How at 45 I’ve misplaced 3 stone and damaged the maintain meals has over me with out fats jabs: Nothing’s off limits, my secret ISN’T a eating regimen and it is serving to so many ladies. Here’s the three steps it is advisable take. Don’t wait… change your life too

I can clearly remember the first time I loved how I looked in a bikini.

It was 2017 and I was on holiday by myself in Costa Rica. Six years before that, I’d travelled to Nicaragua with a friend and I was so self-conscious about the way I looked, I wouldn’t even walk on the beach without a cover-up.

This time I didn’t need one. I wasn’t thinking about my body or about food and I was eating everything – nothing was off limits.

Having struggled with bulimia between the ages of 16 and 31, this was something I could never have imagined.

I’m 5ft 2in and, at my heaviest, weighed 150lb (10st 10lb). Now, I’m 110lb (7st 12lb) and, at 45, the thinnest I’ve ever been. It’s been a long journey, but after years of ­bingeing and purging, of feeling I wasn’t ­perfect enough, I’ve managed to create the life I wanted for myself – one where food no longer has power over me.

I didn’t use weight-loss medication, shots or extreme diets. Instead, I’ve adopted a whole new attitude towards food – I call it the Sober Eating Movement – and now I’m helping other women get to their target weight using it too. Sober eating isn’t about abstaining or removing certain foods completely. It’s about altering the connection between eating and emotion. For many women, those two things are ­inextricably linked, but when you’re using food to quash or change feelings, you’re not controlling your eating, but allowing it to control you.

The Sober Eating Movement isn’t a diet and it’s certainly not a rule book. Instead, it’s a lifestyle, or even a philosophy, where nothing is punishment. Where eating a roll on holiday isn’t the end of the world.

What it is about is making decisions. In my one-on-one coaching sessions, I ask people to ask themselves a number of crucial questions and make decisions based on them.

Are you looking for instant gratification with food? Or do you want to see the bigger picture and arrive at a place of long-term self-respect?

For many years, I was in the former camp. I grew up on Long Island, New York, and was raised in the late 80s and 90s when being thin was a measure of a woman’s value. What’s more, my father was a plastic surgeon. I was brought up with a hyperfocus on body image and food was the ­substance I controlled in order to produce the ‘right one’.

Aged 15, I remember watching a film about a gymnast who made herself sick after she’d eaten and thinking to myself: this sounds like a pretty efficient way to control my weight. But that wasn’t all it was controlling. Food was a lever I used to regulate emotion. Eating ­comforted me; purging afterwards gave me a sense of elation.

At first this felt empowering – I’d found the secret to staying slim and I was getting lots of compliments and ‘validation’ from all the weight loss. Somehow I was able to ignore the fact I felt utterly terrible after each cycle of bingeing and purging.

The biggest irony? To all intents and purposes, I was living a very ‘healthy’ lifestyle at the time. I’d been practising yoga and meditation since I was 18 and after college I became a dietician. And yet here I was, buying all the wrong food in the supermarket, coming home and eating it in one huge binge and then feeling as though life would end if I didn’t eliminate it all. 

Underneath, bulimia was wrecking my life. I didn’t have a boyfriend because my confidence was shot and yet that too was piling on the stress. I was brought up in the Modern Orthodox Jewish culture, where the pressure to get married before 25 is huge. By 26, I was still single and people were constantly telling me there was ‘something wrong’ with me.

I’d go to dating events just to placate everyone, but end up not speaking to anyone and heading home afterwards to eat and vomit.

The turning point came when I hit 150lbs (10st 10lbs). I was at a family party when my dad commented on my weight gain and made it clear my size wasn’t going to be helpful for me or my future happiness.

Around that time, I started ­practising Mysore Ashtanga Yoga. I found morning classes very calming but also difficult if I’d purged the night before, especially with the various twisting positions.

I then studied Ayurveda – an ancient Indian system of medicine which aims to balance the mind, body and spirit through meditation, yoga and diet – and became an Ayurveda nutritionist. All this – my father’s bluntness, the yoga, the Ayurveda – began to add up.

I stopped fixating on carbs and sugar and started thinking about food not as something I could manipulate to stay thin, but in terms of nourishment. I ate rice bowls, fish and lots of veggies. I’d never eaten red meat, but now I cut out chicken too, because digesting it was difficult after all the bingeing and purging I’d put my body through. Eventually, after a few months, I noticed that I’d lost 25lbs (almost 2st).

I also started to say no to things that were ‘triggering’ for me, which is a really big tenet of the Sober ­Eating Movement. Going to dating events, for example. I realised I’d been doing it just to please other people. So I stopped. Soon, I became very comfortable just being by myself – another hugely ­important part of my philosophy and approach to Sober Eating.

Other triggers included intense family situations, which I learned to deal with. The key was to avoid raising the emotional temperature. When your nervous system is at ease and you’re fully connected to your body’s ­natural hunger and fullness cues, the over-eating will stop, just as it eventually did for me.

As my body recalibrated, I ended up losing 15 more pounds. I started listening to my body in a sober way, not reacting to the chaos of emotions inside it.

I even applied my new philosophy to dating. Any relationships I’d managed to start had always ended up feeling toxic because I was exhibiting the same compulsive and controlling behaviour I applied to food. I’d meet someone, there’d be an intense chemistry, but then I’d find myself obsessing and not thinking about my own needs.

In September 2020, however, I met Bryan, a marketing executive, on the dating app Bumble. I’d been on dates with men like him in my early 20s and thought they were boring because they were reliable. It turned out to be the easiest, sweetest relationship I’d ever had – but still, it helped to apply Sober Eating principles. Just as I taught myself not to eat the whole cake, I also taught myself not to text him immediately after every date. We got engaged after a year and married two months later.

Most of the clients I work with today don’t have bulimia. Some are overeaters or mindless eaters. But I’m also helping women who use GLP-1s like Mounjaro. Weight loss jabs remove the food noise, but as soon as you stop taking them, it comes back and you’ve changed nothing.

By contrast, I shine a light on the reasons why you overeat. I help you get to the root cause of it, so when you stop them, you’ve changed everything.

It all boils down to decisions. I truly believe lasting weight loss isn’t about willpower, it’s about personal responsibility. Once you realise that your decisions directly correlate to your weight – and you make them not from an immediate need for gratification but from a set of principles that value you as a ­person – then you’ve cracked it.

My Sober Eating plan has three phases. Working through each will help you lose the weight, keep it off and feel secure with eating afterwards. Here’s how…

Phase 1: Rewire your nervous system away from urgency

In this phase, we teach the nervous system to experience urgency ­without obeying it. Urgency is a ­feeling of something intense taking over your actions, without you being able to control it. One of the most ­important shifts is ­recognising that:

• Urgency lies;
• Intensity passes; 
• A thought does not equal an action. 

The body begins to learn – through repetition and experience – that it can move through a triggering situation (a family row, for example) without collapsing into all-or-nothing behaviour. It’s teaching yourself you can eat one bread roll without then deciding you’ve failed so might as well eat the whole breadbasket.

An important part of this is to rewire the binge-diet loop so your body feels safe without food.

The binge diet loop is: 1) eat compulsively to the point of discomfort 2) feel guilty or ashamed and try to restrict food or impose strict rules around it 3) see those rules eventually break down 4) feel like a failure 5) binge again. Sometimes you can break that loop by breathing through the moment or redirecting your attention by doing something simple like going for a walk.

Every time you break it, you learn that:

• Discomfort can be survived without urgency;
• Choice still exists even when emotions spike; 
• Regulation can come from many places, not just food.

As the nervous system ­experiences this again and again, food stops becoming the primary escape hatch. After Phase 1, food won’t have lost its appeal, but it will have lost its power.

Phase 2: Reprogramming

In Phase 2, you learn not to suppress emotions, but to recognise them without automatically resorting to self-sabotage. A key reframe in this phase is understanding that:

• Feeling something doesn’t mean you must fix it;
• Thinking something doesn’t mean you must act on it;  
• Eating can be a choice, not a reflex. 

This is where we replace rigid rules, diets and trendy quick fixes with self-trust and confidence in making food and eating ­decisions. Part of being an adult is making decisions and you want to make them out of self-respect.

I have a saying that you can eat whatever you want, but not whenever you want all the time. You just have to make a choice.

As part of the Sober Eating Movement, I have a meal guide and template which offers ­specific examples of how to ­structure meals. My eating strategy is sequenced so that people can design their own ­‘day of eating’.

In order to eat without rules, it’s important to:

• Stay regulated while eating. Namely, make clear and confident eating choices without any guilt or shame;
• Notice satisfaction without bargaining. If you want to eat a piece of cake, do so. Savour the experience. Don’t rush it and don’t tell yourself you’ll starve yourself the next day because of it. A slice of cake in and of itself cannot make you fat. It’s the decisions around it (how much, how often) that does that. 

You don’t need extreme rules to stay safe around food and ­maintain a desired body image. You can order fries without ­feeling guilty and stop when satisfied.

Guilt thrives on binary thinking – the idea that eating is either ‘on track’ or ‘out of control’. When that belief dissolves, stopping when satisfied feels natural, not forced.

Phase 3: Holding steady when life becomes unpredictable

Phase 3 reinforces the idea that ‘skilful does not mean perfect’.

You’ll learn to practise anticipatory self-respect – relating to yourself as someone worth protecting, not correcting. You’ll learn to see yourself clearly when looking in the mirror and not judge yourself.

But this doesn’t mean you have to be perfect. Sometimes you’ll want to experience instant ­gratification and that’s OK. Maybe you’ll overdo it and wake up the next day feeling bloated. Or if you are someone who needs to weigh yourself every day (which I don’t recommend), you’ll get on the scales and see that you’re 5lbs overweight. That’s ok too.

If you trust in yourself and make steady, clear decisions about your diet, the weight will eventually come off in a few days to a week. This happens to me all the time.

The bottom line is, you don’t have to be 100 per cent all the time – an average of 85 per cent is just fine. You’ll learn how to feel calm and relaxed around food and how not to choose the brief moment of relief that overeating affords. That is what can create lasting change.

For more information on Alana, the Sober Eating Movement, and her other programs, visit: www.bewellbyak.com

As told to Lina Das