Chrissie Webber works as a writer, business coach and motivation/ leadership trainer and is Managing Director of Life-Shapers Ltd, an online weight-loss motivation company. With over 20 years experience in the field of business and people development she has an expertise in the area of motivation for permanent weight loss.
Following a lifetime of weight issues - at her heaviest, over 21 stone and a massive size 30 – she has personal experience of diets and their devastating effect on size and psyche. With a background in nursing, psychology and business coaching, coupled with a lifetime of dieting, she developed and successfully used a series of models and tools that enhance weight loss motivation. Now over 5 dress sizes smaller and having sustained her weight loss for several years, Chrissie continues her passionate drive to change the mindsets of people away from a ‘Scarcity’ dieting mindset – where food is demonised as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – to an ‘Abundance’ mindset where mind, body and spirit work hand in hand with food and nature.
The recent Government report into childhood obesity has got me thinking. The focus of the report is on the need for healthier eating habits in childhood. This I definitely applaud. However, we as parents pass on many of our habits and beliefs to our children, some of which are related to food.
What really concerns me is the statistic that shows that for 98% of dieters, weight loss is not sustainable. In fact, most regain the weight and at least 10% more within 2-3 years. This means that the dieting tools (habits and beliefs) are failing most of us. These are the habits and beliefs that we have been passing on to our children for decades! If they do not work for us as a long-term solution to our weight issue, how can we expect them to work for our children?
Parents, and teachers for that matter, need more tools in their toolkit for managing life in a world of food abundance. We can no longer continue to label some foods as ‘bad’ and expect our children not to want it and crave it. We can no longer expect our children to eat healthily and exercise regularly if we ourselves do not role model this behaviour.
This is a subject that I am passionate about as I was an obese child. I grew up with the bullying, prejudice and shame. Throughout my childhood I learnt habits with food that have taken me half a decade to overcome. We owe it to the generations of the future to get this right now by developing a mindset that allows us all to live in a world of food abundance without fear, guilt, shame and self-loathing.
