I was humiliated and put on special diets from around 10 years old when my parents divorced and, as I saw it, was sent away to a boarding school.

By the time I was 14 years old I had been on various diets, the latest being "the Mayo Clinic" diet and specifically remember that the Saturday Lunch Menu' s single option was: “Fruit Salad”, which I had to eat at a family picnic, while everyone else had the lovely left overs from the day before's Christmas Dinner...

So, resentment about my weight had set in from an early age and I particularly hated the feeling of “The Thin Ones” looking down their noses at me.

I always felt that people should just accept me for who I am and not base their judgement of me on my weight...or size.

However, as a young person, this all loosely translated to:

• When you’re Overweight = NO Romance
• When you’re Thin = Romance

BUT because of what seemed to be a built-in radar to find someone with a drinking problem, the romances were short lived. The end result being that the weight loss was short lived too as I would soon find myself returning to the trustworthy comfort of my favourite feel-good foods, in particular, Cadbury's Dairy Milk Chocolate, which had the added benefit that it helped me sleep!

By now serious bad behaviour around food had set in: trying out every new diet, hoping for "the answer", then bingeing, followed by fasting, losing weight and gaining weight was the pattern it seemed I could not break. I thought of myself as being fairly intelligent but, clearly, not in terms of my weight!

My self-sabotaging really frustrated and depressed me and I had no idea how to stop it or even WHY I did this...I had tried to get help via a psychiatrist, psychologist, hypnotist, I'd tried acupuncture and self-hypnosis too, ALL in an effort to try and understand WHY I kept on doing this… so that I could finally stop doing it.

Everyone that I had seen about my health and/or weight had only ever told me that I needed to go on diet and lose weight... as if I didn't know THAT!!!!

WHAT I did need was help to get my THINKING straightened out!!! In retrospect though, I don't think that anyone I had consulted actually understood this themselves and so, were of course, unable to actually be of help to me!

Even medically supervised fasts didn’t work long term and finally, I gave up on the whole weight loss saga and decided to simply stop dieting as I was so tired of failing and just didn't want to fail ever again... fortunately, I did stop gaining weight during this “diet rebellion” phase, and lost self-esteem, but no weight.

Truth is, that while I wanted other people to “accept me for who I am”, I didn’t accept me either and was not at all comfortable with my very overweight self …but continued with my insulated life, until I suddenly needed heart bypass surgery, and so, instead of Romance, got the Hospital!
One would think that this shock, combined with the pain of major surgery and the rather long recovery period would've sorted out my diet thinking and food behaviour BUT, not so...after the op's mandatory "no fat" diet I continued experimenting with different diets, (never long enough to make a real difference though) followed once again by the binge eating, and attempts to make up for that by fasting.... yo-yoing yet again!!!!!
WAKEUP CALL
It was only when a long standing close friend was diagnosed with Type 11 diabetes that I realised I absolutely HAD to address my food issues!!!!
I was fully determined that I WAS NOT going to end up Diabetic too, and mainly because I had got used to hiding my head in food whenever I felt life got too difficult!

My friend's lovely daughter, whom I've known since she was 9yrs old, was also struggling with her weight and this just broke my heart because she was a young wife and mom with so much of her life still ahead of her, yet unable to enjoy many activities with her children BUT I knew that I could not help her, until and unless I helped myself first!
These were the motivations that did get me to eventually lose 30kg/66lbs
NEW FEAR
BUT... I never really enjoyed this period of being “almost at ideal weight” because I was truly terrified of repeating previous experience and gaining it all back, again, along with the expected "interest" of at least 10 extra pounds.
The fear that I would lose control had me at the point where I did not even trust myself to go into a bakery to buy cake for the folk at the office when it was my birthday...

Late one night...while avoiding chocolate and instead, scrolling through Kindle Free e-book pages, looking for a new author to read, slap-bang, right in the middle of the hundreds of the run of the mill, "Lust-in-the-Dust" OR "Murder & Mayhem" books, I came across a book titled "Never Binge Again" by psychologist, Dr Glenn Livingston– it did get my attention as the book and has over 1,400 reviews on Amazon.com alone and has been downloaded over 300,000 times.

Feeling rather self-confident, as I had not binged for over year, I continued scrolling past it and onto the next page…5 pages later I remembered my very real fear of gaining everything lost right back again, …and after all what was there to lose...this was in any case, a Free book!!! So I downloaded it and changed my life…

Some months later I saw that there was an opportunity to actually study mindset coaching with Dr Livingston. The NEVER BINGE AGAIN ™ system is completely different to everything I had tried before. It doesn't dictate a particular diet but rather helps you fix your thinking and gain control of your life.
As well as fulfilling a dream of being able to help folk avoid the long self-sabotage road I had travelled, I am completely free of "binge anxiety" as I NOW know, for sure, that I need never fear of gaining back all the weight lost, BECAUSE I now have the answer as to WHY I had self-sabotaged, AND also, now have the right tools to ensure that this remains in place AND too, a BONUS… these tools, when worked together, can be used to beat many other behavioural problems...from food obsessions to excessive internet use, and even to beating procrastination...
For example, I have been able to help:
• someone deal with excessive video gaming and limit personal internet usage
• someone else who seemed to have gained & lost the same 5kg/10lbs over the last 15 years, finally get to keep them GONE!
• a busy Mom with 3 special needs boys, who "got" the understanding of how the program worked, in just a few sessions

THIS is what I want to share with as many people as I possibly can - it’s truly "never too late" to have hope; there IS hope; not only that there is hope, but that you can actually experience this for yourself and KNOW that you are able to be binge free and have the self-esteem you’ve always wanted, the self-respect to move on with your life and be the person you've always wanted to be!
The freedom from thinking about food constantly...Should I? Shouldn't I? Can I? How much? How little? Is it OK to...? So much of the time... has been so wonderful that I can say, from the bottom of my heart, that:

You CAN stay as you are, for the rest of your life
OR you can change..