I often get asked why we are so passionate about helping women find their natural weight and live a life free from dieting. So I thought I’d share a little bit more about my story and why this led to the work we do today.
From my teenage years to mid-twenties, I experimented with lots of different diets and exercise regimes, all in a bid to lose weight and get my body to a shape and weight it didn’t want to be. I found that whatever shape or weight I was, my mind still wasn’t settled, it was always saying… ‘try this other diet and maybe you’ll reach that weight’.
After a while I started to notice my energy levels dropped, I started to crave certain foods and food and exercise began to take up a lot of my mental space. With all this happening I still wasn’t losing weight and in fact, my weight was fluctuating.
Thankfully, all of this changed when I met Sarah. Sarah taught me about the ‘set – point theory’, which is a hypothesis that our bodies have a biologically pre-determined set-point weight, that they are always working to maintain. This was a big light bulb moment for me as I realised, I wasn’t listening to my body and honouring my set point weight.
For me to arrive at my set point weight, I needed to gain weight. There were 5 things I did to allow this to happen (you can check these out in my previous blog ‘How to gain weight safely’). Taking these 5 steps resulted in my body returning to its natural weight. However, the most important things for me were that I didn’t need to diet anymore, my energy levels increased and I was no longer acting on the dieting and body image chatter in my mind.
I wanted to share these two images to show how my body changed from when I was not at my natural weight on the left (working against my body) and when I arrived at my natural weight on the right (working with my body).
Staying at your natural weight is a journey and it is so important to know that your natural weight can fluctuate and can gradually increase as we get older. Understanding this can remind us to support our bodies and their natural processes. So here’s to working with our bodies (and not against them ❤)
To your health and happiness,
Áine & Sarah x
