It started with my mum. She spent 17 years stuck on the dieting rollercoaster after having us kids.
Dan Martini | Your Coach
Health Scientist | Nutritionist | Naturopath
Every January brought a new crash diet. The 800 calorie plan. The juice cleanse. The six week challenge at the gym. Whatever a celebrity swore by that summer. Weeks of eating almost nothing, cooking two dinners, saying no to cake at her own kids’ birthdays. She’d drop a few kilos, then put more back on. Feel broken. Blame herself. Start again Monday.
Then I watched it happen again, a lot closer to home. After my wife had our daughter, and again after our son, the same pressure landed on her. Bounce back. Be strict. Get it done before the baby turns one. She was running on broken sleep and feeding a newborn, and people were still handing her fasting rules and cleanses that had nothing to do with what her body was going through.
I hear the same thing from almost every mum I speak to. You barely sit down to a proper meal. Two bites of toast while you pack the bags, whatever is left on your daughter’s plate, something grabbed on the way out the door, crackers and cheese while you cook for everyone else. Written down it would look like plenty. To you it feels like nothing. And you are hungry the entire time. “I swear I’m barely eating and the scales still go up.” I’ve lost count of how often I hear that.
And underneath it is something bigger. You’ve spent years giving every last bit of yourself to everyone else, and somewhere in the middle of it you disappeared. So you get dressed in the dark. You keep the jeans in the bottom drawer and tell yourself you’ll get back into them one day. You stand at the back of every photo and skip the beach because you can’t face swimmers. This was never about the scales. You want to feel like you again. Confident in those jeans. Comfortable in swimmers. Enough energy for your kids, and able to like what you see in the mirror again.
Here’s what nobody told either of them, and what nobody tells you. After pregnancies, and again as you get older, your body genuinely changes. Hormones shift, sleep breaks, stress sits high, your gut takes a hit, and your hunger hormones (ghrelin and leptin) stop giving clear signals. That’s why the 3pm cravings feel impossible, why you can be exhausted and starving at once, and why the diet that worked at 25 does nothing now. It was never willpower.
You’re not broken, and you don’t need another diet that starves you. Your body is just asking for something different.
So instead of cutting more out, we go after the root cause with a proven protocol. We bring your hormones back into balance so your body stops holding on. We heal and repair the gut, then get it working properly again, because that is where so much of your metabolism, mood and cravings are decided. Then we rebuild your metabolism with enough protein and fibre to keep you full, steady blood sugar so the cravings settle, and sleep and stress supported so your body works with you instead of against you. Real food the whole family eats, one dinner not two, built around nap times and school runs.