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.
