Dear Brooke
I’m not doing well. Still off and on a protocol constantly, for the last three years have been feeling awful about weight. My story, in brief, is I did a ketogenic diet three years ago, lost a heap of weight, put it all back on again, and have spent the last three years trying to get that thin again and always, always failing. I have this issue with holding myself to “time frames” – it took me six weeks to lose about 20lbs on the keto diet when I first did it, and so now I am always, ALWAYS making plans that go “ok – six weeks from xxxx” and then I binge right up until the “start date” and if I do manage to stick to the diet for a while, it is always with this huge feast in mind for when six weeks are up, which puts me right back to square one. So I basically starve and binge. And even when I have managed to adhere to the regime, I never lose weight like I did that first time. If I eat anything that isn’t “keto” I freak out and eat everything. I’m now trying to eat to a protocol like you recommend, but to be honest, I have lost all motivation and drive for losing weight any more. I’m starting to think maybe the way forward for me is just to make peace with my body as it is, and be happy and live my life.

I am now due to go to the USA for a holiday in three weeks. And I haven’t lost weight. When I booked the trip, nine weeks ago, I planned to “keto it” right back down to 8 stone, and now I didn’t do that, I’m thinking “If Only I had stuck to a diet I’d be happy and excited and actually wanting to go on holiday” all the time, and that makes me want to stay in bed and I cry the whole way to work. And then my head, in order to try to make myself feel better, starts planning another “diet” – this time, from when I get back from the USA until my birthday in late September. “I can do it! I can lose weight by my birthday! I can still do this!”
But I don’t know if I can take any more of this kind of planning.

My questions, I think, are:
What do I do about the “If Only” thinking? It makes me want to give up and stay in bed forever. Nothing demotivates me more than If Only thinking.

Is learning just to be happy in my body now a cop-out? (I am five foot two and weight probably about 67kgs right now – do the numbers even matter???) I listen to what you say about dreaming big and making huge goals, but I think I might be all out of gas on this one. Maybe a better goal for me is just to get happy exactly as I am, but then I feel like a failure.

I can’t take this any more.