Biography

After several years as a consultant I left the corporate world to diversify my interests. I now work as a coach and personal development consultant and I also teach at a business school. I have the archetypal portfolio career.

The link between the different parts it is that I have always worked closely with people – groups and individuals, and I have always been very interested in what makes people tick. My first career was in retail where I was a buyer and merchandiser and thus very interested in what people bought and why. I moved into recruitment where I became much more involved in psychology from the perspective of getting a good fit between people and jobs and also the finer points of good interview practice. When I moved into change management I became interested in organisations and their impact on how people behave. I trained as a coach and now focus on how individuals learn and change.

However, my other obsessions are cooking, food and nutrition and their unintended consequences, weight gain and oss! I have a long history of dieting and have lost, and gained, weight many times. I have tried every regime and diet known to man and some of them have even worked. For a while.

My study of change, learning and motivation led me to wonder why I was failing in my own efforts to find a happy medium with my own diet and eating. I began to research the issue from both popular and academic sources. As my own experience and the research made clear, diets do not work. I realised that what is required is a total shift in attitude and/or behaviour. The choices are to learn to accept the body as it is, and learn to make the most of it, or, to make some permanent, sustainable changes in eating behaviour. Or a mixture of both.

My approach is therefore eclectic and draws upon a wide range of information and psychological approaches. (link to how do I do it) I do firmly believe that for sustainable results, a life beyond the diet, it is necessary to look at how and why you eat in the context of your life.

Weighing in with my personal story

I was not a fat child and it was not until my late twenties that weight started to become an issue for me. I developed a pattern of gaining and losing weight and finding it increasingly difficult to lose as the years progressed. I did go through one phase of total non-dieting – on the grounds that dieting makes you fat. It certainly made me fat and I always ended up heavier than I started. This was a difficult period as I knew that dieting made me fat but could see no alternative and so felt stuck where I was. Not a happy situation and I also found that stress and other trigger events like Christmas and holidays made me even fatter. I was at my heaviest and I could not see a way out. I was not aware at this point of the literature on non-diet approaches to weight loss – it was pre-Google.

I gave up "non-dieting" and went on another major diet and became very slim. Then gradually the weight started to creep back on. Same old, same old.

At least three times in my life I have been successful at keeping the weight off for periods of about a year. Each time I thought I had found a way to make it permanent but each time, after the magic year or so, I quietly started to rebel and slip off the regime. Because always there was a regime, rules that I had to stick to and always certain things that were not allowed. The things varied but there were always dos and don’ts.

A few years ago I was in the studio audience for Paul McKenna who was recording for his “I can make you thin” programme. The rules made sense and I had a few very sane months where I completely relaxed around food and managed to come through a holiday and Christmas weighing no more than when I started. I realised there was another way and it not starving or deprivation. Neither was it business as usual. In order to lose weight you must do some things differently and if you need to keep it off, these changes must be permanent. Paul McKenna’s basic message is “eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full”. Simple and sensible if not always easy to abide by.

I will not pretend that the path since then has been straightforward. There have been moments of extreme testing (mainly stress induced!) and my weight has not been stable. However, I now have no strict rules and I can not fall off a diet because I am not on one. I am not the lightest I have ever been and neither am I the heaviest. I am a lot more sane and relaxed though. I dress well and do not punish myself by depriving myself of clothes that fit and flatter. I do not postpone my life because of a number on a scale.