# How I Gained 20kgs in a Year
So today we're going to start right at the beginning. And I want to
share with you the story of how I gained weight, because I did a pretty
good job of weight gain. Like, seriously, it is a skill that I'm really
good at. I gained 20 kilos in one year. And that's what I want to tell
you about today.
And I think it's important because if you were going to listen to this
podcast, if you want to get to know me, I want to share with you who I
am as an eater the habits, the behaviors, how I was able to gain so much
weight so quickly. And I know out there in the world of weight loss,
there are a lot of transformation stories. There are so many stories of
people sharing what they did to lose weight. Oh, I lost 30 kilos. And
here's how I did it. And I find that incredibly interesting. And I'm
sure you do too.
But what I find more interesting is looking deeper into how did this
person gain weight in the first place? What are the triggers? What's
happening emotionally. These are the kind of things that I just find
absolutely fascinating. I love talking to my clients and getting a much
deeper picture as to why they gained weight in the first place, because
when you start to look at these triggers, these behaviors and these
habits and really look at where you're at in your journey, that
knowledge will help you keep the weight off because it's all very well
doing a diet or following a plan to lose weight. But if you want to be
able to keep it off, it's all about recognizing your triggers and
changing your habits, getting new behaviors.
So that's what I think. When we explore our own stories about weight
gain, that's what we want to look for. What are the triggers that turned
us into overeaters, binge eaters, whatever that might be. But let me
share my story with you so you get a much better picture as to what led
me to gain weight.
So I'll start with a bit of a spoiler alert. There was actually a big
trigger that led to the 20 kilos of weight gain in a year. A big
emotional trigger. I'll be getting to that shortly, but we don't become
emotional eaters overnight. And when I think back to how I was as a
child, while I would never say that I was the type of emotional eater
who would hide in the cupboards to eat or feel shame about my eating, I
definitely had a lot of emotion in that I loved food. Like, I really I
enjoyed the act of eating.
When I think back to my childhood, we just had a very simple upbringing.
It was quite simple. New Zealand food, good New Zealand food of the late
70s and 80s, you know, meat and three veg for dinner. Breakfast would
probably be cereal or toast. You'd go to school, you would have a piece
of home baking that mum did, maybe a bit of fruit and a sandwich. That
was it. We'd come home from school. My mum was a stay at home. Mum says
she had some afternoon tea for us. We'd eat that and then dinner was.
Mate in three, bitch. It was incredibly simple food, and when I was
young, my weight was just normal, just sort of standard.
I certainly wasn't one of those young people who was quite thin when
they were young. When I look back at photos, I was just probably quite
an average size. And in fact, right through my teenage years, I was
probably a size 10 to 12. So I wasn't overweight as a teenager. As a
young teenager, I was probably fairly normal really, when I look back on
photos.
But when I was a young kid, I just remember we loved eating lollies. And
when I think back to kids parties, there used to be a game where you
would roll the dice and if you had a six, you could run up to the front
and you could get dressed up. Yet to put on a couple of items of
clothing. Then you got a knife and a fork, and you got to cut into a
king sized bar of chocolate, and you could eat the chocolate while you
were standing there, and then everyone else in the circle would keep
rolling the dice. But if someone else got a six, they had the chance to
run up and you had to quickly get the clothes off. They would get the
clothes on and the game would continue.
I bloody loved that game. Like that was always my favourite game. The
chance to attack a king sized bar of chocolate with a knife and fork.
Oh, I was in, you know, and we didn't. We didn't get chocolate much
growing up. I remember once a week when we were teenagers, we could get
a chocolate bar when my mum did the weekly shopping. That was quite
exciting to me, I have to say. And my mum would do baking, but we didn't
have a lot of biscuits. It's not like it was ever an issue. I don't
remember ever saying to my mum, oh, I want to have, you know, more sweet
food. And we weren't allowed it. They weren't. There was nothing like
that going on. It just wasn't a huge part of our everyday eating.
And I don't think that was that abnormal for, for those times. There was
certainly we never went to school with little chippy bags in our
lunchbox. There just was no way near the amount of these highly
processed snack foods that are available now. But I remember at kids
parties, I bloody loved the chance to eat chocolate and those really
indulgent party foods. Man, I remember that very well and I made the
most of every opportunity to eat party food.
I also remember when we got pocket money, if we'd done some work and we
might get a dollar pocket money, my sister and I would go to the dairy
and we would buy some bags of lollies, and that was really exciting too.
I remember with hide under the bed and we'd eat our lollies and we would
pick which one we wanted to eat and look. It was just a very fun
experience of childhood for me, so clearly there was an association
there between yummy sweet food and a lot of pleasure. But I didn't
overeat. As I said, I was a normal weight. It wasn't like I would buy
lollies all the time because we just simply didn't have access to that
type of food or money to buy it. So growing up there was no overeating
or bingeing, but I certainly remember loving sugary foods.
Then what happened when I turned 12 is probably the key thing that
determined my eating future from then through my teenage years, and
would ultimately lead to the trigger that saw me gaining 20 kilos in a
year. And it was when I met my wonderful best friend, Grace. Grace lived
across the road from me, and my mum had met her when we first moved to
my hometown, which was Tokoroa. I grew up in central North Island of New
Zealand.
Well, actually we moved there when I was about ten. We moved from
Wellington, so we moved up to Tokoroa and there was this house across
the road, and my mum had actually looked at that house when we were
looking for a house to buy, and my mum told me there was a girl who
lived in that house who was a similar age to me, and her name was Grace,
but I hadn't met her until we started intermediate school, so that would
have been, yes, seven and she was put in my class.
So my first day of school, I met this girl, Grace, and I realized she
was the girl who lived across the road. So we walked home from school
together. And from that moment, just the most powerful friendship of my
life was born. We fit together like two ends of the magnet coming
together. And it was just an instant friendship, an instant connection
that was so, so strong and powerful. It was just incredible.
And Grace had something really in common with me. We loved eating. We
both loved food. So in the school holidays, I remember that we would
sometimes bike down to the supermarket, buy some chocolate, buy some
chips, and then we'd go back to her house and we put it all out on the
table and we'd have a little, a yummy little taste. And that was a huge
part of what we would do coming home from school. We would go to the
dairy and get a milkshake, buy an ice block. A lot of our fun times as I
was growing up through those teenage years involved eating food,
especially with my lovely friend Grace.
We would cook food together. We might go to the fish and chip shop and
get some fish and chips on a Friday night. You know, it was just a huge
part of our friendship. I remember one time we did the 40 Hour Famine.
Remember that for charity? So we did the 40 hour famine and we just kind
of ate lollies. We ate the old barley sugars non-stop while we were
doing the 40 hour famine. And then I remember at the end when we lasted
by just eating lollies, we were probably in heaven thinking it was the
best thing ever. And we went to the bakery and just bought a whole lot
of food because, you know, we justified it because we'd done a 40 hour
famine. The things you do when you're young, right?
So we had a lot of fun with food, but again, it was always associated
with pleasure. There was never a lot of bingeing going on. I mean, we
might have an overeat, but that was still quite a rare occasion in the
school holidays. So I do remember when I became into my later teens? I
was never as thin as some of my friends, but I wasn't overweight either.
I was just kind of in the middle. Sometimes I think, oh, I wish I could
lose weight, but I never did diets or anything like that.
I went overseas on a student exchange when I was 17, and I went and
lived in Honduras for a year as an exchange student. So I went and lived
with another family, got to eat a lot of that food from a different
culture, but once again, it didn't lead to weight gain and my weight
stayed stable.
Now all of this changed for me when I was 18, at the end of the year
when I had turned 18, and unfortunately, my beautiful friend Grace, we
hadn't been living in the same town at this time. She'd moved away, but
we always stayed in touch and unfortunately she passed away in a car
accident and it was a very difficult time for me, especially because she
had been living in Auckland and I'd finished school and I'd applied to
go to Auckland University, and part of the attraction of coming to
Auckland was because she was here and we were going to have a lot of fun
together. That was the plan. And then incredibly sadly, she passed away
before university started.
So I moved up to Auckland as I'd planned. I'd applied for university and
came to the reality of living in a new city. I did have family here, so
it certainly wasn't a completely challenging experience, but I moved
into the student accommodation and it started a terrible cycle of going
through grief. I was meeting a lot of new people. You know, you're
starting university. It's a really exciting time. But I was also going
through grief of missing my best friend.
Then there was a lot of partying that came from moving to university, as
that first year of university can be incredibly social, and I went into
this kind of hot mess of partying combined within dealing with grief.
And for me, that looked like sitting there eating chocolate chip
biscuits and ice cream and crying. And that was when I really remember
that I became what I would now call that classic emotional eater, a
person who's definitely eating their feelings, trying to stuff their
feelings down with food.
I remember so clearly sitting at my window in my room of my hostel 18,
crying, eating ice cream and just really turning to food to try and deal
with that grief. And as you can imagine, in direct proportion to me,
shoving a whole lot of sugar in my face along with alcohol and all of
the deep fried food that comes when you eat alcohol. I started gaining
weight quickly, incredibly quickly. That's a great combination for
weight gain. Isn't that alcohol? Sugar? Carbs? Sleeping in Bain hung
over 18 burgers. It was an absolute hot mess, and that was the trigger
that saw me on the path of emotional eating, emotional bingeing, and
incredibly rapid weight gain. My body responded very well to that
combination and the response was to start gaining fat fast.
I did go home during that year when I was at university, but I remember
clearly when I went back at the end of the year, so I hadn't seen my
parents probably for about six months at this point. And I took the
train down and I think I got off at Hamilton and I got off what might
have been started. It was somewhere along the line. I took the train and
when I got off the train, my mum was there to make me and I think when
she saw me, she got quite a huge shock because of course in those days
we didn't have the internet and I sure as hell wasn't taking a lot of
photos of myself. So she hadn't seen a picture of me for quite some
time, and she was quite shocked because I had gained a lot of weight.
But bless my mother's heart, she actually didn't say anything about my
weight. And when I think back about that, it's quite incredible how she
managed to not say anything. I'm going to be talking about my mum in a
future episode, actually, about how she dealt with my weight gain and
her reaction, because I think it's a really, really important message
for mothers to hear of. Just another way to approach weight gain.
Because I certainly take my hat off to her and not saying anything. It
must have been really difficult to not say something because I'd gained
a lot of weight.
I mean, I was 19, 20 years old by this time. It's not like I needed my
mum to tell me that I'd gain weight. I was very, very aware of it, but I
was very embarrassed and I didn't want to talk about it. It's not fun
being hugely overweight and gaining weight quickly. When all of your
friends are going out shopping and you're socialising and they're
meeting guys and you're just sort of shrinking into your own skin. I
hated going shopping. I had no joy, really, in going out when it came to
getting dressed.
I like the drinking part. That was always fun until I'd start crying and
shoving all the food in my face when I was in private. I never did that
in front of other people on the outside. I was happy, bubbly, share all
life of the party, drinking, drinking, everyone under the table, you
know, always a lot of fun. But as soon as I would go home, close the
curtains and be in my own room in the student hostel, that was when the
real emotions would come out. Not many people got to see that, but
inside I was incredibly embarrassed so I did not enjoy that experience.
Okay, so that was how I gained my 20 kilos. It was that mixture of
grief, of leaving home, of being in environment where there was a lot of
alcohol, fast food and sugar. I became an absolute emotional eater and
the weight came on very quickly.
And the next episode, I'm going to tell you about the trigger of how
that all changed, the shift that happened in me, that saw me on the path
to completely changing my mindset and being able to lose weight. And of
course, I'm going to tell you about everything that I did that enabled
me to lose 30 kilos in a year, but that's going to come up next time.
Thank you so much for listening, and I'm looking forward to helping you
in your weight loss journey. If you've identified with anything that
I've been talking about, I can't wait for you to hear what's coming up,
and I hope that it's going to help you take the next step in your
journey.
