Like a lot of women my age, my relationship with my body started on shaky ground.

Growing up, the message I absorbed, from the world around me, from comparisons I couldn't escape, from comments that were never meant to cut as deeply as they did, was that my body wasn't quite right. That I was too short, too curvy, too much of the wrong things and not enough of the right ones. I internalised all of it completely, and it shaped how I saw myself for years.

It didn't help that I was born in the 80s and grew up in the 90s, when Nicole Richie was considered the fat one. The era worshipped an ultra-thin, waifish ideal, heroin chic, thigh gaps, emaciated frames held up as the pinnacle of beauty. It was a strange and damaging time to be a teenage girl with curves, and like many of my generation, I absorbed those messages completely without ever questioning them.

I wasn't a passive victim of it though. I made choices, I formed beliefs, and I let those beliefs run the show for far longer than I should have. The obsession with being skinny was mine, even if the world around me handed me the blueprint for it.

Sound Familiar?

I stepped on the scale. I'd gained a kilo. After a week of surviving off what a toddler would consider a generous portion, I had somehow gained weight. I'd even made it to the gym. I'd done my daily quota of sit-ups. And my stomach still wasn't flat and the scale tipped in the wrong direction.

How is this even possible?

That moment wasn't a one-off. It was a recurring nightmare I lived through for years. Serial dieting. Starvation plans. Money spent on programmes and fat-loss pills that promised everything and delivered nothing. No matter what I tried, my body just would not change.

Was my metabolism broken? Did I have bad genetics? Was my willpower simply not strong enough?

The quick-fix diets that had worked before stopped working. I was moody and hungry from Monday to Thursday, then fat and guilty from Friday to Sunday as I binged on everything I'd denied myself, the rising numbers on the scale feeding a cycle of self-loathing that just kept spinning.

All I wanted was to look lean, defined and strong. Instead I felt soft, unhappy, and deeply uncomfortable in my own skin. And it wasn't for lack of effort. I was trying constantly. I was just trying the wrong things.

The Cycle I Couldn't Break

Poor self-confidence and toxic relationships pushed me further into emotional eating. I'd eat, hate myself for it, and starve myself in response, which would lead to ravenous hunger, bingeing, more self-hatred, and more weight gain. A textbook restrict-binge cycle I couldn't see my way out of. At my lowest points I tried laxatives and diet pills, things I'm not proud of, but that paint an honest picture of just how desperate and lost I felt.

Then in my early twenties, at my heaviest, 76kg at 5'2", something shifted. I joined a slimming clinic: very low calorie, low carb, EMS sessions four days a week, followed by 30 minutes of cardio. And it worked.

I thought it was a miracle programme. I now know it worked because I was in a calorie deficit. That's it. But at the time I didn't understand why, which meant I had no real tools, just a method I was dependent on and couldn't replicate on my own.

I kept the weight off for a few years, largely by listening to hunger cues and staying vaguely aware that I couldn't eat whatever I wanted. It wasn't a system. It was luck, more than anything.

Pregnancy, Emigration & Starting Over. Again.

Then came my first pregnancy, and I took eating for two extremely literally. I gained 20kg, convinced that breastfeeding would melt it off. It didn't. We'd always planned a small age gap between our daughters, so I didn't push too hard, and fell pregnant again not long after my eldest turned one. Another 20kg.

This time I was serious. I went back to the slimming clinic, but it didn't work as well. So I switched to two protein shakes a day and a small dinner, waking at 5am for home HIIT workouts before my husband left for work. It worked, I lost all the baby weight, and more. I was thrilled.

It didn't last.

When my youngest was two, we emigrated from South Africa to the UK. The weather, the emotional upheaval, and a whole world of food I'd never had access to before slowly undid the progress. Not dramatically, but enough that I didn't feel like myself.

So I started running.

The Running Years (Or: Why Cardio Alone Is a Lie)

Running was a revelation, especially being able to do it safely, something I'd never really had in Johannesburg. It was brilliant for my mental health. But the weight wasn't shifting the way I'd expected, so I set myself a bigger goal: a marathon. Surely after that I'd have the lean, toned legs I'd always wanted.

I gained weight during marathon training.

More running meant I was constantly hungry. And since I was running so much, I reasoned I couldn't possibly put on weight by eating more. I was very wrong.

I loved the challenge of it though, and I completed London. Then I signed up for an ultramarathon, because if a marathon hadn't done it, surely double the distance would. I did lose weight this time, but even after running a double marathon I still didn't have those toned legs. I understand now exactly why: toned means muscle. And all that endurance work without any resistance training, combined with being chronically underfuelled, meant my body was burning through muscle for energy. I was shrinking the wrong way.

Running did reignite something important, though. I'd played hockey at school and been genuinely good at it, but had stopped when I changed schools in my final year. Nothing since had hooked me quite like this. I trained as a Running Group Leader through England Athletics, built my own group helping women go from sedentary to 5K, and wrote training plans for women working towards 10K, half marathon and full marathon distances. I was proud of every bit of it.

Covid took it all away. My once busy weekly running group disintegrated almost overnight, replaced with cautious solo ventures outside, and the community I had built simply vanished.

Every Diet Under the Sun

While the world was locked down I discovered keto. I went all in, no carbs for over a year. The weight fell off dramatically and I got down to 52kg. I now know exactly why: extreme running combined with a ketogenic diet put me in a severe calorie deficit. It wasn't the keto. It was never the keto. But I didn't know that yet.

I pushed further, trying carnivore for a couple of months, thinking I could eat as much as I wanted. I was wrong again. Calories crept up, weight started returning. Eventually the total absence of carbs caught up with me badly. My skin deteriorated, my hair started falling out, my hormones tanked, and I felt genuinely terrible in a way that went far beyond just the numbers on the scale.

So I swung completely the other way and went plant-based for six months.

That made me feel worse.

Slimming clinic. Protein shakes. Marathon training. Keto. Carnivore. Plant-based. When I say I tried every diet trend under the sun, I am not exaggerating. And every single time, the result was the same: temporary at best, miserable throughout, and completely unsustainable.

The Lightbulb Moment

Around this time I picked up an injury, nothing to do with running ironically, that stopped me training entirely. I decided to use the time to try strength training, to support my recovery and reduce the chances of future injuries.

I was terrified. I had no idea where to start. So I found a local women's weightlifting group and went along. I was hooked from the very first session. One session a week became four. The gym owner, a professional bodybuilder, noticed how hard I worked and when he found out I was a running coach, suggested I consider training as a Personal Trainer.

So I did.

And that's when everything finally clicked.

A lightbulb went off, a completely new way of understanding what I'd been doing wrong for over two decades. Through my CPT course I properly learned about nutrition for the first time. Not diet rules. Not food lists. The actual science of how the body works, how food is composed, and most importantly, why every diet I'd ever tried had either worked or failed.

I finally understood the why and the how of every single failed attempt. In fact, so many of the things I'd been doing with the best of intentions had actively been working against me.

It all came down to something almost frustratingly simple. Fat loss is like maths. There is a formula, a formula that produces predictable, repeatable results. And once you understand it, you realise you don't need god-like willpower, or a life of dry chicken salads, or a pharmacy full of supplements. You just need to understand what actually counts.

No fancy foods. No BS. Just the fundamentals that most of us have been distracted away from by decades of diet culture noise.

I also finally understood why running had never given me the body I wanted, and why lifting weights would. Toned means muscle. You cannot build muscle if you're chronically underfuelled and doing nothing but cardio. I had been working so hard, for so long, in entirely the wrong direction.

After I qualified I set up my own 1:1 personal training business working exclusively with women, and became a coach for the same weightlifting group that had first changed the course of my own journey.

But something kept nagging at me.

The women I trained, both 1:1 and in the group, were working hard. They were getting stronger. They felt better. But those who wanted fat loss were still battling with that piece of the puzzle. I could hand them an eating plan, and some would follow it for a while, but an eating plan you can only stick to for so long will never produce the lasting results you're after. I didn't want to give women a temporary fix. I wanted to show them the formula so that they could apply it themselves, for life, without needing me standing over them telling them what to eat.

So I went back to studying.

I completed my Level 4 Nutrition qualification through RSPH and then my Level 5 in Advanced Nutrient Metabolism. I wanted to have the depth of knowledge to do more than help women follow a diet. I wanted to help them genuinely understand their bodies, change their relationship with food, and build a way of living that is both sustainable and, crucially, something they actually enjoy.

Where I Am Now

I have stopped trying to be skinny.

I am focused on being strong, well-fuelled, and healthy instead.

Ironically, and I genuinely mean this, I now have a better body than I have ever had in my life. I'm stronger, healthier, and more at peace in my own skin than at any point I can remember. Including when I was at my lowest weight.

I went through years of confusion, self-loathing, failed diets, obsessive behaviour, and genuinely harmful approaches to my body so that I could finally understand what actually works.

I don't want anyone else to take the long way round.

That is why I do what I do.