10 Things I Learned in 30 Years of Losing Weight

What three decades of yo-yo dieting taught me about the habits, mindset, and biology of sustainable weight loss

I’ve been on this weight loss roller coaster since I was 17. I’m 48 now. That’s more than 30 years of trying to lose weight and it somehow finding its way back to me.

For three decades, I’ve been fascinated by nutrition. I’ve read everything, tried everything, and lost the same weight more times than I care to count.

A few years ago, my health took a turn with a Hashimoto’s diagnosis. That sent me down a rabbit hole of researching nutrition interventions and eventually led me back to school in my mid-forties for a degree in Nutritional Therapy. Through my studies I finally learned even more than I thought I knew about nutrition, weight and the human body.

I went on to lose nearly 20 kg (roughly 3 stones, or 44 pounds) while learning all this science. The most significant amount I’d lost in one go. I felt like I’d finally cracked the code.

But then I gained it all back anyway, seemingly without noticing.

You loosen up, start eating a little bit more of this or that and before you even realize it, you’re back at the starting point. If not worse.

That experience finally achieved what 30 years of failing at long term weight loss never succeeded in doing. It sparked curiosity and introspection into why I kept failing, even now when I understand exactly what the science says and know what I need to do.

It turns out that knowing what to do and actually doing it long-term are completely different ball games. As you probably know yourself if you’ve been on this weight loss rollercoaster for some time like I have.

Biology is important, but emotions are too. Losing weight and keeping it off is as much about the mindset, the habits, the emotions and attitudes you’ve adopted along the way. I’ve now lost 13 kg (roughly 2 stones or 30 pounds) this time around and I’m still going, but the focus this time around is different. It’s more about the journey, the habits, the learnings, than how much I’m losing or how quickly. It’s more about the process of becoming someone new, adopting new habits, embracing new attitudes and really inspecting my relationship with food, with exercise, with my body. With myself.

I’ve decided to start this Substack newsletter to document and share everything I’m learning, in the hope it will help inspire and support someone else in the same boat. I will write about what the research says as well as what the lived experience of myself and others have taught me about finding a ‘happy weight’ and maintaining it for life. Yes, especially in my late 40s, in perimenopause, with a Hashimoto’s diagnosis.

I will write about habits, mindset, emotional eating and also about why we obsess about something so mundane as our weight anyway. I hope you’ll find it educational, straightforward and easy to digest. And that it helps clarify a lot of the confusing conflicting information circling out there. Finally, I hope that if your weight has been something that’s bothering you and keeping you stuck for a while, it will inspire you to lose it once and for all, in a healthy, sustainable way and to achieve, if not your ‘dream weight’ at least your ‘happy weight’. A point at which you are happy with the way you look, behave and feel.

To start, here are 10 things I’ve learned. Not just from the research, but from losing and gaining weight over and over and improving and learning a little bit more about the process every single time.

I failed at this a lot. But each failure taught me something. These are the lessons that most stand out to me (in future articles i will write about many more). Maybe one will land for you the way it eventually landed for me.

1. Calories Aren’t Exciting, but They’re a Tool That Works

Calories went out of style. Social media is full of people claiming calories are irrelevant if you just eat the right foods.

I used to believe something similar. Not that calories don’t matter, but that I could lose weight by ignoring them. Make better food choices and it’ll somehow work out.

It doesn’t work that way.

Yes, there are many things more important than calories when it comes to your health. How you feel, how you function. But when it comes to losing weight? The science is clear: to lose weight, you need to consume fewer calories than you burn. It’s boring, but true.

You could theoretically lose weight eating nothing but donuts. Or Twinkies, Oreos and Doritos, like Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University who lost 27 pounds in 10 weeks eating only ultra-processed food, by eating fewer calories than he burned. You’ll feel horrible, you might get sick in the long run, you’ll be hungry and tired. But you will lose weight.

Every diet you’ve heard of works because it helps you eat fewer calories over time. Keto, vegan, paleo, carnivore, the cabbage soup diet, anything. Whether through increasing satiety (how full and satisfied you feel) and reducing consumption, eliminating highly caloric food groups, or some other mechanism. These ways of eating might have other benefits for aspects of health or performance, but at the end of the day, you lose weight because you ate less than you burned. There is no other magic trick.

I’m not saying you need to count calories. There are other ways to create a calorie deficit. Choosing low calorie density foods. Eating smaller portions. But if you’re doing everything right and the weight still won’t come off, tracking your calories for a bit might be the answer.

You don’t need to do it forever. The mental burden is real, and calorie counts are imprecise anyway. But even tracking temporarily, just for a week or two, teaches you things. About portion sizes. About calorie density. About how much food you actually need to feel satisfied.

And here’s the good news: you don’t need to be perfect every single day. What matters is your overall pattern. If you eat a bit more one day and a bit less on another, but generally maintain a calorie deficit over time, you’ll still lose weight. Your body doesn’t reset at midnight.

2. Your Food Choices Matter More Than Your Motivation

One of the things that makes weight loss so hard is this: if you’re constantly hungry, you’ll eventually cave. It’s not a willpower problem. It’s biology.

This is why GLP-1 medications (weight loss drugs like Ozempic etc) work so well. They affect your satiety mechanisms and make you feel full. Suddenly, not eating too much becomes easy instead of a daily battle.

But here’s what most people don’t realize: you can manage your hunger without medication. You can actually control how full and satisfied you feel by changing what you eat and how you eat it.

This is the simple truth that explains why some diets feel easy and others feel impossible. Why some people seem to lose weight effortlessly while others white-knuckle through every meal. It’s not willpower. It’s satiety.

There are practical things you can do to feel full and satisfied with less calories. Eat enough protein, it keeps you fuller longer than carbs or fat. Load up on fiber-rich low calorie density vegetables, you get volume without many calories. Choose whole foods over processed ones, they satisfy you differently. Balance your blood sugar. Drink enough water.

These aren’t exciting tips and they aren’t new. But they can be the difference between constantly fighting hunger and feeling reasonably satisfied while losing weight. Understanding how our biology works and the different levers we can pull to increase satiety while keeping to a calorie deficit can make the difference between losing and then maintaining your weight for life and going back to old habits, because it is just too hard.

It’s the difference between walking 10 km barefoot in the snow versus taking a heated car. Same destination, completely different experience.

Get your hunger and fullness cues right, and everything else gets easier.

3. There Is No ‘After’: Weight Loss Is Practice for Maintenance

Here’s what took me years to understand: what you do to lose the weight is what you’ll need to do to keep it off.

We treat weight loss like a temporary project. Lose a couple of kg, pounds or a stone by summer, fit into that dress for the wedding, then we’re done. But there is no “done.” Maintenance isn’t that different from weight loss. You get to add maybe 100-200 calories a day, one piece of fruit or a small snack, and everything else stays exactly the same.

This is why so many people regain weight. When you think of weight loss as temporary, you choose approaches you can only sustain temporarily. You eliminate foods you actually like. You follow rules that don’t fit your life. You tell yourself that once you hit your goal, you’ll be able to ease up and do things differently.

But you can’t. The habits you build while losing weight are the habits you’ll need for the rest of your life. You’re not just losing weight. You’re learning a new way to eat and live, a way that keeps your body at a healthy weight.

Once this clicked for me, everything changed. I stopped trying to do anything I couldn’t imagine doing long-term. I ignored flashy trends promising quick results. I wrote off things like fasting that, while they worked temporarily, didn’t make me feel good and I couldn’t see myself maintaining for life. Instead, I adapted things to work for me over the long term, not just for a few weeks.

I started focusing on small, sustainable changes I could actually maintain. Not for 12 weeks. For life.

If you can’t imagine doing something most of the time, for years, don’t do it to lose weight.

This might sound depressing, like the struggle never ends. But actually, it’s liberating. It means you get to choose an easier path from the start. No more crash diets. No more extreme restrictions you abandon the moment you hit your goal. Just steady, doable changes that become your new normal.

You lost the weight because you became a person who eats and moves and lives a certain way. If you go back to your old ways, the weight will come back. Once you start thinking about your new body as part of your new existence, a direct result of how you now eat and live, you’ll realize it’s better to make maintainable changes instead of short-term extremes.

Think of maintenance as staying at your happy weight. Up some, down some, but basically stable. And you stay there by keeping the same habits that got you there.

4. Imperfect Efforts Add Up to Real Results

Your body is far more forgiving than you think. One cookie won’t derail your progress. A luscious dinner out won’t either. Even a whole weekend that got a little off track (don’t ask me how I know) won’t undo your progress. Same with skipping workouts on a two week vacation.

What matters is what happens next. Do you get back to your everyday rhythm? Eating mostly well, moving your body regularly, taking care of yourself? Those are the habits that actually add up.

The problem isn’t the occasional slip. It’s how we react to it. When we treat every misstep as proof we’ve failed. When we’re so rigid that one deviation turns into an all out eating fest. I’ve done this so many times. Ate more than I planned at dinner, felt like I’d ruined everything, and then thought “well, might as well keep going.” The whole box of cookies. The entire next day. There is always Monday.

Being too strict almost always backfires. Weirdly, allowing yourself flexibility actually makes consistency easier. You’re not constantly swinging between deprivation and making up for it.

Life will always hand you moments like this. Sometimes the better long-term choice really is the late dinner with friends or the extra hour of sleep instead of the gym. And when perfection isn’t your goal anymore, those choices stop feeling like failures. They’re just part of living.

Once you take perfection off the table, getting back on track becomes so much gentler. You don’t spiral into “I ruined everything” thinking. You just make the next meal a good one. That shift, that self-compassion, makes the whole process feel more doable and a lot more human.

And the science backs this up. Studies show that people who respond to lapses with kindness instead of self-criticism recover faster and stick with their goals longer. In one study, participants who treated themselves kindly after a slip reported better moods and stronger intentions to keep going. In another, self-compassion was linked to higher confidence and less negative self-talk later in the same day.

Perfection isn’t required. Flexibility, compassion, and just showing up again and again? That’s what carries you forward.

5. Just Show Up. The More You Do It, the Easier It Gets

If satiety is the most overlooked aspect of weight loss from a biology standpoint, consistency is the one from a mindset standpoint.

And I don’t mean perfect consistency. I mean just showing up, over and over. Getting back to your habits after you slip. That’s it. That’s the thing that works.

Here’s what happens when you keep showing up: your brain literally rewires itself. New neural pathways form. What felt hard and unnatural at first starts to feel easier, more automatic. Just something you do.

The struggle I felt going to the gym the first 25 times? It honestly feels so much easier after the next 20. It becomes something I do habitually, without having to psych myself up or negotiate with myself about it.

Knowing this helps. Knowing that if I just keep going, it will get easier, makes it worth pushing through those early hard times.

And here’s the beautiful part: by consistently doing the new positive habits, you’re crowding out the not so helpful ones. If you go to the gym regularly, you will get stronger. If you eat whole foods most days, there will be less space and less cravings for the junk. The positive outcomes than become inevitable.

You don’t have to show up perfectly. You don’t have to follow the plan flawlessly. You just have to return to your core habits again and again, regardless of what happened yesterday.

Ate too much going out? Back to normal the next meal.

Missed three workouts? Just do the next one.

Consistency isn’t sexy. It doesn’t make for dramatic before and after posts. But it’s the only thing that actually works long-term. Your new habits, build your new identity, and eventually a new version of yourself that doesn’t carry the extra weight anymore.

Keep doing the thing, over and over, and you’ll get there.

6. Forget the On/Off Switch: Why ‘All or Nothing’ Doesn’t Work

One of the biggest traps I fell into for years was thinking of weight loss like a project with a start and finish line. I was “on plan” when I was being good, and “off plan” when I wasn’t. It was all or nothing.

one cookie turns into two, and suddenly the whole day feels ruined. If the day is ruined, well… why not go all in and start again on Monday? That way of thinking took me in circles for years and I blame it for most of my history of yo yo dieting.

It is only when I realised there is no on or off switch, that things started to change. There’s no diet box you step into and then fall out of. There’s just life. There’s the next meal. The next choice. And the one after that.

Ditching this mindset might be the single most powerful shift I made.

Once I stopped labeling myself as good or bad, on or off, I started seeing the process for what it really is: an ongoing way of living. Some days you’ll make choices that support where you want to go. Other days you won’t. But it’s all part of the same journey.

When you start seeing it this way, the pressure eases. A choice that doesn’t align perfectly with your goals isn’t a failure, it’s just one choice. And the very next one can bring you right back in line. You don’t need to wait for Monday, or for a “fresh start.” You can reset in the next bite.

When you drop the all-or-nothing mindset, you free yourself from the cycle of guilt and “starting over.” You realize there’s no perfect plan to fall off of, just a series of choices, some better, some worse. And over time, the better ones add up.

7. Every Little Bit Actually Helps

Doing something, anything, is better than doing nothing.

I used to think that if I couldn’t do a full hour at the gym, there was no point going. If I could only squeeze in 15 minutes, why bother? I now believe the exact opposite.

A 15-minute walk is infinitely better than no walk. Five minutes of movement beats browsing Instagram on the couch. Making a decent meal choice beats an actively bad one.

Like the slogan of a famous UK supermarket chain: Every little helps.

But it’s not just because a little exercise is better than none, or that adding a vegetable makes your meal more nutritious. The real reason is bigger. You’re building your identity as someone who does these things.

Every time you show up, even for five minutes, you’re reinforcing a pattern. This is who I am now. This is what I do. The next time becomes easier because you’ve done it before.

There’s also this: once you get yourself to the gym, you’ll probably do more than you planned. Once you start chopping vegetables, you’ll probably make a decent meal. The hardest part is just starting.

I’ve learned to make the habit so easy I can’t say no, to lower the barrier and focus on showing up, not on being perfect.

Every little bit compounds. And usually you end up doing more once you start anyway.

8. There Is No One Perfect Diet (and That’s Good News)

Stop searching for the perfect diet. Stop wondering if keto or vegan or carnivore or intermittent fasting is the answer.

Here’s what the research actually shows: they can all work, as long as you keep to a calorie deficit. Studies comparing different diets, even ones that promote completely opposite approaches like keto and high carb low fat, often show comparable weight loss results.

The difference isn’t the diet itself. It’s whether you can stick with it.

The “right” diet is the one that fits your life, your preferences, your biology. The one that brings you joy from time to time or at least doesn’t make you struggle. The one you can actually maintain most of the time, for the long haul.

This realization freed me from years of hopping from one diet to the next, trying each new one to see if it was the one that would finally stick. I stopped chasing the latest trendy approach, convinced that this time I’d finally found the method.

Instead, I started building my own approach. I learned the core principles that help our bodies maintain health and lose fat over muscle. Then I tweaked everything else to work with my preferences, my lifestyle, amplifying what brings me joy and avoiding what doesn’t.

You can borrow what works from different approaches and drop what doesn’t. You can adjust as you go. As long as you keep the core principles of biology and understand how your body works - everything else can be tweaked to your preference, your taste, to you.

Stop trying every new approach that promises to be the answer. Instead, educate yourself on the core fundamentals, what research has actually shown to work, and tweak everything else to fit your life.

It’s kind of fun to craft your own personalized approach. Think of it as the ‘you method’ for long-lasting weight loss.

9. Emotional Eating Is a Habit Problem, Not a Feelings Problem

Emotional eating. There’s no way to discuss weight loss without touching on the emotional side of the process.

Every time you read about emotional eating, someone will tell you to stop and think about why you’re eating. What’s the emotion behind it? What are you looking for food to solve? Then they’ll suggest giving yourself what’s actually missing instead. Tired? Take a nap. Angry? Talk about your feelings, or shout about them.

Personally, identifying my feelings and understanding my needs didn’t really help. I’d identify what was wrong. I’d realize I could do something else at that moment, like go for a walk or take a shower. But I still just wanted to eat. I wasn’t hungry. I knew that. But eating was the only thing that actually calmed down the feelings.

Here’s the thing about emotional eating: it’s solving a real problem. When you’re stressed and you eat, food genuinely makes you feel better. Your brain’s reward system activates. It’s not in your head. The relief is real.

The problem isn’t that it doesn’t work. It’s that it only works temporarily, and it creates a new problem in the process.

To understand emotional eating, you need to understand habit formation. At some point in the past, your brain learned a pattern. Stress plus food equals relief. Boredom plus snack equals satisfaction. Every time that sequence repeated itself, the neural pathway strengthened. The brain learned that X plus Y equals happiness, or at least relief. The connection became automatic.

This is why emotional eating is so powerful. It’s not about willpower or discipline. It’s about deeply ingrained neural pathways that have been reinforced hundreds or thousands of times.

To break this habit, you need to break the connection or create a new one. Anything else, no matter how logical (like identifying the real emotions behind your actions), is helpful and an important first step. But it won’t get you to stop until you break the habitual connection.

Emerging research suggests that even GLP-1 weight loss medications (think Ozempic, Wegovy, Monjaro) work less effectively on people who deal with emotional eating. Think about that. These are pharmaceutical interventions that directly manipulate your hunger signals. They make you feel physically full. And emotional eating might still reduce their effectiveness.

Why? Because emotional eating isn’t driven by physical hunger. It’s addressing a completely different need. When you’re eating to regulate emotions, blunting your biological hunger cues doesn’t help. The drive is coming from somewhere else entirely.

Breaking these connections takes time and effort. It requires introspection. It means building new neural pathways, new responses to stress or boredom or loneliness. It means teaching your brain new associations that are more conducive to what you’re trying to achieve. But it’s as important as figuring out what and how much to eat.

You can master nutrition science, get your macros perfect, understand calorie density inside and out. But if you’re still using food to manage emotions, you’re essentially working against yourself. The emotional drive will sabotage your physiological efforts every time.

10. What You Gain Is Bigger Than What You Lose

I wish I could tell you that life becomes perfect when you hit your goal weight.

It doesn’t.

Your difficult relationships don’t magically fix themselves. Your job doesn’t suddenly become fulfilling. All the regular struggles of being human stay exactly the same.

But here’s what does change: confidence.

There’s something powerful about making a commitment to yourself and following through. About saying you’ll do something difficult and then actually doing it, consistently, for months or years. You prove to yourself that you can.

You feel stronger. You feel more capable. And if fat loss is genuinely important to you, not because you think you “should” or because you compare yourself to others, but because it truly matters to you, then it’s absolutely worth pursuing.

Not because it’ll make you perfect, but because it’ll make you more of who you want to be. And the process of becoming that person is as important and as gratifying as the result.

Because when you look at yourself at the end you feel proud. Not because of the size of your jeans or because you look great in your swimming suit, but because you went through something and came out on the other side. You became someone to be proud of, that changed their habits and is doing something for themselves.

And the knowledge that you were able to achieve that and overcome all the hurdles on the way and still continue, spills over to so many other things in life and truly makes you feel you’re able to take on anything.

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So that’s 10 things that three decades of yo-yoing with my weight has taught me.

I’m three years into my nutritional therapy degree and god knows how many years into losing weight (and hopefully keeping it off), still learning, still figuring things out. This newsletter is going to be my way of sharing what I discover. Breaking down the science, the psychology, and the messy reality of actually trying to live this stuff.

If any of this resonates, or if you have questions, or you just want to share your own experience, I’d genuinely love to hear from you in the comments.

Let me know what resonated most, what you agree or disagree with and anything specific you’d be interested in reading about.

Here’s to consistency over perfection and finally figuring out how to make this actually stick.