I'm a Dietitian. And I Used to Have a Terrible Relationship With Food.

For years, food was exhausting.

Not because I didn't know what to eat — I'd always been interested in nutrition, read everything I could get my hands on, knew more than most people about what healthy eating looked like. The knowledge was never the problem.

The problem was that none of it helped with what was actually going on.

I grew up thinking I had a weight problem. As a child I had a belly that stuck out — the kind that gets commented on, casually but frequently. I grew tall quickly, my younger sister was petite and somewhere along the way my mind translated "big" to mean "wrong." My body became a problem to solve.

So I tried to solve it. At fifteen I tried to follow a supermodel's "perfect" diet. Green apple, plain yoghurt, boiled chicken, salad, no dressing. I lasted about two weeks. I was dizzy, hungry, permanently irritable, but determined — because clearly this was the price of being acceptable.

That was just the beginning. I tried everything, but nothing worked for long. My belly didn't shrink, but my relationship with my body did change — and not for the better. I hid behind baggy clothes, avoided mirrors and thought about food and how I looked constantly.

What shifted was how I saw things. I'd been so convinced I had a weight problem that it never occurred to me to question it. When I did, I realised the problem had never really been my body — it had been the thinking about my body. Once that became clear, the whole thing looked different.

That was before I became a dietitian.

When I did go back and complete my training, what I learned confirmed what I'd already discovered from the inside: that the body knows how to eat, that hunger and fullness are reliable signals when we're not overriding them with rules and fear. The thing people struggle with most isn't knowing what to eat — it's everything that gets layered on top of eating.

The fear, rules, guilt, judgement, overthinking. Most people don't realise that's what they're really fighting.

Fast forward to now — I'm in my late fifties, I eat carbs, I drink wine, I thoroughly enjoy food, my weight is stable and my mind is quiet around eating. I didn't finally find the magic diet, I stopped trying to fix myself. Which is more straightforward than it sounds, because the body was never really the problem to begin with.

What I didn't find in my training — and what I've spent years since then piecing together — is a way to help women actually get there. Not through another eating plan or a stricter version of what they've already tried, but through a genuine shift in how they see food, their body and themselves.

That's what this blog is about.

If you're someone who knows what to eat but can't seem to do it — who feels fine around food one day and completely out of control the next — who has tried everything and still can't figure out why food feels so hard — you're in the right place.

I've been where you are and I know that what you're looking for isn't more information on what to do or another diet plan.

It's understanding and once you have it, everything else tends to fall into place.

Want to explore this further?

If this is landing for you, I've written a short free guide that goes deeper into what's actually been going on underneath every food struggle.

It's called Hiding in Plain Sight: What's Really Underneath Every Food Struggle — and it's a five-minute read that might start to make a few things make sense.

And if you're ready to go further, A Weight Off Your Mind is an eight-week course built around exactly this.

Or get in touch and let’s talk.