Honest writing about dieting, setbacks and carrying on anyway.
I’ve started more diets than I can count and buried nearly as many. It was never about knowing what to eat. I always knew.
The quiet war in your head starts the moment the diet does. The scale starts running your emotional life. One biscuit tries to ruin the entire week. Monday makes promises it has never once managed to keep.
This is not about diet plans. It is about the thoughts, setbacks and small battles that happen around them and finding ways to keep going through them.
You may recognise some of your own struggles in mine and perhaps feel a little less alone.
Latest articles
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The hardest days are the ones before anything has changed
The first days of trying to lose weight can feel brutally unrewarding. You are doing the work, seeing almost nothing, and wondering why you bothered. This is the dangerous bit you have to get through before the proof starts arriving.
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Should you tell anyone you’re trying to lose weight?
Should you tell people you’re trying to lose weight? I usually don’t. Here’s why I keep my goals private, avoid the questions, and prefer a grand reveal to a public progress report.
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I named my inner saboteur Grumelda
I gave the sabotaging voice in my head a name, a personality and a pair of long red nails. Meet Grumelda Grudge, the woman I now refuse to take advice from.
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Waiting for motivation that never comes
Waiting for motivation has never got me very far. This is about the miserable truth that motivation often never comes, and how carrying on anyway is what finally works.
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What you should not trust AI to do with your diet
AI can be genuinely helpful during weight loss, but it can also guess, miscalculate and sound convincing while doing it. This article looks at what not to trust AI with when it comes to your diet, from calorie totals to meal plans, weight predictions and health boundaries.
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Use This Prompt to Turn AI Into Your Weight-Loss Companion
Use this copy-and-paste prompt to turn ChatGPT or Claude into a kinder, more useful weight-loss companion for weigh-ins, food decisions, motivation, difficult days and everything in between.
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What AI can actually help with during weight loss
AI has become my calorie tracker, meal planner, pattern spotter, memory and reality check. Here is what it actually helps me with during weight loss, including the parts that have very little to do with food.
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I want food because I want something to happen
Sometimes I do not want food because I am hungry. I want it because the day feels flat and food is the quickest way to make something happen.
What has made today difficult?
Start with the thought that has been following you around
Carry this with you
You do not build self-trust by making bigger promises. You build it by keeping smaller ones.
You keep waiting to become the person who can do this. They are built by the choices you are avoiding now.
Perfection does not lose the weight. Imperfect consistency does.