The Summer I Stopped Finishing My Plate

Through COVID, I knew I needed to lose weight. What I didn’t know was how, or where to start.

I’d tried diets before, and they never lasted, and weight loss without dieting seems impossible. The problem wasn’t willpower, it was the structure itself. The moment you slip, even once, you feel like you’ve failed, and that feeling is what actually derails you, not the missed meal. I was concerned enough about my health to know something had to change, but I was clear about one thing from the outset: this couldn’t be another diet. It needed to be a genuine change to how I lived.

A family holiday was approaching, one of the first we were allowed to take with restrictions easing. I spent a few weeks beforehand thinking it through properly, working out what I actually needed to focus on. Eating healthier was part of it, but the bigger shift was learning to stop eating before I felt full. Food takes fifteen to twenty minutes to register once it reaches your stomach, and I’d spent most of my life eating straight past that signal. I decided to start paying attention to it on holiday, with the plan that the last day of that trip would mark the start of the next stage of my life.

I remember one evening out with the family for pizza. It was absolutely delicious, and slowing down to actually chew it properly (rather than shovelling it in) changed the whole experience. When I felt myself approaching full, I stopped. I left a slice on the plate. Anyone who knows me will tell you how out of character that was, especially at a restaurant I’d been looking forward to.

Weight loss without dieting: what actually worked

From there I started researching properly, and landed on Michael Mosley’s Mediterranean diet approach. It took me into food I’d genuinely never considered before: Greek yoghurt, olive oil, oily fish, a far wider range of vegetables, pulses, and nuts than I’d ever kept in the house. None of it felt like a food chain I’d naturally have wandered into on my own, but I stuck with it, and the shift in how I felt was noticeable early on.

What made it sustainable was that I never treated it as a diet I could fall off. I followed it the majority of the time, and if I went out and wanted something different, I had it, without any sense of guilt or of having failed. That distinction mattered more than anything else I did. Because I wasn’t “on” anything, there was nothing to break.

Around the same time, I started researching intermittent fasting, trying to understand how it worked and whether it could support what I was already doing. Over the following twelve to fifteen months, combining the two, I lost roughly four stone.

The changes went well beyond the scales. My sleep improved. My general wellbeing lifted. My focus and concentration at work sharpened noticeably. I ended up replacing most of my wardrobe, which was a strange kind of problem to have. But the change that struck me most was on our daily dog walks: the pain I’d carried for years in my knees and ankles, left over from a lot of sport as a youngster, simply stopped.

That first phase, built on eating differently and paying real attention to how food made me feel, was what led me toward the gut microbiome. From there came the connections to heart health, to the ongoing communication between gut and brain, and to just how much diversity in what we eat actually matters. That’s where this next part of the story begins.

Gut & Grain shares personal experience and general education, not medical advice. Always speak with a qualified healthcare professional before making changes that affect your health.

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