Good Morning!

The newsletter is back in it's regular slot so you should be getting this nice and early on a Saturday morning with a nice weekend ahead.

This week has been a strange week for me really. I was planning on having a week off but work got in the way and I ended up doing a full week. That is the reason I wrote this week's newsletter which is about a balanced life. I went out for dinner recently with a diet industry insider who told me that diets should be worked on in isolation and that you should never include people's other problems into the diet arena, but the reality is that people are themselves! You have the diet and food stuff in your mind alongside all the other things that life brings you in terms of relationships, money, work, arguments, stress etc and all of those effect your emotional state which then drives your food choices.

Therefore, just trying to diet and put your life on hold is actually not possible and finding a balance in life is absolutely key to succeeding with your weight journey. Any diet should be a short term tool to get slim and healthy and not a permanent lifestyle choice.

If you are slim but still jump on and off a diet all the time then I would say that you 'fear' being big again and are constantly fighting, against what you don't want.

For me, having spent 20 years either dieting or not dieting and yo-yoing, this is a very tiresome way to live your life. I am much more proud of spending the last 3 years without needing to diet than if I dieted from Monday to Friday to allow myself to overindulge at the weekend. My goal for everyone I work with is that they use a safe, recommended way of getting slim and then they go off and stop dieting and just do something more interesting! Dieting and diets can, and should be, fun but ultimately it should be something you plan on doing once and then walk away from.

Before I leave this week, and talking of a balanced life, I have decided to stop doing the workshops and coaching courses. I have a day job in IT which takes up a lot of my time and I have realised that my family life is at risk because of the sheer amount of time I put into other ventures. I have therefore decided to keep writing these newsletters and continuing to help people online but I also want to concentrate on what is most important to me, my family.

And finally I was reading a report this week that states that 4 million women in the UK start a diet every Monday and 3 million will break the diet by the Wednesday. Looking for the positive, that means 1 million women will do a diet really well from Monday to Wednesday!! Therefore be part of that club ;-)

Have a great week as always and cya Saturday

Mike :-)