First Blog

Hello
I tried a number of names and styles for this blog, but the only one it would let me have was 'recovering dieter' and so I will succumb to the heavy hand of fate and accept, head bowed, that this was MEANT TO BE.
I am, after all, a recovering dieter. That's not the first description I would have used of myself, but it is true and maybe it's time for me to really face up to this fact - I am a recovering dieter.
I don't intend or expect my every blog to be on this theme, but certainly there will be some food and diet related blogs because it is a huge part of my life.
So, to get the history out of the way first ... I was a skinny child, I remember having a large appetite and was also very active. I remained skinny until well into puberty where I suspect the activity decreased and the appetite increased. Just before I got married, age 21, I put myself on my first diet for reasons I cannot remember 25 years later. I certainly wasn't over-weight. As I didn't know anything about dieting at the time, I just cut down on what I was eating rather drastically - I was at college and I don't remember doing any exercise at all. From what I can recall I had porridge for breakfast, one sandwich for lunch and ate an evening meal, no pudding. I lost weight but was miserable and starving by the time the wedding came.
As a result (I can see cause and effect now, but I couldn't then), I compensated for the pre-wedding starvation by eating huge amounts as often as I could. I gained a lot of weight and then gained more through my first pregnancy.
By the time my daughter was coming up for her 2nd birthday, I was the largest I had ever been. At that point my younger sister told me I couldn't be a bridesmaid at her wedding unless I lost weight.
And so it started ... Over the next 20 odd years I yo-yo dieted and binged. My weight went up and down as I successfully lost weight on a diet and just as successfully put it all back on again once I finished the diet.
I was a very good dieter - I stuck absolutely to the letter of the diet and they always worked. But what they didn't seem able to tell me was how to maintain my newly achieved lower weight. They would talk vaguely about 'maintenance diets' about eating a little bit more and monitoring it and eating a bit less if necessary - but after the rigidity of the diet, I couldn't cope with such vagueness and would return to my former eating patterns with inevitable consequences.
When I'd had enough of dieting, I sent off for diet pills, detox solutions, diet patches, diet teas ... and guess what? Yes! They didn't shift an ounce. Not one of them, not one ounce of weight was shifted by any of them. I am emphasizing this because they are still out there - these envelopes that arrive full of 'before' and 'after' photos, often endorsed by doctors, nearly all claiming that anyone taking this product could eat as much cake as they wanted and still lose weight. It's all absolute rubbish, but I was desperate to lose weight and kept spending out and hoping.
Then one day in September 2007, I went to the amazon.co.uk website looking for a new diet. I couldn't return to any of the ones I'd done previously, no matter how successful they'd been. There had to be something new out there that I hadn't tried.
Amazon, bless its little cotton socks, came up with 'Beyond Chocolate' in response to my plea for a new diet.
A chocolate diet sounded like heaven to me and, inspired by the positive reviews, I ordered the book. I didn't know, but what I had just done was to set myself free.
Beyond Chocolate is NOT a chocolate diet. Beyond Chocolate is a way of guiding the disillusioned dieter towards a life after dieting - back towards what could be compared with the way small children eat - intuitively, in tune with their body's needs.
Since the book arrived back in 2007, I have been working with Beyond Chocolate to sort out the 20 odd years of food abuse, body loathing and dependence on dieting that I had subjected myself to entirely voluntarily.
It hasn't been easy, but then the diets certainly weren't.
It hasn't always been pleasant, but if you've ever detoxed using those foul tasting liquids, you'll know the meaning of unpleasant.
What Beyond Chocolate has overwhelmingly been is liberational (is that a word?!).
Beyond Chocolate set me free from 20 years of dieting hell and is helping me to find my own way through the world of food, one that suits me, one that fits with my lifestyle, one that I can do for the rest of my life.
If that sounds like what the latest diets promise, it's because they've jumped on the intuitive eating bandwagon and are using catch-phrases and slogans that deceive the desperate dieter into thinking that what the diets are offering is freedom and choice, when it's the exact opposite.
I think I will save my rants against the diet industry for another blog.
Suffice it to say that I am now free from the destructive influences of dieting and much happier than I've been for 2 decades.
I'm not sure how often I will get to write on this blog - but we'll take it one blog at a time and see where we go (if that's all right with you, of course!)