The Conversation I’ve Been Avoiding
If you had asked me a few years ago to describe my relationship with food, I probably would have laughed and said, “It’s complicated.” It would have sounded like a joke, the sort of thing people say to avoid answering a difficult question. The truth is, though, that “complicated” is probably the most honest description I’ve ever had. Food has been my comfort, my celebration, my distraction, my reward, my coping mechanism, and sometimes even my reason for getting through a difficult day. Asking me to separate my emotions from food has never felt as simple as just eating less.
I have just started taking a GLP-1 medication. Most people see medications like this through one of two lenses. They’re either a miracle drug that changes lives, or they’re cheating. Social media is full of opinions from people who seem very invested in what complete strangers choose to do with their own bodies. Thankfully, I’ve reached a point in my life where those opinions don’t matter very much. Nobody has lived inside my body except me.
The truth is that I’m not starting this medication because I hate myself. I’m starting it because I finally care enough about myself to accept some help. I have Type 2 diabetes. I have goals I want to achieve. I have a little girl who deserves a healthy mum for as long as possible. Most of all, I’m tired. Tired of fighting my own brain. Tired of the constant negotiations around food. Tired of carrying decades of history every time I open the fridge.
Because this isn’t really a story about a medication. It’s a story about what food has meant to me throughout my life, and why letting go of that relationship feels both exciting and strangely heartbreaking.
“My goal isn’t just better blood sugars.
It’s a future I can be proud of.”
Safety Came With Sweet and Sour Pork
When people think about emotional eating, they often imagine someone sitting alone on the couch with a family-sized block of chocolate after a bad day. While that certainly happens, my relationship with food started much earlier than that. It wasn’t born out of laziness or a lack of willpower. It was born inside a frightened little girl who was trying to find somewhere in the world that felt safe.
My childhood was incredibly difficult. My father was an abusive alcoholic, and behind the closed doors of our home were experiences that no child should ever have to carry. Home didn’t feel peaceful. It didn’t feel predictable. It certainly didn’t feel safe. Looking back now, it’s remarkable how few memories I actually have of ordinary family dinners around our kitchen table. Instead, my strongest food memories happened somewhere else entirely.
Whenever things became too much at home, Mum would take me out. Sometimes we’d go for Chinese. Sometimes pizza. Sometimes Sizzler. Sometimes it was nothing more than a Happy Meal from McDonald’s, complete with whatever little plastic toy happened to come in the box that week. We’d sit there for as long as we could, stretching out the meal because for that little while, we weren’t back in the house. Those restaurants weren’t just places to eat. They became little islands of peace where life felt normal for an hour or two.
Without realising it, my brain started making connections that would stay with me for decades. Food wasn’t just food anymore. Food became relief. It became comfort. It became the feeling that everything might be okay, even if only until the plates were cleared away. It wasn’t about being hungry. It was about finally being able to breathe.
The Armour I Didn’t Know I Was Wearing
I’ve been overweight for as long as I can remember. I don’t have a dramatic story where I suddenly gained weight after one difficult event. I was the fat kid in primary school. Then I was the fat teenager. Then I became the morbidly obese adult. My clothing size only seemed to move in one direction, and for years I simply accepted that this was who I was always going to be.
School wasn’t particularly kind to children who stood out. I was tall. I struggled with acne. I was overweight. I was bullied more times than I could possibly count, and unfortunately, adulthood didn’t magically make that disappear. I’ve had complete strangers make cruel comments about my body in public. It’s amazing how comfortable some people feel treating another human being like they’re invisible until it’s time to make them the punchline of a joke.
There was another layer to all of this that I didn’t understand until much later in life. My father had no patience for overweight people. He regularly criticised my mother because of her weight, and somewhere inside my young brain, another story quietly formed. If being attractive hadn’t protected me from what happened in childhood, perhaps being overweight would. Perhaps a larger body could become armour. Trauma doesn’t always create logical beliefs. Children don’t process danger the way adults do. They simply invent whatever rules help the world feel slightly more understandable.
I’m not saying that’s the reason I became overweight. Human beings are far too complicated for a single explanation. Genetics, environment, habits, emotions, mental health, trauma and opportunity all weave together into something much bigger than one simple cause. But I do believe that somewhere inside me, being overweight stopped feeling like a failure and started feeling like protection. Even if that protection was only ever an illusion, it was one I carried for a very long time.
“Food was never just food.
It was safety, comfort, and survival.”
Every Monday Started with Good Intentions
By the time I reached my teenage years, I already believed I was someone who needed fixing. Every magazine cover seemed to promise the secret to a better body. Every television commercial advertised another miracle shake, another revolutionary workout, another diet that would finally change everything. Like so many people, I believed the next attempt would be the one that worked. I wasn’t chasing perfection. I was chasing the feeling that maybe, just maybe, I’d finally be enough.
I remember going to Jenny Craig. I’m sure we tried Weight Watchers at some point too. There were gym memberships that lasted a few weeks before quietly fading away. There was swimming. There were countless promises I’d make to myself on a Sunday night, convinced that Monday morning would be the beginning of a brand new life. Sometimes I’d even finish a workout feeling incredibly proud of myself, only to reward that effort with a trip through a fast-food drive-thru on the way home. Looking back, it almost sounds absurd, but at the time it made perfect emotional sense. Food was still my reward. It was still my comfort. Exercise felt like punishment, while eating felt like relief.
The hardest part wasn’t that the diets failed. It was that every failed attempt slowly chipped away at my confidence. Each time I regained weight, I didn’t just believe I’d failed a diet. I believed I’d failed as a person. Every new beginning carried the weight of every previous disappointment. Eventually, you stop trusting your own promises because you’ve heard them too many times before. You start assuming you’ll quit before you’ve even begun.
The irony is that I was never lazy. I wasn’t lacking intelligence or motivation. I was carrying around a relationship with food that had been built over decades, and I kept trying to solve it with meal plans and calorie charts alone. Those things matter, of course they do, but they were never addressing the reason food held so much power over me in the first place. I wasn’t just trying to change what I ate. I was trying to untangle a lifetime of emotions that had quietly attached themselves to every bite.
The First Time I Believed I Could Change
Everything shifted when I finally decided to lose weight in my early forties. There wasn’t a magical moment or a dramatic speech in the mirror. I simply reached a place where I was ready to commit to doing the boring things consistently. I followed a calorie-controlled eating plan, kept my carbohydrates under fifty grams a day, tracked what I ate, and slowly built habits that I could actually stick to. It wasn’t glamorous, but it worked.
Over time, I lost forty-four kilograms. Even now, writing that number feels surreal. I’d spent so much of my life believing that lasting weight loss was something other people achieved. Yet there I was, buying smaller clothes, moving more easily, and proving to myself that I was capable of something I’d thought was impossible. Better still, I maintained that weight loss for around two years. It wasn’t a quick rebound. It was a genuine lifestyle change that I’d worked incredibly hard to build.
People often assume that losing a significant amount of weight changes everything. In some ways it does. Everyday life becomes physically easier. You notice small things, like fitting comfortably into chairs without thinking about it or walking longer distances without needing to stop. Some people treat you differently too, and that’s a strange thing to experience. It says far more about society than it does about the person losing weight. You’re still the same human being. The only thing that’s changed is the amount of space you occupy.
Then life reminded me that health doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I became pregnant with Ruby, my miracle baby. During pregnancy I gained around fifteen kilograms, but because I retained an incredible amount of fluid, almost all of that disappeared immediately after she was born. Within a day, I was remarkably close to my pre-pregnancy weight. If you’d looked only at the scales, you might have thought I’d escaped the usual post-pregnancy struggle. The reality was that the hardest part hadn’t even begun.
When Survival Becomes the Priority
Nothing prepares you for how completely motherhood can consume you, particularly when it begins in a NICU. Ruby arrived early, weighing just 1.1 kilograms, and from the moment she was born my world narrowed to one tiny little person who needed everything I had. There were hospital visits, endless worry, interrupted sleep, and the constant fear that something might go wrong. I wasn’t thinking about meal plans or calorie targets. I was thinking about whether my daughter was going to be okay.
When we finally came home, life didn’t suddenly become easier. Like most new mums, I was exhausted beyond anything I’d experienced before. Unlike most new mums, I was also carrying emotional stress that I wasn’t ready to share publicly. There were days when I barely recognised the person staring back at me in the mirror because every part of me had been redirected towards keeping everyone else afloat. Ruby needed me. Other people needed me. There was very little left over for me.
That’s where food quietly slipped back into the role it had played for decades. Delivery apps made comfort incredibly easy to access. After a day spent giving every ounce of myself to someone else, the idea of cooking a balanced meal from scratch often felt impossible. Ordering takeaway wasn’t about laziness, and it certainly wasn’t because I didn’t care about my health. It was because I had reached the end of myself. Food became one decision that didn’t ask anything more of me. It arrived at the front door, gave me a few minutes of comfort, and let me pretend everything was manageable.
I think that’s an important distinction because so many people assume weight gain comes from not caring. For me, the opposite was true. I cared so much about everyone else that I eventually ran out of room to care for myself. Somewhere along the way, survival quietly replaced self-care. My focus wasn’t on building a healthier future. It was simply making it through another day.
“For forty years, food quietened the noise.
Now I’m hoping to find peace without it.”
When Food Became a Medical Conversation
By the time I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, the diagnosis itself wasn’t particularly shocking. Deep down, I already knew. My blood sugars had been telling the story long before a doctor officially confirmed it. It wasn’t the diagnosis that frightened me. It was everything that came afterwards.
Suddenly food wasn’t just about comfort anymore. It came attached to blood glucose readings, medications, insulin, blood tests, cholesterol, kidney function, and doctor’s appointments. Every meal carried numbers. Every decision felt measurable. Every appointment became another opportunity to wonder whether I’d disappointed someone. When you’ve spent decades already feeling like you’re failing at food, adding medical consequences into the mix can feel incredibly heavy.
Some of the hardest moments weren’t even about diabetes itself. They were the comments. Questions like, “Why didn’t you just take care of yourself?” sound simple enough on the surface, but they land like accusations when you’ve spent years trying to survive circumstances people know nothing about. Those words ignore the complexity of trauma, exhaustion, motherhood, mental health, hormones, genetics, finances, and every invisible battle that shapes a person’s relationship with food. They reduce an entire life into a single judgement.
Thankfully, that’s not the whole story. If you’ve followed my health journey recently, you’ll know how proud I’ve been to watch my numbers come down. My blood sugars have improved. My cholesterol has improved. My liver and kidney function are looking good. Every appointment feels a little more hopeful than the last. Those results aren’t about perfection. They’re proof that change is possible, even after decades of believing your body was working against you.
Why I’m Choosing a GLP-1
So here I am, starting a GLP-1 medication, and my emotions are all over the place. Excited. Hopeful. Nervous. Curious. If I’m being completely honest, there’s also a quiet sense of grief sitting underneath it all. That’s not something I’d expected to feel, but it’s there all the same.
I’m not taking this medication because I think it’s a shortcut. I’m taking it because I know what my life looks like right now. I have Type 2 diabetes. I have a toddler who somehow has the energy of a thousand caffeinated squirrels. I’m building a business. I’m trying to write, create, parent, manage a household, keep medical appointments, and remember things like whether I actually moved the washing into the dryer. I don’t have unlimited mental bandwidth, and pretending I do would only set me up to fail again. If there’s a tool that can help me manage my diabetes while also making weight loss more achievable, why wouldn’t I use it?
What I’m hoping for isn’t dramatic. I’m not expecting to wake up one morning and suddenly become a different person. I don’t think this medication is going to magically heal forty years of emotional history. Trauma doesn’t disappear because your appetite changes. Childhood doesn’t rewrite itself because you lose weight. Those are separate journeys. What I am hoping is that it turns the volume down. That the constant chatter about food becomes quieter. That every hour of every day doesn’t feel like another negotiation between what I want, what I should eat, and what I can justify.
What scares me isn’t eating less. It’s wondering who I’ll be when food isn’t my first answer anymore. Food has comforted me for so long that letting go feels a little like saying goodbye to an old friend. An unhealthy friend, perhaps, but one who has shown up consistently for most of my life. If the food noise really does become quieter, I’ll have to learn new ways to comfort myself, celebrate myself, and soothe myself. That’s exciting, but it’s also unfamiliar. Growth usually is.
A Future I Can Be Proud Of
When people talk about weight loss, the conversation usually revolves around numbers. How many kilograms have you lost? What size are you now? What’s your goal weight? Those aren’t meaningless questions, but they’re no longer the questions that matter most to me. I’ve spent enough of my life believing that my worth could be measured on a set of scales.
These days, my goals look different. I want my diabetes to be well controlled. I want more energy to chase Ruby around the backyard without feeling exhausted. I want to travel without worrying whether I’ll fit comfortably into a seat. I want to reduce my risk of the complications that diabetes can bring. I want to keep watching my blood test results improve because every better number represents another step towards a healthier future. None of those dreams have anything to do with becoming perfect. They have everything to do with being present for the life I’m building.
I also hope this journey helps me redefine comfort. Maybe comfort doesn’t have to come wrapped in a paper bag or delivered to my front door. Maybe comfort can become an afternoon walk with Ruby. A quiet cup of tea after she’s gone to bed. Writing words that matter. Laughing with friends. Feeling strong enough to trust my own body again. I don’t know exactly what that future looks like yet, but for the first time in a long time, I’m excited to find out.
My relationship status with food is probably still “it’s complicated.” Maybe it always will be. Healing rarely happens in a straight line, especially when the relationship has lasted more than forty years. There will still be difficult days. There will still be moments where old habits whisper my name. There will probably be setbacks too. But for the first time, I don’t feel like I’m fighting this battle with one hand tied behind my back. I feel like I have support.
“Healing my relationship with food might be the biggest weight I ever lose.”
More Than Weight Loss
If you’ve never struggled with food, I hope this gives you a little more understanding of those who do. Most people living in larger bodies aren’t lazy, weak, or lacking discipline. Many of us are carrying stories you can’t see. Stories of trauma. Stories of survival. Stories of comfort, grief, shame, and hope. You don’t have to know someone’s history to offer them kindness.
And if you do recognise yourself somewhere in these words, I hope you know this: you are not broken. Your relationship with food didn’t develop overnight, and it won’t be rewritten overnight either. You don’t have to earn help. You don’t have to prove you’ve suffered enough before accepting another tool. Whether that’s a dietitian, a therapist, a walking buddy, bariatric surgery, or a GLP-1 medication, there is no prize for making the journey harder than it needs to be.
This medication might help me lose weight. I sincerely hope it does. It might improve my diabetes. I sincerely hope it does that too. But more than anything else, I hope it helps create enough space for me to build different habits, different routines, and a different relationship with myself.
Because after all these years, that’s what I’m really chasing.
Not a smaller body.
A future I can be proud of.
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