OK, so where to start.

Maybe it was in kindergarten when the boy said to me “you would be pretty if you weren’t so fat”….

Or in year 6 when the teacher pulled the scales out and was weighing us all and putting our weight up on a wall, I thought “please don’t let me be the heaviest” and sure enough, I was the heaviest person in the class and everyone knew it.  That was torture for me.  I was 12.

Or how much I hated dancing at school, where they separated the boys and girls and then made the boys go and pick a partner, of course I was not in the group of girls that immediately got picked and I would only hope I was not the last to be picked.

These are just a few incidents that come to mind, but they were the start of my problem with my weight.

My weight became what I believed to be the core to all my problems.

I blamed everything on my weight.

I cannot remember a time in my life when I did not worry about my weight.

Even writing this today, I think how sad that is and it makes me remember how many years I did feel that I was not good enough, all because of my weight.

Your weight should not define the person you are.  I have lost 43 kilos (95 pounds) but I am still the same person, I have just learnt now, to love myself along the way.

I had to work very hard on my weight loss journey to learn to love myself again.   To appreciate myself for who I was.

You will NEVER be truly successful on your weight loss journey until you can do that.

How do you learn to love yourself after maybe a lifetime of not liking you?

Well, one thing you have to remember is

SOME OF THE MOST IMPORTANT CONVERSATIONS YOU WILL EVER HAVE, ARE THE ONES YOU HAVE WITH YOURSELF.

So, stop saying negative things about YOU.  Maybe you don’t even realise you do.  Grab yourself a rubber band and put it on your wrist and every single time you say or think anything, even remotely negative about yourself, give yourself a good hard flick with that band.  It will serve as an anchor to you to stop this behaviour.

Nobody else can truly love you, until you truly love yourself.

Loving yourself, will be a major part of your journey, if you want long term weight loss.

You need to be KIND to you.  Treat yourself as you would a best friend, respect yourself and know your true worth.

Weight loss is a journey.  It is not a quick fix and if that is what you are after you will probably just end up with quick results that do not last very long.  If there was something out there that was fast, easy and gave long term sustainable results, we would not have an obesity epidemic, everyone would do it.

In the real world, there just are no quick fixes, you need to take the journey and remember, as Miley Cyrus puts it, its the climb, so enjoy your journey.  Celebrate your wins and forgive yourself quickly if you fall off the wagon, it doesn’t matter how many times you fall off, just that you get up quickly, dust yourself off and get back on.

So, go out today, knowing you are a great person with so much to give and become your very best friend and cheer leader on this journey.

My passion in life is to first and foremost be the best mother I can possibly be, because my children did not choose to be born and I want them to have the most incredible lives and my other passion is to empower people to become exactly who they want to be.  To break free of the weight shackles and shine.

There is an amazing life out there to be had so don’t let your weight rob you of another second….

Yours in Health,

Rebel.