I tried everything. Here's what actually worked.

Food became something I turned to for comfort and emotional support from a young age, and this became a pattern that quietly followed me into adulthood. As life produced new ups and downs, that pattern became deeply embedded.

This is the reason I do this work, and if any of it sounds familiar to you, I want you to know you're far from alone, and you're certainly not broken.

The fads, the marathons, and the rules

Over the years I tried pretty much everything. On top of all the classic diets, I've run five marathons, all in pursuit of weight loss. I joined a powerlifting gym. I quit sugar for an entire year. Each of these things "worked," for a while, until they didn't anymore, and I'd be left gutted by yet another disappointment.

More recently, GLP-1 medications have become the next shiny penny, the thing everyone's talking about. And I absolutely get the appeal. But for me, it wasn’t going to be the silver bullet I was looking for. Not because it doesn't work for some people, but because I knew it wouldn't address what was actually driving things for me. Without fixing that, I'd end up right where I started, only a lot poorer.

After a long (long!) time, I realised that I wasn't looking for the next exciting plan or news-worthy approach. I just wanted to quietly get on with my life, without that ever-present voice telling me I was failing because I hadn’t hit whatever new and unrealistic goal I had set for myself.

The problem was, I didn't actually know how to live without extreme restriction or punishing exercise routines. I had to relearn how to live without treating my body as something to be controlled or punished. That relearning is what eventually led me here.

I ran my first marathon for fun, and my second marathon to beat my time…after that, they just became a form of punishment. This was me after my second marathon of the year, AND I wasn’t eating any sugar…

I told everyone - including myself - that I was doing it because I love a challenge, but in reality, my ultimate goal was just to be thin.

I’m so glad I don’t have to do that anymore!

What changed things for me

What helped wasn't another diet, another plan, another set of rules to follow more perfectly than the last. What helped was finally addressing what was underneath it all: the thoughts, the patterns, the old stories I'd been telling myself for years without realising it, many of them forming long before I had the self-awareness to understand them.

In Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy, we call this self-hypnosis. Every time we repeat a thought to ourselves, "I'm fat," "I've failed again," "I’m useless," we're reinforcing it, training our brains to accept it as true. The good news is that this works both ways, and just as we can talk ourselves into believing something unhelpful, we can also learn to talk ourselves into something far more productive.

And, I know how that sounds. "Be kind to yourself." "Think positive." You'll have heard it a hundred times, from influencers, from diet plans, from well-meaning friends. And on its own, it can feel like empty advice, because knowing you should be kinder to yourself and actually managing it are two very different things.

That's the gap I want to help close. Not with another slogan, but with an actual approach: One that works with how your mind forms these patterns in the first place, so the shift isn't something you have to force through willpower. It becomes something that starts to actually feel true.

That's what led me to hypnotherapy, first as something I turned to for myself, and eventually as a career after 15 years in the marketing industry.

What "anti-diet" actually means

To me, anti-diet doesn't mean anti-health. It doesn't mean I think nutrition doesn't matter, or that anything goes, or that wanting to feel good in your body is wrong.

What it means is that I don't believe restriction, willpower, or rigid rules are the answer for most people, most of the time. In fact, for a lot of people, that approach is part of the problem. The more we try to control food through sheer force of will, the louder the urge to break those rules tends to get.

My work isn't about adding more rules. It's about understanding why the rules feel necessary in the first place, and helping you build a different, calmer relationship with food and with yourself.

What Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy brings to this

Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy combines the practical, structured thinking of CBT with the deeper work of hypnotherapy. CBT looks at how thoughts, beliefs, and feelings create patterns while hypnotherapy works directly with the automatic responses that drive our unwanted behaviours.

A lot of our relationship with food isn't conscious. It's automatic. It's the reach for something sweet when you're stressed, the guilt that follows eating something you've labelled "bad," the all-or-nothing thinking that one biscuit means the day is ruined. These patterns were learned, often a long time ago, and often for understandable reasons. CBH works with both our conscious thinking and those deeper automatic responses to help unlearn them.

Who I work with

I work with adults of all genders who feel that food, eating, or body image takes up more headspace than they'd like. That might look like disordered eating, an uneasy relationship with certain foods, or patterns around eating that feel hard to shift, no matter how much willpower gets thrown at them.

If any of this resonates

If you've read this far and something in it felt familiar, that's enough of a sign to take seriously. You don't need to have hit some kind of crisis point to deserve support, and you don't need to have it all figured out before reaching out.

If you'd like to talk about whether this kind of work might help you, I'd love to hear from you.