It’s about gaining health, not just losing weight

If social media feeds, newspaper supplements, and magazines are anything to go by, the thing we want the most is to be thin.

This is particularly true for women who have borne the brunt of the weight loss narrative for decades, but men are catching up.

According to these sources of information, I won’t be happy unless I fit into smaller-sized jeans, no one will love me unless I’m thin, people will judge me and think I’m lazy and I’ll have no use in the workplace because I can’t be overweight and intelligent.

Understandably, this has led to a multi-million-pound industry of companies promising they can make you thin - the faster the better, because no one wants to wait.

We’ve all grown so used to this messaging that we barely bat an eyelid when a company launches a new product - promising weight loss, fast.  Even if what they are offering to do so is a mixture of starvation and dubious meal replacement products and supplements to do so.  The power of ‘being thin’ is enormous.

But I’m here to make a slightly controversial statement - who cares how much you weigh?  No one is putting on their gravestone ‘She/he finally got to target weight, and maintained it’.

Let’s buck the trend, and put the focus back on what matters.

Let’s enjoy our lives, in the best health we can. 

Weight loss is a side effect of improving your metabolic health - and a good one at that!  But if we stopped giving it so much air time we could focus on the things that matter instead like bone density, strong muscles, and feeling good.  

Building good foundations for your health will pay dividends further down the line.

I’m not immune to this - I grew up with ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’.  I’ve been on my share of restricted diets - and I’ve yo-yo’d the weight back on too.

However, something radical changed for me that led me to metabolic health, which I discovered underpins everything.

After having my second child, I found myself 3 and half a stone heavier than ever. I felt miserable, not just because I looked different, but I was tired, I had reflux and I was out of breath going up the stairs. I got there by using food as both comfort and reward.  

I knew I needed to lose weight, but this time I had a different focus.  I wanted to keep up with my children and model a healthy lifestyle for them.  It had to be sustainable - there was far too much going on in our house for me to be spending time weighing stuff out.  It couldn’t be too restrictive - if I didn’t eat certain foods, my children would ask ‘Why doesn’t Mummy have that?’ and I couldn’t just say I was allergic to everything!

For the first time, I decided I wouldn’t choose a target weight.  I didn’t want to fail to meet a certain target, I would lose as much weight as I could so that I felt well and was able to keep up with the children.

If you are reading this now, you have the benefit of knowing what I didn’t then - I changed my mindset.  Weight wasn’t the most important factor any longer, health was.  I realised that absolutely no one cared how much I weighed or what size clothes I wore.  The only reason anyone would ever need to know is if I had to have medication prescribed based on weight, and seeing as that would be quite a rare scenario I decided it didn’t matter.

I started my research.  I learned about how my body responds to food, and what foods were best.  I realised my muscles were of vital importance and that weight training wasn’t going to turn me into a bodybuilder, but rather an efficient fuel-burning machine.  I looked further ahead than just the next few weeks and saw that I would be training my body for later life.  Flexibility, independence, mobility, fewer injuries, and most importantly being strong and healthy for the demands of my family life.

Over the next year, I lost that 3 ½ stone, and a little bit more.  I added resistance exercises, better quality food, managed my stress, and prioritised sleep.  The better I felt, the more I could do.  I saw opportunities to move my body as positive steps towards my healthy living goal and walked as much as I could.

Along the way, I learned more and more about metabolic health.  This inspired not only my transformation but also began to help me in my professional life as I thought about patients through this lens. I realised that what I had learned could benefit more than just me.  

As a society we’ve been concentrating on our weight for so long and told that this is the way to better health, but in reality this mostly fails.  And when we do, we’re told to just repeat the same thing - a great business plan for the slimming industry, but not so good for the individual!

This was just the start of a fascination with metabolic health, finding a work-family balance and using lifestyle interventions to help people feel so much better.

I am still learning.  I continue to add in new habits to improve my health, but weight loss is no longer the ‘big thing’ it used to be.  I haven’t weighed myself in years, and have no plans to either.  My main focus now is continuing to optimise and maintain my metabolic health so I can live well and help others to feel as good as I do!