In September last year, an insurance nurse came to weigh me as part of a routine health check. I was working as a contractor at the time, so this sort of visit was normal. What was not normal was the number she wrote down.
I had built a whole story about my body without ever checking it against the facts. I went to the gym. I used the spa. I told myself I was simply big boned, naturally a size fourteen, doing fine. The number on that form said otherwise, and it landed the way a fact lands when you have spent years avoiding it. I did not want to write it down here either. I was over two hundred pounds.
Here is the part I did not expect. The truth underneath the gym visits was a pattern, not a failure. I would train hard, then go home and bake a whole cake and eat it over three or four days. I would recreate cocktails and pair them with big meals. I was coming out of the back end of a divorce, frightened about surviving on my own, and food and television were how I felt safe and held at the end of a day. None of that showed up on a fitness tracker.
As a psychotherapist, I could explain this pattern in a client in about thirty seconds. In myself, it took a nurse with a clipboard.
What actually changed was not a diet. I lost close to five stone in under four months, and kept going after that, but the eating style itself was never really the lever. What moved things was understanding why I was reaching for food in the first place, what it was standing in for, and what I actually needed instead. Once I could see the pattern, I stopped needing the cake to solve a problem the cake was never going to solve.
These days I ask myself one honest question before I eat, rather than a list of rules. Not is this allowed, not have I been good today, just this. How is this food actually going to help me right now. Sometimes the answer is that it will, and I eat it and enjoy it. Sometimes the answer is that I am not actually hungry, I am lonely, or tired, or avoiding something, and the food was never going to touch that. Either way, I get to choose on purpose instead of on autopilot.
If any of this sounds familiar, the pattern you are living probably has a name and a shape, and it is worth knowing what it is before you try to fix it. I built a short quiz that maps this out in a few minutes. It is free, and it is the same starting point I would use with a client.
Take the Food Attachment Quiz at https://disreeshaw.uk/quiz,