For 30 years I was either on a diet, thinking about starting a diet or feeling guilty about not being on a diet, and for most of those same 30 years, I was overweight.
I navigated the world acutely aware of what I should be eating and how I should be exercising, trying to avoid 'bad’ foods while choosing only the ‘good’ ones and often counting some metric or other while cutting out an entire food group, exhausting myself on a stationary bike and cancelling plans last minute to avoid any temptations that might cause me to eat or drink more than I wanted.
Along the way, I became literate in every diet, fitness fad and unhealthy practice that someone somewhere had cited as being the thing that had ‘made the weight fall off’ them.
It took me a while to realise that all these diet and fitness truths I held onto and hoped would work were not only lies but often contradicted each other. No wonder I was in a cycle of yo-yo dieting, achieving some success to only fail in the long term.
The ugly truth is, there are a lot of lies out there that look and sound convincing but the key to weight loss, certainly in my case, was to forget everything I thought was true and start from the beginning.
These are the lies I unlearned and the truths I discovered to finally lose weight and keep it off…