Hello there!!

Let’s continue with the fourth and final blog of my nutrition journey.

I had just met “The Man of My Dreams”, was over the moon and fell completely and utterly in love with this awesome man!

Life became so sweet. We fell in love, dated, had an enforced separation as he headed to the UK to have some fun, became engaged quite soon after his return and got married. We had three magnificent boys, who are now all grown up.

I can’t say my Binge Eating Disorder (BED) was cured from the time I met him, but what I can say is that it never got completely out of control again. Even with three pregnancies, gaining fifty percent more weight with each pregnancy, I always managed to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight relatively quickly. In the early days of our marriage, I had numerous late-night binges after a night out, but would quickly return to normal eating and my weight remained constant. I am now reasonably content with my weight but I do like it when people tell me that I am looking a little too thin. Guess it never leaves you!

I wish I could say that I don’t think about food often, that I never feel guilty about overeating or eating the so-called “wrong” foods.  I wish I could say that I do not harshly assess my body regularly, that my inner self tells me what to eat and this intuition is what I base my eating plan on. I can not say this.

What I can say is that I am taking baby steps and seem to be moving forward. The steps back seem to be getting less.  There are small sustainable changes and I rejoice in these.

As most of you know, I am a physio and have had my own private practice for twenty-five years. I had a booming practice before I had children, but after each pregnancy, I worked less and less. Happily, since this afforded me the time to be a big part of my children’s school careers.  My youngest is in matric and is very independent and my two older children are at university away from home. I now treat a few patients a day and so have plenty of time to pursue other interests.

At the end of last year, my husband had a very bad accident while we were on holiday abroad.  This was a traumatic and life-changing experience for me and resulted in my perspective on life changed significantly. I began to question why I am here and wanted to do something more with my life.

In January, I was introduced to podcasts, and one I listened to regularly, is very nutrition-focused.  I so enjoyed learning from this. I love studying and reading but realized that, in fact, I had very little sound knowledge of food and nutrition, in spite of my eating issues. So, after a great deal of research, I  enrolled in a nutrition diploma course through a UK-based learning centre that seemed to offer what I was looking for.

Little did I know what I had led myself into, online tests, assignments, extra reading and doing this all alone, without having anyone to bounce things off!!  Having last studied twenty-two years ago, I also felt very rusty. I just hoped that the few neurons I had left could manage to communicate with each other and allow me to do this!!!

However, after many hours, much determination and a sprinkling of grit, I  completed my diploma. I  received accreditation and realized very quickly that my journey into this vast, ever-changing, mostly confusing and hugely exciting minefield, had just begun.

So much info available but not enough evidence-based science and a lot of codswallop!!

Honestly!!

The result. I have been working for about two hours a day, subsequent to my completing my diploma and this is a veritable work in progress and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. I am slowly finding My Nutrition People and its moving in the right direction.

So what was the point in my doing all this?

Truthfully, it is twofold.  I needed to start healing myself from within as I seem to have been able to keep the external, my weight, constant. I also think that I can help others on their journey.   Conventional nutrition has never appealed to me as I have never counted calories, I do not weigh my food and I very rarely weigh myself, so I need to do things differently.

I am now making sense of how I would like to go about this. I want to help people to understand that our bodies need food as fuel to work properly. If we want our bodies to work optimally, we need to feed our bodies with the best fuel.  Food is not good or bad. Food is nutritious or food not. Food is not healthy, people are. It’s not about weight, it’s about health. We need to treat our bodies and ourselves with kindness and love.  This may sound quite naff, but how many of us actually do this?

This knowledge would have been beyond helpful for me back in the day. However, no worries, it’s all good and the time for me to change is now.

So, if you feel the same and would like to learn with me, let me know!!

I think we can have so much fun on this voyage!

Thank you so much for your time and your amazing, well-received and hugely appreciated, encouraging messages.

I look forward to meeting up again next week for my next blog!

My third eating tip.

I am trying to decrease the number of sweet things that I eat. The taste buds on our tongue are truly amazing sensory organs that renew every ten to twenty-one days.  We can actually train our taste buds to enjoy food with less sweetness. So I started eating bitter dark chocolate. I eat a couple (sometimes more)squares of this often and it honestly satisfies me. My sweet-tooth is not nearly as sweet as it used to be!! It’s exciting and I can tick another sustainable change.