To give you some idea on what I have been doing in recent years:

I had involved the services of Personal Trainer and have been seeing him since early 2006.

6 months prior to our Wedding which was in early 2008 my trainer and I had instigated a program called N.F.B. – “No Fat Bride”. My PT sessions were up to 4 days a week, involving cycling (most days) 15-20 minutes to see him and then doing around a 1 hour session and cycling home again. During this time my weight went from around 130kgs to 124kgs (not much of a loss really) for a 6 months of slogging it out.

Here is me blossoming around the 130 kilo range.

As much as my trainer could help with my exercise and fitness, he could not control the “Kitchen”, my eating, take-away and dining out.

I have since found out we would have been considered a D.I.N.K “double income no kids”; this was the lifestyle that we were leading.

I love food, I love it to be tasty, I love entrees main and dessert, I don’t like to give up any 1 course, I love buffets (once at a buffet I ate 12 different pieces of dessert and bragged about it), we nearly always had 3 courses plus bread any time we went out, I would never choose from a low fat option (if there was one) and very rarely we might share a course. We would often dine out for breakfast, lunch and dinner on the weekends and a few times throughout the week. It has not been formally diagnosed but I would say I, like many others, have a “Food Addiction”, it is my drug of choice. All of this often washed down with copious amounts of alcohol.

I have learned recently (and probably knew before this, but didn’t want to believe it) that weight loss is approximately 70% food related and only 30% exercise related and it is so true, different things you read will say 80/20, 60/40 but the end result is food is key, exercise is an aid.

I continued to exercise and also continued to eat. Therefore the results were so slow and often non-existent. I didn’t know how to have balance in my life.

I have since realised and been diagnosed, by my husband, with severe F.O.M.O. “fear of missing out”, humorous but true, after he said those words to me I really really thought about my eating habits, I wanted to eat what I was having and what he was having, if someone said Ice cream, regardless of if I wanted it or not I would say yes of course I want Ice-cream, same goes for any other food, chips, chocolate, hamburgers etc etc etc the list goes on, massive cases of FOMO all the time. I also had “Food Envy” if someone else’s meal came out and it looked better than mine dare I say I was jealous. I would never share my food, and would secretly get offended if someone would ask for a bite and god help them if they took more than a taste. I am pretty sure I roared like an Ogre protecting his swamp. (Yes I have been watching too much Shrek lately)

So how have I made all of these revelations and got to where I am now?

Well I would say Lap-banding has helped immensely, you just can’t eat 3 courses, you can’t eat huge main meals, so I quickly learned that to avoid missing out and to enable my FOMO that hubby and I could share 3 courses and therefore have a taste of more meals. Bread, as much as I loved it, was the enemy, you were way too full too quickly, the same with chips/fries, you did not have to avoid at all costs but eat the good stuff first and have a couple of chips at the end, what I found was that I generally didn’t want the chips at the end, for 2 reasons, 1 that I was full from eating the good stuff and secondly the chips were cold and who wants to eat cold fries.

In hindsight and probably even now I should involve the services of a Psychologist to understand why I think like I do. It’s all in your H.E.A.D. “highly educated aid to dieting” just made that 1 up.