I'm Yasmin, the creator and founder of The K Plan and a qualified counsellor & psychotherapist. I believe your weight loss wellness journey should be a holistic lifestyle transformation, as individual and unique as yourself. The K Plan is an individually tailored lifestyle transformation plan for the emotional eater.  The aim to create long-term positive changes to your physical, emotional and social wellbeing.

I have great empathy for those who find a healthy lifestyle transformation difficult. I can only but assure you - if I can transform my habits and lifestyle, then anyone can with the right tools, support and eventual mindset. Hopefully, by reading about my personal struggle with my weight and my mental health wellbeing you will be inspired to be positive in achieving your own healthy weight loss wellness goals.

For me personally, battling with the hormonal changes a person experience’s throughout the different stages of their lifetime and the stress factors we as humans experience on a daily basis left me battered, bruised and worn out. We all have  "life" happening to us at a continuous momentum, without much room if any for recovery.

In my twenties and thirties if I put weight on - I was able to lose it relatively easily.  Once I reached forty, however - the weight piled on. And stayed on. I didn't realise at the time events from a previous decade had helped my slender size eight balloon. I crept up the scales until one day at nearly forty-six years old I realised a size eighteen was edging on being too tight for me. For the past five years, I had drifted and yo-yo-ed from diet to fad to exercise to crying in sheer despair to binge eating. I reached for another Battenberg slice and cried whilst I sat in the car plotting how I would hide the evidence. I really felt there was no hope.

Slow weight loss didn't help me!

I would lose a pound here, a kilo there - only to fall off the wagon and put those few pounds back on. All it would take was feeling pre-menstrual - one week a month of tears and binge eating.  If I exercised more - I ate more. I stopped socialising, I looked like a frump and I was tired of not achieving my goals. I definitely wasn't much fun to be around.

Once quite active (I had run fitness boot camps myself in my twenties and thirties), now I was comfort eating as a coping strategy. I was crippled by an Achilles injury which stopped me in my tracks. I could barely walk let alone do star jumps. I was demoralised by being told it “was my age”, my cholesterol was sky high and my hormones seemed to be all over the place. I knew if I carried on like this I would be a potential candidate for diabetes type two and heart disease. 

It was only when my daughter was reaching thirteen. This was a real trigger for me.  My father had died suddenly in his sleep of a heart attack at the age of thirty-nine, I was thirteen years old when I found him dead in his bed. I believe my father would have lived longer if he had made adjustments to his lifestyle.

This includes a healthy weight, diet and exercise but also finding ways to manage stress. At the time I  just felt lost and didn't know where to start. I just wanted to give up.

My lifesaver came in the form of the third counselling qualification I was studying for. Within the first year of my course, my mindset changed.  Through a new self awareness and healing of past trauma. It was actually this positive change in my mental wellbeing which was the catalyst for my own lifestyle transformation journey. This time I was not sabotaging my efforts. 

I knew what I needed and ended up putting together my own plan - which worked for me. I was able to use my counselling & psychotherapy training, this included looking at my behaviour patterns, the emotions behind them - working on changing them (wasn't easy) and finding creative ways to manage stress.

In fewer than 20 weeks I had lost just over three stone. My Achilles no longer stopped me exercising, my skin was brighter and tighter and for the first time in a long while I was enjoying life again. I stopped seeing green envy and stopped criticising my nearest and dearest. I became a lot nicer and kinder to be around. I even had space in my head to be funny and creative again.

Friends and family where shocked and surprised not only at my weight loss but the fact "I had actually done it". Most knew how much of a struggle it had been for me (I had noticed some "eye rolling" in the past when I talked about "when I lose the weight").  Here I was - over three stone lighter! I was more than eager to share my plan with anyone who would listen to me. I was (and still am) overflowing with enthusiasm - the thought of helping others on their weight loss journey fills me with joy and contentment. 

Changing my mindset - gave me a new found confidence. An empowerment. I am not still not the skinniest I have ever been. But bigger than that I am comfortable in my own skin. My size. I no longer need to be skinny, buying clothes that I don't fit into. I no longer try to hide when there is a camera insight. I love me - for the person I am.

Thats the biggest take away from the K Plan. Learning to love myself in my own skin. I hope you find that too.