?

Should I start again tomorrow?

Should I wait until Monday?

Should I eat this now because I'm starting again later?

None of those things necessarily looks dramatic from the outside, but capacity doesn't only get used by dramatic things.

Your attention, decision-making, emotional regulation and mental energy can be pulled in lots of directions by lots of smaller demands too.

So part of working with capacity can be noticing what is taking from it unnecessarily and asking whether anything there can be reduced, changed or approached differently.

But I also want to be very careful here, because not everything draining your capacity can be fixed.

Sometimes life is simply asking a lot from you.

Someone you love may be ill.

You may be grieving.

You may be caring for somebody.

Work may be relentless.

Money may be tight.

Your relationship may be struggling.

Your health may be affecting what you can do.

Your sleep may be disrupted by circumstances you cannot immediately change.

There are periods of life that cannot be solved with a better routine, stronger boundaries or a positive mindset.

Sometimes your capacity is lower because what you're living through is hard. And sometimes, for that period, it just is what it is.

That's where acceptance can matter.

But I want to be really clear about what I mean by acceptance, because I don't mean self-collapse.

I don't mean, "Well, my capacity is low, so fuck it."

And I don't mean abandoning yourself, your health or everything you've been working towards until some imaginary future point when life becomes perfectly manageable again.

I mean adapting what you're asking of yourself to what is actually available right now.

There is a huge difference between saying, "I can't do everything I planned, so I'm doing nothing", and saying, "I can't do everything I planned right now, so what can I realistically continue doing?"

Maybe during a difficult period your food needs to become simpler.

Maybe your usual workout becomes a walk.

Maybe three planned sessions become one.

Maybe something you would normally prepare yourself needs to be bought ready-made.

Maybe the goal for a period isn't to push harder but to maintain some of the behaviours that help you stay connected to yourself while more of your capacity is needed elsewhere.

The exact adaptation will be different for different women and different circumstances. What matters here is the principle.

Adaptation is not abandonment.

And adapting now doesn't mean deciding this is all you'll ever be capable of doing again.

You're responding to the period you're in not writing the rules for the rest of your life.

When what you have available changes, what you ask of yourself can change with it.

But there is another side to this that I think is incredibly important if we're going to talk about capacity properly.

Capacity cannot become an excuse we use to remove accountability or personal responsibility from the picture.

Understanding why something is harder doesn't automatically absolve us of responsibility for what we do next.

There will be days when your capacity genuinely is lower and what you originally planned needs to adapt.

There will also be days when you simply don't feel like doing something, when the easier choice is more appealing, when an old pattern is familiar or when doing what supports your goal requires some effort from you.

Those things are not automatically evidence of low capacity.

And I think we have to be willing to be honest with ourselves about the difference.

If every difficult choice becomes "I don't have the capacity today", then capacity hasn't become something we're working with. It's become a more sophisticated explanation for avoiding things we don't particularly want to do.

That isn't what I'm asking you to do.

I'm asking you to understand the conditions you're operating within so you can take responsibility from inside the reality of those conditions.

Sometimes that responsibility will mean recognising that you genuinely need to adapt.

Sometimes it will mean protecting your capacity by saying no to something that doesn't need to take from you.

Sometimes it will mean supporting yourself better so you have more available.

And sometimes it will mean being able to say to yourself, "Actually, I do have the capacity to do this. I just don't particularly want to right now."

Not wanting to do something is human.

Choosing the easier option sometimes is human.

Having days when you can't be bothered is human.

But if something matters to you, there will also be times when personal responsibility means doing something that requires effort, tolerating some discomfort, interrupting a familiar pattern or making a choice you don't particularly feel like making in the moment.

Working with your capacity doesn't mean only doing things when they feel easy.

It means becoming more accurate about what is actually available to you and then taking responsibility for how you use what you have.

And that means capacity awareness requires honesty as well as compassion.

If your capacity is genuinely lower, accountability might mean asking, "Okay, I can't realistically do everything I intended today. What can I still do?"

Maybe the answer is less than you originally planned.

But less is not automatically nothing.

And lower capacity doesn't automatically mean no capacity.

Equally, there will be circumstances where what you have available really is incredibly limited.

Grief, illness, crisis, caring responsibilities or periods of extreme pressure can reduce your available capacity enormously.

This isn't about forcing yourself to find productivity in every difficult human experience.

It's about being truthful about where you are.

Not using "try harder" to dismiss genuine limitations, but not using "low capacity" to dismiss personal responsibility either.

Both matter.

You can have compassion for what you're carrying and still hold yourself accountable for the choices that remain available to you.

In fact, I think that's a much more useful form of accountability than repeatedly demanding that you perform as though your circumstances never change.

It asks you to respond to reality without handing all of your agency over to it.

So perhaps another question belongs alongside, "What can I do with what I have available today?"

"Am I adapting to my capacity, or am I using it to avoid something I am actually capable of doing?"

There won't always be a perfectly clear answer.

Human beings are far more complicated than that. But being willing to ask the question matters.

And when you begin doing that, capacity can give you something I didn't have through so much of my own weight-loss history.

A middle.

Somewhere between doing everything and doing nothing.

Somewhere between following the plan exactly as intended and deciding you've stopped.

Somewhere between what you can do when life feels manageable and abandoning yourself completely when it doesn't.

And when you have a middle, a reduction doesn't automatically have to become a restart.

You can adjust and continue.

You can do less without deciding you've stopped.

You can respond to what is happening now without turning it into a permanent statement about what you'll do later.

And when more becomes available again, you can do more again without needing another Monday, another January or another promise that this time you'll finally do everything properly.

So when you think about capacity from here, you don't need to remember an enormous framework.

You can simply begin noticing.

What is supporting my capacity at the moment?

What might help strengthen it?

What do I need to protect?

What is taking from it unnecessarily?

What genuinely cannot be changed right now?

What choices are still available to me within what I have?

And am I adapting because I need to, or avoiding something I am actually capable of doing?

Those questions won't make every difficult period easy, and they won't remove every obstacle from weight loss.

But they give you somewhere very different to go from, "Why can't I just do this?"

And perhaps you can see now why capacity was such an important missing piece for me.

For years, whenever my behaviour changed, I looked almost exclusively at the behaviour itself. If I stopped meal prepping, exercised less, started eating differently, struggled with a pattern or stopped implementing something I'd previously been doing, I saw evidence that I had become inconsistent again.

I rarely asked what had changed before my behaviour changed. I didn't look at what life was asking from me, what I was carrying emotionally, what I was asking from myself physically or how much of what I had available was already being used elsewhere.

So I kept reaching the same conclusion.

I needed to try harder.

Now I had more possibilities to consider.

Sometimes I might need to support myself better.

Sometimes I might need to protect what I had.

Sometimes there might be something unnecessarily draining me that I could change.

Sometimes life might simply be asking more from me for a while, and the most useful thing I could do was adapt rather than disappear from my own priorities completely.

And sometimes, if I was being completely truthful with myself, I might have enough available and still need to take responsibility for making the choice.

Capacity didn't remove my responsibility.

It helped me understand how to take responsibility more accurately.

Because responsibility isn't only forcing yourself to keep doing exactly what you originally planned regardless of what changes around you. But neither is it abandoning what matters every time doing it becomes uncomfortable.

Sometimes responsibility is recognising that something has changed and adapting appropriately.

Sometimes it's changing something that is unnecessarily draining you.

Sometimes it's asking for support, setting a boundary or taking better care of the physical resources you're relying on.

And sometimes responsibility is simply doing the thing you know supports you even though, in that particular moment, you'd rather not.

That is why I don't want capacity to become another label you place over your behaviour.

I want it to become another part of the information you use to decide how to respond.

And I think that's where capacity changes the conversation around weight loss so significantly.

It gives us another way to understand why the same woman, with the same knowledge and sometimes even the same plan, can find implementation relatively manageable at one point and incredibly difficult at another.

It gives us somewhere to look before we automatically label that change as laziness, lack of discipline, inconsistency or failure.

But it also leaves the woman herself in the picture as somebody with agency, choices and responsibility for what she does with what she has available.

We don't need to choose between compassion and accountability.

There is room for both.

So if there is one question I want you to carry forward from this part of the Guide, it is still the simplest one.

"What can I do with what I have available today?"

Not what should I be able to do.

Not what could I do when life was different.

Not what somebody else appears able to do.

What can I do with what I have available today?

And then be honest with yourself about the answer.

Because capacity changes.

Your response can change with it.

Your accountability remains.

And your goal doesn't have to disappear in the process.

Which brings us to the final thing I want to help you do before we bring this Guide to a close.

Because you now have a very different picture of what may have been happening throughout your weight-loss history.

You understand more about implementation.

You can recognise patterns that may have been hiding in the space between losing weight and regaining it.

You've looked at beliefs, emotional weight and bracing. And now you can see how your capacity may have been influencing your ability to keep doing the things that supported your weight loss too.

You can understand all of that today.

But some of the conclusions you reached about yourself were formed long before you had any of this information.

And understanding your history differently now doesn't necessarily mean the emotional weight of those old conclusions immediately disappears with it.

So before I ask you to look at the whole picture one final time, I want to give you an opportunity to look back at your history through what you understand now.

Not so we can change what happened.

But so that what happened doesn't have to keep meaning the same thing about you.

That's where your Regain Reset begins.