Health: Influencer Trisha Lewis shares her healthy eating journey
The weight loss plan that teaches you the power of the reset button and helps you get back on track every three weeks by chef Trisha Lewis, whose own positive advice has helped her lose 7.5 stone and to aim for even more
Weight loss doesn’t have to be negative. I spent all my adult life hating and avoiding the fact that I had to lose weight. I cried many times, feeling trapped because I felt like a failure. But I wasn’t a failure — I just didn’t have the correct systems in place. Now when things go wrong I don’t beat myself up, I simply reset.
It’s all about how you look at the glass: is it half full or is it half empty? I decided very early on that I would love my journey and that I would learn to love myself.
‘Part of my journey is setbacks and curveballs’
Part of my journey is setbacks and curveballs, and if I love the good, then I also have to love and learn from the not-so-good parts. Part of a weight-loss journey inevitably involves weight gain at some stage, so how do I stay on track and keep going?
The diet culture is everywhere and success story after success story is pouring from our devices, but what happens when you feel you messed up and can’t go on?
What happens when you have a night out filled with wine and a bag of chips? What happens when you haven’t slept well and all you want to do is pick the leftover food from your kids’ plates? What happens when you’re upset and have eaten extra calories and you feel like the only person in the world who does this? What happens when you are doing amazing and then all of a sudden you’re tired and in the drive-through ordering food for a fake friend? (I’ve ordered food for ‘Mary’ so many times, but, in fact, it was all for me.) What happens when you feel like you’re bogged down and you just can’t get your mojo back?
The answer is, you RESET
If you follow these guidelines for three weeks, and use these flavourful calorie controlled recipes, you will feel better. You will feel like you are back in control.
All of us ‘mess up’, but one thing I’ve learned from my journey is that you need to be resilient and resilience comes from never giving up, no matter what your mind is telling you, no matter what the scales say. You hold the power because you are the boss of your own happiness.
We can often overthink things, but often it is the simplest things are the most important. So get the basics right.
I want you to commit to making the next three weeks the most important three weeks of your life. Then, start another round of three weeks and after every single round of three weeks, simply reset and repeat what you did the previous three weeks if it made you feel good. Feeling like crap is just feedback that you are not giving yourself the chance that you need.
I want you to do the 21-day reset 17 times this year and I want you to really smash it.
FAILURE IS POSITIVE
I often get asked what to do after you’ve hit the self-sabotage button, and the answer is reset.
Failure will happen — this is not going to be plain sailing.
The negative feedback that you may have got all your life might mean that you feel useless and unable to achieve a healthy lifestyle. But let’s flip all that around now and look at failure as a positive thing.
In a weird way, failure is a gift because it’s a warning shot that your system isn’t working and that you need to reset.
Stop beating yourself up that when you went into a garage to pay for your petrol, you bought four KitKats too. You’re human. It happens.
Instead of following this up with self-hate and throwing your whole journey out the window, take a deep breath and say, ‘Right, that happened.
‘I can’t undo it, but it doesn’t make me a bad person, just a person who went into a garage when I was hungry and went a bit mad.’
When this happens, make a plan based on what went wrong before. I have a rule with garages that I abide by about 90 per cent of the time. I call it the diesel diet.
I will only purchase diesel
because it’s too easy to sit in the car at the pumps afterwards, scoff down the food and put the wrappers in the bin.
The lightbulb moment is fleeting. Things will slowly get brighter, but you have to work on it bit by bit, plan by plan. You have to keep resetting. Over time, resetting when things get hard will get easier and easier.
Armed with the knowledge that failure will happen, you can be ready for it with a smile and the best tool in the toolbox: the reset.
Your inner critic won’t expect positivity, so catch it off guard and watch how much easier life is when your mind doesn’t go to the negative side straight away. How you react to and deal with failure will determine your journey.