my story


I know you because I am you

The Last Diet was created largely from my experience in two main areas:

A lifelong struggle with my weightA career in addiction treatmentThere’s no denying it, I was a chubby baby. At some point in my childhood, I started realizing that my body was causing concern to those around me. When I was around nine years old, my mother began worrying that my weight was becoming an issue. So she started changing what she cooked at home and drawing my attention to the things I ate that I shouldn’t eat so much of. She didn’t tell me outright that it was because those foods were causing me to gain weight and that gaining weight was a bad thing. And, as a child, I simply picked up on the fact that there was now a new way to be “good” or “bad.” This was the first time I realized that some foods were naughty and that eating them would make people unhappy with me.

I had already started to suspect something was up. I remember kids in junior school asking me why I was bigger than them. I remember being in a school uniform shop once when I was about ten and the shop assistant telling my mum that the sizes didn’t go up any higher, and that she’d have to start altering my skirts. My mum then started to sew extra panels into the side and, when I went to school, I realized that parts of my skirt were a very slightly different shade to other girls’.

As I became more aware that there was something “wrong” with me, I became more dependent on behaviors like bingeing and secret eating that would cause me to gain a lot of weight very quickly. As soon as I had a chance to consume the foods that my mother had controlled at home to slow down my weight gain, I would eat them like there was no tomorrow. I would obsess over getting my hands on them and strategize to ensure I could be alone with them. I would lie about how much of them I had eaten. I’m not proud to admit the lengths I’d go to for a “hit” of the forbidden foods. And it was very much a hit, because that’s the other force that was embedding my dependency on the forbidden foods: they were very high in sugar and fat. Food addiction was a very real part of my life before I understood what it was or indeed that it even existed.

In a similar way to what happens with many drugs, my tolerance grew and eventually I needed more of those hits more frequently to get my fix. As a result, I continued to gain weight at a rapid pace. By the time I was about twelve, the GP was telling me I was obese, and I had already grown very accustomed to being told by my peers that I was fat (and that being fat was a bad thing).

During secondary school, I started believing that boys didn’t fancy fat girls and fat girls aren’t popular unless they’re funny or have something else to bring to the table. These assumptions began to turn into a self-fulfilling belief, where for example I would choose to stay at home and binge instead of going to a party, because I decided that while I was fat, I wasn’t going to have much fun. TV shows and movies didn’t help either. It seemed to be a very common storyline that it wasn’t until someone lost weight that they became desirable, popular and self-respecting.

My relationship both with food and with my weight started to become a problem I desperately wanted to deal with. I went to my mum asking for help and, with the best intentions in the world, she started calling for backup. She approached the issue from every angle you could think of. Anything to stop me crying when I’d come home and say someone had made fun of me at school. We’d go to nutritionists, slimming clubs, dieticians, herbalists, hormone specialists and hypnotists. We came at the problem from two angles:

Find out what’s wrong with my bodyFind out how not to be fat anymoreMy mum would sit there and explain (what she thought was) the whole story to the “experts” over and over again. What she didn’t know was that at this stage I wasn’t sure whether it was my secret binges on the forbidden foods that was the issue or if it was a problem with the way my body was working. By this point, I wasn’t aware of how much I was already using food as a drug to help me cope with all the social, physical and emotional discomforts of being overweight. Since so many of my impulsive, rebellious, opportunistic eating habits had developed in secret, I didn’t register how my actions were spiraling. Plus, I was just a kid!

During the initial consultations and assessments, I was made very aware of how long my weight had been causing concern. I witnessed countless pitches from experts who I realize now could only sell my mum a fix if they concluded that I needed fixing. I became more and more conscious that something was the matter with me and that it was costing those around me time, money and energy to try to fix it (however hard they tried to hide this fact from me). Behind every consultation room door was a new person who would weigh me, prod me, confirm something was wrong with me and offer me a cure.

As a result of many of these appointments, I would adopt various “expert-recommended” crash diets, and I genuinely wanted them to change my body and my life. But of course, they never did, because every time I fell off the wagon, I would binge. By my mid-teens, I seriously didn’t want to be overweight anymore and was prepared to do anything to make that possible. Plus, my mum and I were a team, and although she never put pressure on me, she knew the rules I was meant to be following for each different attempt. Quite naturally, she was disappointed when I couldn’t keep up the plans because she knew how desperately I wanted to be slimmer. The problem was that she couldn’t really be the team-mate she wanted to be because she didn’t know the level my dependence on food had reached. Even if I’d wanted to, I didn’t have anywhere near enough insight or self-awareness to explain what was going on for me.

So, over and over again I’d fall off track with these plans, become disillusioned and end up heavier than when I started. Any success they brought eventually became a curse, because the diets that gave me quick transformations were the ones I couldn’t sustain, the ones that made life miserable. People would applaud me when I was visibly smaller, but they would notice every time I gained weight too. This of course made me feel self-conscious and afraid of being judged, as well as fostering the belief that people preferred me when I wasn’t fat.

I reinforced this belief throughout my life, associating not being able to manage my weight with disappointments in other areas. I would look for evidence to confirm my suspicion that being fat was bad. And of course, growing up in the nineties as a girl in the Western world, there was a lot of it flying around.

Since my eating habits became entirely associated with my weight from such a young age, from birth to the time I went to university to study psychology, my “way of eating” had looked like this:

Breast milkFood my mum knew was healthy for kids in generalFood my mum knew would help me lose weight + secret bingesExtreme diet plansExtreme diet plans + secret bingesFood my mum knew would help me lose weight + secret bingesExtreme diet plansExtreme diet plans + secret bingesEtc.When my parents dropped me off on campus to live on my own for the first time at university, I was already close to being my heaviest ever. However, I had decided that I would transform while I was there, eventually, by starving myself. And so in the meantime I would eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, however I wanted for the first time in my life. And oh boy, did I go for it. In that first term of university I ate in a way that caused me to gain a lot more weight. I also developed a regular weed smoking habit that didn’t help matters. It was a disastrous marriage of substances, joining together to help me avoid and delay emotional discomfort as well as making me want to eat more.

As I grew closer to some of my friends at university, I discovered that they had a very different relationship with food than I did. When we went to the supermarket, they knew which ingredients to buy in order to cook a number of meals that were part of their ordinary way of eating. I, on the other hand, was leaving with shopping bags full of either celery and seeds or french fries and pudding. I didn’t have a dozen “meals” in mind because my meals had always consisted of things my mum had cooked and things that were forbidden. Both for cultural reasons and the fact my mum reigned over the kitchen in my house, the only meals I ate regularly were either way too complicated for me to want to learn how to cook, or way too “healthy” for me to be convinced to cook. A “big shop” for me often involved picking what I wanted to eat that day and just multiplying it by fourteen to last me two weeks.

I carried on like this into my second year of university, until I got to a point where I was used to waking up feeling lethargic and heavy. It’s lucky I wasn’t interested in alcohol at that time, as I imagine that would have made the situation much worse. During this time there were of course still attempts to lose weight. Although I told my mum that I was done with all the expert outsourcing, I was still determined to one day be slim. After all, my flawed belief system told me that it wasn’t until I had lost weight that I could really go out, take up the space I deserve to and enjoy my life.

I’d got to a stage where if I caught myself starting to feel good or enjoy myself for whatever reason, I would immediately think “this would be so much better if I wasn’t still fat.” Often, I would catch a glimpse of myself and realize that not only I had expanded but also that I had stopped taking pride in my appearance and my surroundings. So, in response, I would punish myself by deciding to embark on another crash diet and life transformation plan. These would commence between one and five times a week, and last for anything between one hour and six weeks. But now they were harder to keep to than when I lived at home, since I didn’t have a routine or any supervision. Plus, my addictive eating patterns had a hold on me that made the withdrawals really painful whenever I’d try to rashly deprive myself, thinking that’s what I deserved for letting things get to this stage.

I was also able to adopt much more extreme diets, ones that my mum would understandably never have allowed. I started abusing laxatives and taking appetite suppressants from the internet that were essentially amphetamines. I could go days without eating if I wanted to, without anyone noticing. So not only was university a fertile ground for my food addiction to spiral, it was also the perfect place for my quick-fix, all-or-nothing, lose weight at any cost thinking to get worse.

On one occasion, I continued long after the usual six weeks, and although I used a combination of very unhealthy methods, I managed to lose a lot of weight. I went from a size 20 to a size 8. For the first time in my entire life, I was undeniably thin.

So, I lived as a thin person for a couple of years during my last year of university and the year following it. My hair was thinning and I struggled to focus, but I didn’t care because for the first time I was thin. Although you will have gathered that this story doesn’t end well, I have to admit that it was all that I’d hoped it would be in a lot of ways, but largely because I’d spent my life treating it as the criterion I needed to meet in order to enjoy myself.

I wore the clothes I’d always dreamed of wearing; I went on a holiday and wore a bikini the whole time; I stood up straight and acted more spontaneously. Plus, the world applauded me. And not just because of my achievement, because I was thin. I wish this wasn’t true but it was. I knew this because coming into contact with new people as a slim person was an entirely different experience. The suspicions I’d had that fat people weren’t treated as well as thin people—at least in the UK—were confirmed. When I met people for the first time as a slim person and told them how much weight I’d lost, they usually reacted to my “before” pictures with shock and horror. “That doesn’t even look like you!,” “Wow, what an achievement, you looked ten years older then!,” “You look SO much better now,” “Make sure you keep up the good work!,” “It just suits your face more to be thin,” “Boys must be queuing up now…” I lapped it up.

Then there were the people who knew and cared for me, who communicated their relief that I was finally thin. They treated my weight loss as a done deal, a solution to a problem that had been low-key concerning everyone for a while, not least because of how much it concerned me. Everything was fixed as far as other people were concerned, and I deserved praise, so they were happy to tell me how much better I looked.

But it wasn’t a fix. They didn’t know that I hadn’t found a long-term solution to staying slim other than things like skipping meals, white knuckling it and abusing appetite suppressants. Plus, every time someone told me how much better I looked now, it made me think they didn’t think I looked fine before. Nonetheless, in the short term at least, people reacting positively to my weight loss spurred me on.

Predictably, the combination of not knowing what to eat to maintain my new size and needing constant external validation meant that once the compliments died down and it turned out that all life’s problems hadn’t disappeared, I subtly started lapsing. I ate to deal with the disappointment of slimness not being the solution to my low self-esteem and also because I was starving all the time. I slipped back into old ways—in that I slipped back into no “ways,” just impulsive, isolated binges—and my weight crept back on until, before I knew it, I wasn’t thin anymore. It was like it had all been a dream. I was back where I started and, although it made me desperately sad and disillusioned, it was also strangely comforting in its familiarity and predictability.

Over the next few years, well into my late twenties, I repeated this pattern of losing huge amounts of weight at rapid speeds once I’d hit another “rock bottom” and then gaining it again. Many had learned to stop commenting on my always fluctuating weight. As an old colleague once said when I walked into a meeting after four months of not seeing her, “Oh you’re thin again! We were all just debating whether we thought you’d be thin or not this time.” I’d say that between the ages of 23 and 30, I spent 20 percent of the time very slim, 60 percent very overweight and the other 20 percent in the transition process.

By this time, I had started living in London. I got my master’s degree and when it came to choosing an area of psychology to specialize in, I chose addiction. I started with an unpaid, one-year placement in an NHS service in northwest London, where I was introduced to the world of addiction treatment for the first time. Admittedly, when I walked into the waiting room on the first day for my induction, I remember wondering whether a placement somewhere like this was really going to be worth working two side-jobs for. But just hours into my job there, I knew I’d found my career path for life.

Day after day, I witnessed people’s entire lives transform thanks to the help they were getting from my colleagues. I grew obsessed, and gave my role more time and energy than I’d ever given any paid role before. I wanted to learn as much as I could. I soon figured out that one of the best ways to learn was to work on the reception desk. This way I could speak to the patients, hear their stories, help them with forms and make them tea. I learned how to really listen to people and make them feel heard.

As the months passed and my obsession with my role grew evident to my colleagues, I started being given more responsibility. By the end of my placement I was confident that I could go straight into a paid addiction worker role, and that’s what I did. My new job was to assess and treat drug addicts using a range of the latest motivational tools, which I was continuously trained in. In contrast to the NHS placement, I was no longer in clinical environments, so most of the approaches I used were focused on motivational exercises, talking therapies and support groups as opposed to prescriptions and risk assessments.

I kept working my way up in the field until eventually I became a consultant and trainer, advising healthcare organizations on the best approaches to use in addiction treatment.

I became knowledgeable in new approaches I had never heard of, and built on what I already knew from my first-hand experience and previous training. I started to travel across the country delivering training to clinical, community and prison staff teams, all of whom wanted additional tools to help them motivate their complex and resistant clients to make lasting changes that they could sustain independently.

The training I delivered would include a lot of written exercises that delegates could try out so that they felt comfortable going back and using them with their own clients. I would mainly guide them to complete “maps.” This simply involved writing a theme in the middle of a page and scattering ideas around it, as opposed to writing things in a list. In the first few months of delivering training, I’d ask delegates to populate their maps using examples from one of their client’s lives. But something kept happening that made me tweak this: people wanted to complete the maps using examples from their own lives, to use the motivational and planning exercises to explore their own unwanted habits. This didn’t surprise me, as seeing how effective these tools were at work, I’d also begun to re-approach the ever-looming task of losing weight with more focus on my motivation and personal development.

Although the maps helped me to gain more insight into my behaviors and lose a bit of weight by decreasing the frequency and severity of my binges, I still didn’t have a “way of eating.” I knew from my work across addiction that meaningful change had to be realistic and enjoyable. But I had no idea how to sustain a way of eating that managed my weight and was all of these things at the same time. That’s where OA came in.

OA, or Overeaters Anonymous, is a twelve-step program for people who feel that their behaviors around food have become unmanageable. I came across it when I was doing research for a client on what free support was available. Of course, I had heard of the Alcoholics Anonymous program, but in order for that to be effective you have to abstain from alcohol entirely. You can’t be abstinent from food entirely.

I went to check out OA and learned that some of the same concepts that help us stop doing something altogether can also help us to keep doing it, but differently. I learned that although everyone at the OA followed a prescribed twelve-step program, when it came to the food guidelines they had to follow to be in a state of recovery, everyone’s were different. There seemed to be some common themes that ran through people’s individual programs—like trying not to eat refined sugar or starchy carbs, and of course going through the required personal development exercises. But for most, when it came to food, they had different definitions of what lapse and relapse looked like, based on their bodies, their goals and their experience.

Over time, I combined my learning from OA, clinical addiction treatment and training feedback to create an entire personal development plan that enabled me to lose weight gradually, meaningfully and more enjoyably than ever before. I created new maps that focused more on my self-esteem and I designed exercises that helped me find sensible personal definitions for words like “healthy” and “moderation.” I kept the weight off this time because I finally realized that there was never anything wrong with me, I just never had the tools, self-awareness or self-belief I needed to make lasting changes.

The Last Diet is a collection of all the tools and knowledge I needed, in the format I needed it, to finally change. It’s the book I wish I had twenty years ago.


Copyright © 2019 by Shahroo Izadi