I suspect, sadly, that the journey I’ve been on when it comes to my relationship with food, my body, and exercise, is not unique. I grew up, like many others, as the self-conscious fat kid. Always the heaviest kid in the room, my childhood memories are tinged with the red-hot embarrassment of being obviously different and (as was made abundantly clear to me by the adults and the media in my life) different in a bad way. I knew, vaguely, that people got fat by eating too much, but I didn’t think that could be true for me. After all, I was eating what I was being given by the adults in my life. I thought there must be something about my genetic makeup that just meant I was destined to be bigger than others.
At the beach with a childhood friend - Thailand, 2004
As I grew from child to teenager, and as my mum steered me along what felt like a relentless road of fad diets and exercise programs that never seemed to help shift the weight, this sense of being born fat began to set in. By the time I left my childhood home for university, I armed myself against the self-consciousness I felt around my weight with the belief that I was just meant to be this way. I needed to accept this as my fate and just learn to love myself.
So, all through university, I embarked on a journey of self-love. I consumed body positive media and tried to embrace my body for what it was. I told myself that I was beautiful, worthwhile, and important, and all of the people who had criticised me for my weight were just closed-minded bigots. By the time I graduated, I had built myself a (very shaky) foundation of self-confidence. I had convinced myself that I didn’t care about my weight. After all, I was healthy.
Cue the Depression Era. Navigating the real world after university was incredibly difficult. I spent the first 2 years after graduation spiraling into a deep depression. I sought comfort in food like never before (I now recognise this as the beginning of my binge eating disorder) and I began to size out of my clothes. I found myself constantly thinking of food - not because I was hungry but because I wanted a little hit of dopamine to help get me through the day. I was stuck in a loop of panicking about my weight gain and then convincing myself that the weight gain wasn’t an issue. I was still healthy…Well, perhaps not healthy, but I wasn’t unhealthy. I didn’t have any concerning medical issues, after all. A holiday to visit my family in Spain quickly shattered that belief.
On that holiday, I began to experience some obvious adverse effects to being overweight. Things beyond just feeling uncomfortable or self-conscious. On a very gentle hike with my dad, brother, and girlfriend at the time, I could feel my heart pounding in my chest and I had to stop often to catch my breath. It was a miracle I was able to complete the hike. On another occasion, my girlfriend and I were walking from the beach back to the house. This 10 - 15min walk felt almost impossible because, for the first time, I experienced searingly painful shin splints and had to pause every couple of minutes to rest. Out of embarrassment, I told my girlfriend I had to stop because my flip-flops were giving me blisters. Looking back, these moments should have been my wake-up call, but they were not. What really shook me to my core was coming back home from the holiday, looking through our photos, and realising that I couldn’t recognise my own face. I took a deep breath, stepped on my flatmate’s bathroom scale, and saw that I was now 112kg (17.6 stone). The heaviest I had ever weighed. I cried. I decided I needed to do something about it.
Me at my highest weight, taken at the end of a hike - Spain, 2016
I took the time to properly research weight loss. I knew fad diets weren’t going to work, I had tried a lifetime’s worth of them already. I also knew that I couldn’t commit to any extreme exercise programs. I could barely walk for more than 10mins without experiencing intense pain, let alone get through 30min HIIT workouts. Eventually, I stumbled across calorie counting. CICO (calories in calories out) made sense to me. I could eat whatever I wanted and so long as I didn’t eat more energy than I expended, I’d lose weight. Simple. I downloaded MyFitnessPal, an app to help me track my food, count my calories, and record my weight, and tried sticking to the app’s recommended caloric intake for the week. By the end of the week, I stepped back on the scale and realised I’d lost 0.5kg, the exact amount the app had predicted I would lose. I was astounded. Perhaps this would work for me. Perhaps I wasn’t destined to be fat after all.
3 years of calorie counting, fixing my relationship with food, and working on my binge eating resulted in a 45kg (7 stone) weight loss. I felt amazing. I could now walk for hours without pain, and although I still struggled with binge eating (it took me several more years and a lot of therapy to overcome this), food didn’t have the same control over me as it once did. I could now recognise my fullness and hunger cues and I had a strong grasp of how I should eat in order to feel at my best. Then, I began to exercise consistently. I completed the couch to 5k program and took up running regularly. I also started lifting weights and began measuring my success not by how little I weighed on the bathroom scales, but by how much I could lift or how far I could run. I felt empowered, strong, and so incredibly proud of what my body could do. For the first time in my life, I felt truly happy and content with myself, the way I looked, and how I could perform.
Taken after a long day of water sports, something I could never have done at my highest weight - Spain, 2022
This sense of empowerment and pride is what I want to pass on to my clients and is what motivated me to become a personal trainer and weight loss coach in the first place. I want to help those who have struggled in the same ways I have because I know what the journey is like and I know how much better you can feel.
If you are struggling with your weight, know that it doesn’t have to be like this forever. You can feel stronger, healthier, and happier and, if you want me to, I can help you on your journey. It won’t require eating obscenely small amounts of food, or completely cutting out carbs, and you won’t be forced to exercise to the point of exhaustion. We’ll work on making small changes consistently so that, little by little, you’ll build healthy habits that snowball into a healthy lifestyle.