This blog is a little different from my usual crochet chat, but I wanted to share it anyway.
Before I start, I want to say that I know weight can be a sensitive subject, and I’m very aware that this is personal and that I’m probably over sharing. I also know I’m not massively overweight and I’m not talking about needing to lose stones and stones. For me, this was simply about carrying a bit of extra weight around my middle, feeling self conscious about it, and wanting to do something about it.
I’m also someone who absolutely loves food. Genuinely loves it. Eating is one of my main strengths. So if you’re imagining that this blog ends with me living on dry salad leaves and pretending to enjoy them, don’t worry. That is not where this is going.
Over the last three months, I’ve been working with a personal trainer and online coach called Laura Caddy Lifts, or “The Caddy” as I call her, in a very affectionate Line of Duty inspired way, not because she’s a criminal mastermind, and honestly…it has completely changed the way I think about food, weight loss and what is actually possible in your 40s.
I’m not writing this because I suddenly think I’m some kind of expert. I’m not. I’m writing it because for years, I had started to believe that once you got to your 40s, especially with all the perimenopause chat flying around online, that was it. You were stuck. A bit more weight around the middle, a body that didn’t seem to respond to anything anymore, and a quiet acceptance that nothing was ever really going to change.
That’s genuinely what I believed.
And I know I won’t be the only woman who’s felt like that.
I’m 45, and over the last ten years I’ve tried so many different things. Weight Watchers. Slimming World. Noom. Eating “healthily”. Walking more. Joining the gym. Going swimming. Doing home workouts. I’ve tried all sorts, and nothing ever seemed to properly work.
Or if it did work a tiny bit, it never felt sustainable.
I’d also fallen into that midlife trap of thinking that maybe my body was just doing what middle aged bodies do, and I’d have to lump it.
A really good example was when Mr SC and I gave up sweet treats for a month. No biscuits, no chocolate, no crisps, nothing. At the end of the month, he’d lost eight pounds and I’d put on one.
I’ll say that again, I’d put on a pound.
Honestly, when things like that happen, you do start to think, what is the point? You may as well just eat the chocolate and be done with it. And for the record, I do love chocolate.
Then just after Christmas, while I was still full of festive treats and feeling pretty fed up with myself, I saw a Facebook post from a coach called Laura. She works with women aged 35+, helping them lose weight and feel better, without extreme diets and without anything weird and wonderful.
I also had a very fixed idea in my head of what working with a PT would be like, and it wasn’t a good one. In my mind, it was all shouting, “come on, run faster,” until you were sick, with horrible flashbacks to PE teachers at secondary school. Or it was the sort of advice that comes from people who have never actually been there themselves, telling you what to do while you stand there in jeans that are too tight, desperately craving a bar of chocolate. But Laura is different. Laura is human. She gets it, and that made a huge difference to me right from the start.
That sounded like my kind of thing.
So I booked a free discovery call.
Laura and I had a really good chat, I think on New Year’s Eve actually, and I told her about all the things I’d tried before. She listened, she didn’t make me feel daft, and she explained how she works. Meal plan, workouts, regular coaching and check ins, proper support.
So I signed up.
It was a minimum of three months, and I’ll be honest, I was dubious. Laura is not cheap, but by that point I felt like I’d run out of things to try. I was very much in the mindset of, right then, this is the last chance saloon. If this doesn’t work, then nothing will.
Before I officially started, I had a sort of unofficial practice week where I got used to the app Laura uses. I had a look through the recipes, tried a few breakfasts, looked at the workouts and started to get my head around it all. Then I officially started on 12th January.
That first week was a bit hit and miss food wise, but I was determined not to give up.
Some things were a success. The peanut butter smoothie, for example, was amazeballs.
Some things were absolutely not a success. Cottage cheese porridge, for example, was rank. I threw it out for the birds and not even they would eat it. It was still sitting there a week later, untouched, which tells you everything you need to know.
But what really surprised me from day one was how much food I was eating.
I remember having a chicken, avocado and spinach sandwich for lunch on the first day. Normally I would have looked at something like that and thought, ‘well that’s a lot of bread,’ maybe I’ll just have a salad instead. But I did what I was told, made the sandwich but couldn’t even finish it. I had to save a quarter of it for later because I was so full!
That was my first big clue that this was not going to be one of those miserable plans where you spend your life feeling hungry and thinking about biscuits.
At the end of week one, which technically was only five days, I’d lost three pounds.
I was genuinely shocked.
Mostly because I felt like I had eaten more that week than I had in ages. But what I hadn’t eaten was the random handfuls of chocolate, crisps and snacky bits that used to creep in, because I was so full from actual meals. Chicken sandwiches, peanut butter smoothies, chicken curry for tea, proper filling food.
Even then, I remember thinking, okay, that’s nice, but it probably won’t carry on like this.
Except it did.
I’m now about eleven weeks in and I’ve lost ten pounds.
My clothes feel looser. I feel more comfortable in myself. I’ve been doing the workouts upstairs in the spare room with resistance bands and some dumbbells I already had at home from previous fitness attempts. And whisper it quietly, because I would never want this getting back to Laura, but I’m actually quite enjoying the workouts.
Please don’t tell her.
One of the biggest surprises of all has been that I do not feel like I’m on a diet.
I’m eating loads. I’m not hungry. I’m not constantly thinking about food. I’m not staring into the biscuit tin at three o’clock in the afternoon wondering what I can get away with eating. I’m not rummaging through the cupboard for chocolate buttons because I “need something sweet”.
That urge has just calmed right down.
I think a huge part of that is protein. I’m eating a lot more of it than I used to, and I think that’s what has made such a difference. I’m fuller for longer, my cravings aren’t all over the place, and everything feels much steadier.
I think the word is satiety, which sounds a bit technical for me, but whatever the proper word is, I just feel more satisfied. And when you feel properly full, you don’t spend the whole day obsessing over snacks.
Even during a fairly stressful patch over the last month, I didn’t suddenly find myself reaching for a bag of chocolate buttons. That would absolutely have been my old pattern. But this time, I just didn’t feel that pull.
I can’t quite explain how different that feels.
Another thing that has changed, and this is something I wasn’t expecting at all, is my sleep.
I’m usually quite prone to waking up in the night. Two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock, one of those annoying middle of the night wake ups where your brain starts wandering off and your sleep is ruined. But over the last three months, I’ve mostly been sleeping straight through.
I don’t know whether that’s down to the food, the workouts, the routine, Laura, or some magical combination of all of it, but I’m not about to argue with it.
One of the things I’ve really loved about working with Laura is the weekly check ins.
Now, I’ve never particularly felt like I needed accountability. In business, in life, in weight loss, I’ve always thought I was fine just getting on with things by myself. But Laura described the weekly check in as being like having a cheerleader on the sidelines, and that is exactly what it feels like.
It’s not bossy. It’s not judgemental. It’s not someone telling you off because you haven’t been perfect.
It’s just a really genuine, supportive chat about how the week has gone, what’s gone well, what’s been tricky, and what you might need to tweak.
One week, for example, I mentioned that it didn’t look as though I was going to lose anything. I’d hopped on the scales a few times, it wasn’t really shifting, but I knew I’d been sticking to the plan so I wasn’t in full meltdown mode about it.
Laura asked whether I’d eaten much salt that week.
Well yes, as it happens, I’d been having bacon sandwiches all week. Which, by the way, you can eat on this plan.
Laura explained that salt can make you retain water, so that could easily have been affecting the scales. I ditched the bacon sandwiches for the rest of the week and ended up losing half a pound.
That might not sound like a huge moment, but actually it was. Because if I’d been doing this on my own, or doing one of the old plans I’d tried before, I think I would probably have taken that as a sign it wasn’t working and given up.
Instead, I had someone there to help me make sense of it.
And that has made all the difference.
For me, three months in and ten pounds down, this feels like the beginning, not the end.
This doesn’t feel like a quick fix or a punishment or one of those things you white knuckle your way through until you can “go back to normal”.
This does feel normal.
It’s not massively different from how I was eating before, if I’m honest. It’s just a few smart tweaks, a lot more protein, a better structure, proper support, and food that keeps me full instead of sending me off on a biscuit hunt three hours later.
So why am I sharing this?
I think because I genuinely believed that losing weight in your 40s, without going to extremes or going on the jabs, was basically impossible.
And now I know that isn’t true.
I wanted to share it for any other woman who has started to believe she’s just stuck. For anyone who feels like her body has changed, nothing works anymore, and she may as well just accept it.
You might not be stuck after all.
And I also wanted to share it because Laura has been brilliant. Supportive, sensible, encouraging, realistic, and never once made me feel like I had to survive on lettuce leaves and sadness.
So if you’ve been feeling a bit fed up, a bit uncomfortable in yourself, or a bit like nothing is ever going to shift, I just wanted to say that from one 45 year old woman to another, it may be more possible than you think.
And that’s worth sharing.