My story
I did not become this woman by trying harder.
I already knew how to work hard. Discipline was never something I lacked.
But for nearly 40 years, I lost weight, put it back on and moved on to the next plan, still believing that more effort and more control would eventually make the difference.
It did not.
Where it started
I learned very young that hard work got results.
I started martial arts at six, became a black belt at nine and spent almost 20 years competing at national and international level.
Discipline, consistency and sustained effort had always served me well.
But when it came to food, my weight and how I felt, the same approach kept leaving me in the same place.
From the outside
I had a good life. But I no longer felt like myself in it.
When COVID disrupted the routines I had relied on for years, I struggled to find my rhythm again.
Alcohol had gradually taken up more space in my week and my social life. I did not like what I saw when I looked in the mirror, and I could feel my confidence disappearing.
At work, I found myself holding back in meetings. When we started returning to the office, I wanted to hide rather than be seen.
Nothing was dramatically wrong. But I knew I did not want to keep living this way.
The decision
Staying the same had become harder than changing.
The decision may have appeared sudden, but it had been building for some time.
I had started thinking seriously about the years ahead and how I wanted to live them.
So, at 55, I made a decision.
I was going to stop repeating what had never worked and find a different way forward.
A different approach
I stopped looking for another plan and started learning what worked for me.
I still wanted to lose weight, but I knew I did not want another restrictive diet or a life controlled by the number on the scales.
I changed how I ate, moved and structured my days. I stopped drinking and began learning more about nutrition, habits and what my body actually needed.
I also stopped treating every choice as either good or bad. Enjoying something did not mean I had failed or needed to compensate for it.
For the first time, I was making deliberate choices rather than following another set of rules.
What changed
The weight changed. More importantly, so did I.
I lost nearly 10 kilograms and have maintained those results for over two years without dieting or counting calories.
But the greatest change was not the number on the scales.
Food stopped taking up so much space in my head. Holidays, meals out and weekends away became part of life, rather than reasons to abandon everything else.
I became someone who could make deliberate choices, recover when life was not perfect and trust herself to keep moving forward.
Why Nourished Roots
I did not want what I had learned to stop with me.
While I was making changes in my own life, I experienced coaching through work. It helped me see possibilities for myself that I had not believed were open to me.
I later trained and became a coach within the organisation. At the same time, I was becoming increasingly interested in nutrition and understanding why changing our health is rarely as simple as knowing what to eat.
Nutrition coaching brought those two parts of my life together.
I qualified as a Nutrition and Lifestyle Coach and created Nourished Roots to help other women make changes that work within their lives, not somebody else’s.
The Nourished Roots approach
What I learned changed the way I now work with women.
Information matters. But information alone is rarely the problem.
If it were, intelligent, capable women who already know a great deal about health would not still be struggling to make changes last.
That is why I do not begin by telling you what to change.
We work together to understand what is already happening in your life, what is getting in the way and what could genuinely make a difference for you.
The aim is not another plan that works only when life is perfect.
Make healthy living feel natural.
Start here
My story will not be your story. But where you begin matters just as much.
If you have recognised any part of yourself in my story, I would encourage you to take the Midlife Assessment before you decide what to change next.
Take the Midlife AssessmentAround 3 minutes · Personalised insight