Okay, the part about the sky isn’t true. But the rest of it stands.

Next thing I know, I’m faced with a promoted tweet from none other than Slim Fast.

Slim Fast.

Now, I did hurl out a bit of a snarky tweet in response, and then let it go. Then, as I listened to the radio in the shower, I heard an ad for a cosmetic surgery business telling me I could get the body I want today. Then, some old bloke told me to “take a chill-pill” before calling me “babe.” And then, I went on Twitter again, to the same promoted tweet.

And that’s when I got mad. So I’m sorry if we’re re-hashing old ground, and I’m sorry if this post isn’t my most tidy or grammatically correct, but y’all know how I get when I’m pissed off. Today, I am pissed off. Like this.

So, to Slim Fast: I have a problem with you.

Actually, I have numerous problems with you. Let’s start with the product in question: the 3-2-1 7 Day Plan. It’s built around the idea that you can have three snacks, two shakes or meal bars, and one balanced meal.

I think you’re already going down the wrong track when you think a healthy way to live can be structured around one balanced meal a day. That’s crap, and I don’t care what your nutritionist Fiona (apparently without a surname) has to say about it.

This is no real way to live. Here’s what one day looks like:

Snacks – Chocolate Snack Bar, 1 Orange, Sour Cream and Chive Pretzel Snack Bag

Meal Replacements – Chocolate Crunch Meal Bar, Chocolate Flavour Shake

Balanced Meal – Quick Fish Pie

They’re selling it on the fact that “you get to eat six times a day!” idea, although you’ll note that they’re very, very tiny eats indeed. And also, if I were only eating six things over the course of a day, and three of them were chocolate flavoured – and when I say chocolate flavoured, I mean artificial-kinda-gross-chocolate-flavoured – I’d be pretty unimpressed. Unless it was Easter. I mean, I love chocolate like a friend – but that’s not how you want to survive.

Anyway, let’s look at that again, with a good old fashioned ingredients – or rather, “ingredients” – list attached:

Snacks

Chocolate Snack Bar (Rice Crispies (23%) [Rice Flour, Sugar, Cocoa Powder, Salt, Rapeseed oil, Emulsifier (Soya Lecithin)], Plain Chocolate (22%) [Sugar, Cocoa Mass, Cocoa Butter, Emulsifier (Soya Lecithin), Vanilla Extract], Chocolate Biscuits (11%) [Wheat Flour, Sugar, Vegetable Fat, Cocoa Powder, Malt Blend (Glucose Syrup, Barley Syrup, Malt Extract), Skimmed Milk Powder, Salt, Flavourings], Glucose Syrup, Oligofructose Syrup, Bulking Agent (Polydextrose), Sweetened Skimmed Condensed Milk (Skimmed Milk, Sugar), Sugar, Humectant (Glycerol), Cocoa Powder (3%), Sunflower Oil, Flavourings, Emulsifier (Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids) MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF EGG, PEANUTS AND TREE NUTS.)

1 Orange (just an orange)

Chive Pretzel Snack Bag: (Wheat Flour, Dried Potato, Vegetable Oil, Salt, Dextrose, Onion Powder, Sugar, Yeast Extract, Modified Maize Starch, Sour Cream Powder (0.5%), Whey Powder (from milk), Flavouring, Garlic Powder, Citric Acid, Parsley, Chive Extract, Colour (Paprika Extract) MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF SOYA.)

Meal Replacements

Chocolate Crunch Meal Bar: (Soya Nuggets (23%) (Isolated Soya Protein), Rice Crispies (12%) [Rice Flour, Sugar, Cocoa Powder, Salt, Rapseed Oil, Emulsifier (Soya Lecithin)], Glucose Syrup, Milk Chocolate (10%) [Sugar, Cocoa Butter, Cocoas Mass, Skimmed Milk Powder, Lactose, Whey Powder, Milk Fat, Emulsifiers (Soya Lecithin, Polyglycerol Polyricinoleate), Vanilla Extract], Bulking Agent (Polydetrose), Oligofructose Syrup, Humectant (Glycerol), Sweetened Skimmed Condensed Milk (Skimmed Milk, Sugar), Vitamins and Minerals (Dipotassium Phosphate, Calcium Carbonate, Vitamin C, Magnesium Oxide, Niacin, Ferric Pyrophosphate, Vitamin E, Zinc Oxide, Pantothenic Acid, Vitamin B6, Riboflavin, Thiamin, Vitamin A, Copper Carbonate, Folic Acid, Potassium Iodide, Biotin, Vitamin D, Vitamin B12.), Milk Chocolate chips(3%) [Sugar, Whole Milk Powder, Cocoa Butter, Cocoa Mass, Whey Powder, Skimmed Milk Powder, Emulsifier (Soya Lecithin), Vanilla Extract], Sunflower Oil, Sugar, Reduced Fat Plain Chocolate Powder (1%) [Sugar, Cocoa Mass, Fat Reduced Cocoa Powder, Emulsifier (Soya Lecithin), Vanilla Extract], Flavouring, Emulsifier (Mono-and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids), Salt, Lactose. MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF GLUTEN, EGG AND TREE NUTS.)

Chocolate Flavour Shake: (Skimmed Milk (78%), Water, Milk Proteins, Cocoa Powder (1.2%), Vegetable Oil, Sugar, Stabilisers (Cellulose, Cellulose Gum, Dipotassium Phosphate, Carrageenan), Thickener (Gum Arabic), Maltodextrin, Emulsifiers (Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids), Vitamins and Minerals (Potassium Chloride, Sodium Carbonate, Magnesium Hydroxide, Vitamin C, Sodium Chloride, Zinc Gluconate, Vitamin E, Ferric Pyrophosphate, Niacin, Sodium Selenite, Copper Gluconate, Pantothenic Acid, Manganese Sulphate, Vitamin A, Vitamin B6, Beta Carotene, Thiamin, Vitamin D, Vitamin B12, Riboflavin, Folic Acid, Biotin, Potassium Iodate.), Sweeteners (Sucralose, Acesulfame-K), Flavourings, Antioxidant (Ascorbic Acid).

Balanced Meal

Quick Fish Pie: Skimmed milk, plain flour, butter, spring onions, salmon in brine, salt and pepper, French bread slices, finely grated mature cheese.

I’m not going to pick a fight with the balanced meal, although it sounds pretty god damn boring to me – but the rest of it? Heck, that does not qualify as real food – and it certainly doesn’t sound like it’s going to do you any good. There are a lot of chemicals you’ll find above that I’ve seen before, when I listed the ingredients in a Happy Meal last Halloween – so it’s still the same old processed crap that contributed to weight gain in the first place.

It’s just… It’s not food.

For comparison, here’s what I ate yesterday:

Breakfast: Smoked mackerel and poached eggs with fresh basil, red peppers and spinach.

Lunch: Salmon fillet (marinaded in lemon and black pepper), with red onion, fresh peppers, jalapenos, tomato, cucumber, spinach, hazelnuts and avocado, with balsamic vinegar.

Dinner: Steak with asparagus, mushrooms and spring onion with avocado and fresh red chillies.

Snacks: Apple, brazil nuts.

I don’t need an ingredient list, because I’m eating things composed of actual food. That’s a great start. And it’s all good, tasty stuff. I am not going hungry, and I’m eating six times a day. GO ME.

So that’s the first part of my issue with Slim Fast. My second issue, however, is with the fact that Slim Fast – or any other unsustainable, extreme diet – will never help you to lose weight and keep it off. Unless, that is, you plan to spend the rest of your life eating meal replacement shakes and going hungry. Although because your metabolism will adapt pretty quickly, the initial weight loss won’t last long anyway – so soon enough, you’ll plateau.

Once you’ve plateaued, you’ll either have to further restrict your calorie intake, or you’ll get disheartened and go back to eating the same stuff you were before – processed foods, all calorie-dense and nutrient-poor – and you’ll gain the weight back with interest. 

All you’ve done is screwed up your metabolism, your food habits, and your self-confidence. You’ve failed at a task that the marketing tells you is “simple” and “easy.” According to the diet industry, you suck.

And that’s what the diet industry is built upon. If there was one diet that was easy, and did work, they’d have gone out of business already, and we’d all be Rihanna-a-likes by now.

No: Slim Fast and their ilk can, quite frankly, shove their seven day diets, their quick fixes, and their soul-destroying bullshit, where that big ol’ sun refuses to shine.

Please guys: don’t fall for this shit. Make a real change to your life by learning how to eat real food, to exercise, to enjoy your life as much as you deserve to. Make a permanent change by realising that you can be a success; you can be happy; and you can be well, just so long as you believe in yourself.

And now, I’m going to go back to enjoying my day off. Over and out.

As I’ve said over and over again, slow and steady has been the name of the game for yours truly. It’s taken a long, long time to shift the weight, and it’s been full of plateaus, patches where I’ve been too busy (read: drunk) to focus on my weight, and even the odd setback here and there.

I’ve moved jobs twice in the time since I started. I’ve called six different places home. And I’ve been a member of four different gyms. In other words, life has been going on at a pretty swift pace, and I’ve slowly, gradually shaved off over 140lbs. Ten stone. 63.6 kilos, one by one. Half by half, in fact.

But because of that, it’s been a long time since I’ve felt like anything could surprise me – except, that is, my ability to pull weird faces in photos. Still amazed at that. But I know it takes time; I know there will be patches where it works and patches where it doesn’t; and I know that if I do the right thing, most of the time, eventually my body will do the right thing, because my body is pretty smart. I trust it implicitly. We’re cool now.

So I was very, very surprised to find myself sitting on a train at lunchtime today feeling a bit emotional.

Okay, screw emotional. I full on welled-up and had to hide behind my coffee so that the weird guy with one lens missing from his sunglasses – which he was wearing even though it was raining – wouldn’t notice and offer me some kind of creepy hug.

Now, it’s been a bit of an emotional week anyway, and I blame you guys. I had a bunch of emails on Monday from readers who, between them, had lost over 400lbs. That stuff gets me all choked up and grateful – so much so that I ended up firing this article over to the lovely guys at MindBodyGreen. You people are all incredible, and I salute you. Y’all are turning me into a frayed little spark of emotion, but it’s awesome, so keep that inspiration coming. I also had the chance to have a really good catch up with Matt, who I’ve missed a lot since I moved – so all in all, it’s been a funny old week.

Anyway, by today I figured I was just about back to normal service on the emotions front (and I’ll add that I am not hormonal. You’d know if I was, because that has more of an Oscar the Grouch effect on my emotional state – so you’d be able to identify me by my trash can) and headed out for a Friday morning workout with the lovely Tom Dyer.

Each time I do one of those sessions, I look forward to the next even more. Yes, when I leave I walk like Bambi with a drinking problem, and yes, I do find blow drying my hair near enough impossible afterwards – but it’s hella fun. I can’t believe I’m saying it, but it would appear that I’m falling in love with this whole fitness thing.

As the girl who always, always staggered around at the back in P.E. – the girl who would do anything for a sick note, in order to avoid being the last to finish in track yet another mortifying time – and the girl who couldn’t walk at 21 years old, this is big bloody news… But it’s not what got to me today.

No, what completely threw me today was one single, solitary deadlift.

Let me set the scene. Last time, I was lifting 100lbs. Today, I lifted 110, and I joked – joked – that I’d like to one day lift that 140lbs I’ve now lost. But y’know, that would be impossible at the moment… Right? It was a joke… Right?

Of course, one day I will learn that these hardcore awesome fitness people don’t seem to have the word “impossible” in their vocabulary, which I can only speculate must make for some downright dangerous drinking games and bad driving. Probably. So the next thing I knew, I was addressing the bar.

No, not the fun kind of bar. Me addressing that kind of bar would not be news to anyone (although since I’ve been in training, not a single drop of alcohol has touched these lips. Wonders may never cease.) I mean the butt-kickingly scary, Rocky-Rambo masculine kind of bar – with that 140lbs on it.

And I did it. I lifted that big ol’ weight, and Tom filmed it, for your viewing pleasure and entertainment:

As you can see, in the moment, I was concentrating too hard to get emotional about it. And afterwards, I was just knackered – so again, nothing doing. I showered, stomped to the office, ticked a few things off the to-do list, and then stomped back out to catch the train for a site visit.

I sat on the train, got myself a coffee, and stopped. Just stopped. That’s it. And the next thing I knew, I was getting all emotional on public transport, like the grown-up professional woman that I am. Turns out this Dyer fella isn’t just giving me an external makeover – this training is emotional, too.

Because I never realised how much weight I was carrying, physically. I have no idea how I coped with that. In fact, I didn’t cope. I couldn’t walk. I mean, I am completely behind people being any size or weight they want to be, so long as it’s their choice. Being whatever you want to be is the name of the game, round these parts.

But I didn’t want to be 290lbs. Everything hurt, from the moment I got out of bed in the morning, to the moment when I’d wake up suddenly in the middle of the night because I’d forgotten how to breathe. I was sick all the time. I was risking diabetes, heart disease, and a whole bunch of other potentially fatal illnesses for an extra slice of pizza.

I mean, an extra pizza. A whole one.

And the emotional strain of all that was enormous – probably more than I realised at the time. Which is why, today, lifting that 140lbs and realising just how far I’ve come… I had kind of a “defining moment.” A breakthrough, if you will.

Yeah, I know. That’s real cheesy. But it’s true. Because I also had one of those 140lbs ago, taking those tentative, painful steps into my local gym. Lifting that first 2kg hand weight. Making it to 5 minutes on the recumbent bike. They don’t seem like big achievements now, but at the time, they were quite frankly epic. I was the morbidly obese girl on crutches in the gym. I felt like everyone was staring and judging, and they probably were – but I had to do it for myself.

And that’s the point I want to get across here. Feel no shame when you try to improve yourself, under any circumstances, and regardless of what size you are, or how you look or feel.

Because you are changing your life. You’re going to be that person who achieves what other people will call an “amazing transformation.” You’ll be the one that can inspire other people to find happiness, too – but the thing you need to get there is self-belief.

You don’t need much – just enough to get you through the day. It’s practically radioactive, this stuff – so can fuel huge changes on just a tiny amount. All you’ve got to do is know, somewhere in you, that you can.

Because trust me, you can do anything. Some of you guys have already proved that. Others are still on the path to figuring it out. But believe me: it’s possible. And even though in my case, I’m talking about weight loss, this outlook should cut across every aspect of your life.

You can do anything you set out to.

And one day, in the not-so-distant future, you too will be able to embarrass yourself by getting all emotional on public transport when you look back and realise just how far you’ve come.

That feeling rocks. But as I’ve said before, it doesn’t last for ever. You have to put some serious effort into making motivation happen. And sometimes, life just pops a foot outta the bushes and trips you up for no apparent reason, because sometimes, life can be a bit of an asshole.

For instance – I have been a saint of late, with food that looks like this:

And workouts that make me look like this:

Yet on Wednesday, I got food poisoning eating out. From a salad. Needless to say I was deeply unimpressed.

Four days later, I am still hella bloated. I’m not joking – I’m pretty sure my stomach is entering rooms a good thirty seconds before I do. I’m contemplating going to hang out at Mothercare just so I fit in. Given I know for a fact that I’m smaller than I was a couple of weeks ago, this kind of discomfort just seems a bit uncalled for.

Also – drum roll please – I’ve got a new bra. When I started out, I was wearing a size 42G – and that kinda helped me in the size stakes, because it ‘balanced me out.’ I had big boobs and a big ol’ butt (still do), and so I wasn’t top or bottom heavy. For all my extra weight, I still had a kind of hourglass shape, and I made it work.

On the same day as I got poisoned, I made the switch from a 38DD to a 36C – and that’d be cause for celebration, but for the fact that it’s made quite a significant difference to my silhouette. I didn’t notice it happening, but it turns out under my layers, I’m kinda pear-shaped.

I like this – not least because it means I’m edging closer to being the same kind of shape as my sister, and she is hawt. But it’s strange, because without that (admittedly empty) bra I was wearing, in this iddy-biddy looking new one… I suddenly don’t look like me. Especially given the aforementioned bloat-baby.

Now, this isn’t the first time this has happened. Almost a year ago, I wrote that:

Psychologically, losing all of this weight is a strange thing. I’d like to say that I’m the same person I always was, fat or otherwise, but I’m not. I’m still in the position of catching my reflection and being (positively) surprised by it – and believe me, that does NOT get old. But it does throw you off centre a tad, because when you’ve spent years building up an idea of yourself and your identity, only to significantly change it – well, it’s odd.

To me, it really reinforces the reasons that this sort of drastic change needs to be a slow-burn process. Seeing yourself differently because you know you’ve put in months and years of hard work to get there has a very different impact on you than waking up after surgery or extreme, sudden weight loss having been changed by something or someone externally.

Source: The Psychology of Getting Fit

 

And again, about six months ago:

Mentally, though, I haven’t adjusted to my size. I don’t just mean when I’m picking things up off the rail, either – when I’m trying to squeeze between tables in a bar, or going to sit down in a tight spot, or even just walking down the street, I still think I’m bigger than I am. I don’t mean that in the sense of walking around feeling miserable about my size – I just mean that I haven’t adjusted to the difference yet, so I’m working on the assumption that there’s a wider load here than there actually is.

Source: The Red Dress Epiphany

 

What I’m getting at here isn’t that I repeat myself – although it would appear I do – but that the whole body-changing journey business isn’t just a straight path. If anything, it’s more like a flight of stairs, or a mountain range, depending on how ambitious you’re feeling.

Because after each of those posts, there was a patch where I did adjust, and that size did seem normal. Right, even. And then, I’d change again – and have to readjust. And readjust again.

I think part of the reason these long-term changes fail is because nobody ever says these little wobbles – where you’re getting smaller, leaner, healthier, but you’re not sure you’re you – can kinda throw you off track. All the weight loss ads show it as one smooth transition from fat and miserable, to thin and happy, when actually, any sustainable weight loss will be a mixture of different things at different times.

That’s where perspective and proportion are important. I know I’m in a middle-ground at the moment, where my body is doing all sorts of awesome things and is changing shape accordingly. And I know that, while I’m a bit thrown by my suddenly-actually-kinda-small bust and suddenly-relatively-thin thighs (in contrast to my suddenly-rather-swollen-tum and still-resolutely-big-ass), I’m getting fitter by the day. This is a good thing. I’m just getting used to my new proportions.

If you’re starting out on a weight-loss journey – or if you’re at any stage in the process, for that matter – remember that you’re in transition. That person in the mirror might change faster than you, or slower, and those scales will tell you nothing at all – it’s the psychological side you’ve got to focus on.

Because a healthy lifestyle isn’t just a matter of waking up one morning after three months of starvation and suddenly being Jennifer Lopez.

Nope – this takes time, effort, and a commitment to carrying on, even when you get food poisoning from a salad.

But when you realise that you’re craving feeling better so that you can go for a run, rather than being able to eat a family size pizza…

Turns out, it’s all good.