My battle with weight started for me in my young teens. My body was different to all the other girls at school. I felt like a big, hulking elephant next to them. Which was confirmed, when my mum took me to Weight Watchers.

If I could have lose weight and kept it off, I would have.

Over the years I’ve tried numerous diets and I’ve even made up extremely restricted ones of my own! And although every time I always put the weight back on and more, I kept trying to lose weight again and again…

I kept trying to hate myself thin.

I remember going to bed hungry and imagining what I would eat if I could. I thought about food obsessively. The only way I could stick enough to a diet, between my emotional eating and binges, was to hate myself thin. I would never ever have talked to somebody else like I talked to myself. I said appalling, hateful things to myself to get myself to stick to a diet at all.

I compared the size and shape of my body to everyone else’s. I felt like a big fat loser who couldn’t keep the weight off.

Apparently, all I needed was willpower.

This made me feel awful and lacking as a human being. There must be something fundamentally wrong with me.

I finally reached the point where diets seemed completely pointless to me. So I decided to stop dieting and weighing myself. Then each year I put on more and more weight. My clothes sizes kept going up and up and up and up and up…

I was shocked at how much I weighed.

In February 2018 I was weighed by the NHS. Then a bit later that year I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. My GP prescribed; losing weight; eating healthily; and living a healthy lifestyle. I was petrified of the possible consequences of having type 2 diabetes. I had to lose and keep the excess weight off. But this had been impossible for me to do.

How was I going to do that? Was this even possible for me? Was I doomed to suffer with weight related health issues as long as I lived?

Luckily for me, previously, I’d had the opportunity to attend a practitioner training course. Where I learnt a tool, which addresses what is underlying a problem/issue.

Fast forward to 2018. As part of my doctor’s prescription he offered me 12 weeks free at a slimming club. I was desperate to lose weight, so I joined. But I knew even IF I did lose weight, a weight loss diet alone wasn’t going to keep the weight off for me, it never had before. I needed to address what was underlying my weight issues and my relationship with food. And I now had this tool to do so.

I went down about seven clothe sizes.

In about a year and 4 months I lost over 5 stone (over 70 pounds, over 31.5 kilos).

Previously I’d had this need to eat bread every day for one of my meals. The desire, the need had been so strong within me that I hadn’t been able to ignore it. Suddenly I realised I hadn’t eaten bread for weeks, and I had absolutely no desire to go out, buy, and eat bread.

I found I also had similar experiences with other foods, and with white wine.

It didn't take any willpower.

Being on my healthier eating plan, became the norm for me. It didn’t take any will power, or harsh and hateful words to myself to eat this way.

I even had two major life events happen during the time I was working on losing this weight. But neither of them derailed me from my healthier way of eating, like they would have certainly done in the past.

But there was one major life event which did temporarily derail me after I’d lost my weight. My mum died over the Christmas holidays. I felt overwhelmed with seemingly never-ending grief. So I turned to my old familiar friends of food, white wine and TV. In under 2 months, I'd put on 26 pounds. But unlike before, when my clothes started to feel too tight, instead of simply buying a bigger size, I returned to my healthier way of eating. And I was surprised at the relief I felt. I lost the extra weight, and my clothes felt comfortable and no longer too tight.

I knew after this experience that I wanted a little bit extra in my toolkit. Luckily, I was led to taking training in specialist weight loss techniques. As part of this training, I received coaching myself. Which helped me to work through my blind spots. And this time when my best friend died, my food experience was different. My grief only pushed my buttons to emotionally eat a small percentage of the time. I only emotionally overate a bit of chocolate and I only did this 1.3% of the time. And with white wine it was only 0.01% of the time.

And now it is my deep honour and joy to help other women, so they are able to lose the weight they desire and maintain it.

My qualifications

• EFT practitioner certification

• Tapping for weight loss coach certification

• Clinical EFT and energy psychology certification

• Master level 3 EFT certification