Ok, let’s get it out of the way: I am like 2 stone (14kg) above what I consider to be my ideal weight. There is so much talk about body positivity now that wasn’t there when I was growing up that it feels like it shouldn’t be a problem but one thing that is never mentioned is that I (so I presume other overweight people too) often experience feeling of mild ache around my stomach area that was never there when I was lighter.

What I don’t like in particular is waking up feeling full. When I was my ideal weight (by which I don’t mean skinny) I used to wake up feeling like I’m ready for breakfast and I also experienced more joy out of my meals, things just seemed to be this tiny little bit tastier.

Yet, the last couple of years I cannot successfully loose any weight. When I buy a packet of biscuits I need to really watch myself so that I don’t eat it all within 2 days, the same apply to chocolate. I stopped attempting to even go on a diet because, although it can be very effective for a while, it never works long term.

Every time when I have less of a control over what goes on my plate (like when I’m on holiday or if I work somewhere where meals are provided) I experience a crisis that completely ruins my healthy habits.

The other thing is, however, my all or nothing, autistics way of thinking: if I want to be slimmer and healthier I can’t possibly have a ready meal for dinner – that’s what I think when I’m at the supermarket. I get home and realise I’m too tired to cook so I am ending up eating biscuits.

It’s only been those couple of months recently that I realised that instead of following rituals that may work short term but are in fact limiting my life (like calorie counting or intermittent fasting) I should make healthy eating enjoyable and easy. There’s nothing wrong with having a tinned soup for lunch and knowing that it only contains 160kcal gives me an indication that it’s not going to be quite enough so I need like slice of bread and some fried chicken with it. Being realistic is very important.

Doing this, however, didn’t really make me loose any weight. It seems like there’s still too much food that I’m putting into my digestive system for my metabolism to handle. And if I have to be quite honest I’d like to be able to choose my timing of meals and what I eat based on how hungry I am. But then what happens is, I feel like I’m never going to be hungry again, even if I stopped eating for good, which of course triggers a massive Fear Of Missing Out, which again ruins everything.

I never really had healthy relationship with food. I have lactose intolerance that I was unaware of till my early 20s and my main symptoms is a horrible pain in the stomach that mimics hunger pangs. And, to make matter more complicated, I was brought up on a farm with a milky cow. We were drinking milk around the clock, like some other people drink wine on weekends.

Funnily enough, most of that time I was slimmer that I am now and I really do not know what happened. Possibly I just eat too much for what I need, even though I don’t have any hunger pangs now and possibly I need to admit that. But what really puts me off another attempt on loosing weight is the fact that I’d have to, once again, use mental effort to control my food intake. This is really not working long term and no diet approach seems to even acknowledge that.

I wonder what mechanism long term slim people use to control their food intake but there doesn’t seem to be much research on that or at least I didn’t hear of any. Or maybe they’re just not so bothered about food?