I also got her the most enormous bear from Costco!

So we went to the cinema – which has become our new Saturday tradition. We watched Pirates for the second time and this time she sat all the way through to the end

And then she played in the arcade

And the rest of the day was either in the pool or inside building things from bricks

It was a very chilled out day.

I discovered that since taking all those clothes that were too big to the charity shop, I no longer have any summer clothes. So tomorrow I will need to go shopping!

Dear Dawn,

It must have seemed like a pretty tough break all these years. Having gone through your formative years having to fight for survival after been dealt a pretty poor deck of cards on the family front, you then had to take a barrage of abuse and hatred from me.

I'm sorry for that.

I was confused. I blamed you. I blamed you for doing whatever you needed to do to survive until you could get out on your own and control your own life. I misinterpreted your approach as weak and pathetic where I can see now you were strong and determined.

There were moments too where you were hugely brave. Despite the fear you had and the dependency of being a child you stood up for yourself countless times in ways where even once would have been a massive achievement. I can think of three or four times where you did something amazing to stand up for yourself (that kick that broke his ribs will always make me smile) It wasn't your fault that it made no difference to your circumstances. I can see that now.

It worked though because you survived and you have this amazing life with the most amazing people in it. That is because of who you are.

I'm sorry I blamed you. I was hurting. It seemed so unfair. Everything I did felt like a "despite..." not a "because of..." and I was always looking for answers. I see now that there were no answers. Sometimes shit happens. Sometimes shit happens lots.

I think we have both struggled to see that this wasn't about us.

I have blamed you. I thought you pathetic and useless. I felt you held me back because no matter what I achieved in my adult life I felt you had let me down when I was a child. I was wrong.

It's because of you that I am who I am. I am strong and determined. I respect people irrespective of who they are or where they've come from. And now I am doing the most amazing thing because I am using everything we've been through to help other people. Without you, that wouldn't be possible.

So I'm sorry. But I don't forgive you, because I realise now there is nothing to forgive.

Instead I want to thank you. Thank you for looking after me and for getting me to where I am now.

And yesterday I looked like this

Looks like one of those adverts you see on Facebook doesn’t it? Except they say it will only take 6 weeks or something!

A good few months ago now, we changed the bedtime routine because it was getting out of hand.

I loved the idea of lying with the little one while she went to sleep but she gradually played it up more and more so it was taking over an hour to be leave the room.

With me being away at least once a month it was also not practical for the hubby.

So we changed.

We do the usual brushing of teeth. I lay in bed with her and read a story, and then the light goes out and I sing hush little baby.

A cuddle and a kiss and then I leave the room.

After a couple of nights of hell she took to the routine really well.

So much so that it took me a long time to come downstairs and just get on with something else because I was always expecting her to be coming out of the room screaming.

She was totally amazing and our evenings were transformed. She was in bed and settled by 7:15pm every night.

Notice the past tense?

The last 3 nights she’s changed again (why can’t kids just stick to a routine?!)

We follow the normal routine and then she bounces out of bed after me saying she doesn’t want to go to bed yet. Yesterday she was saying it was still light. But it has been for a long time now and she has blackout blinds in her room so it’s nice and dark.

We’ve been trying everything – ignoring, the stern line, bribery, reasoning and in fairness she’s usually settled again by 7:30pm but not before we all go through lots of stress and tears. It’s an awful way to do bedtime.

I really hope this habit breaks again soon!

I know, I know, this is old news isn’t it?

But you see I haven’t been able to acknowledge it. All I could see was how I failed. I didn’t run for enough of it. I didn’t have enough energy because I didn’t have the right breakfast.

All the things I knew I should have done I hadn’t.

So completing the marathon gave me no sense of achievement. No buzz. I felt as flat at the end as I had at the start.

In the last 2 weeks I’ve been able to get back to my morning run before I start work. This is the run that I started to clear my head. This is the run that I did to give me energy to get through my day. I need this run.

So yesterday morning, as I ran along the path on my 2 mile route I was thinking.

I thought “This is not easy”

I thought “I should be finding this a lot easier shouldn’t I, I ran 26.2 miles after all”

And then I realised.

Running is not easy for me.

6 hours and 21 minutes was a great achievement for someone like me who doesn’t even like running and struggles to run 2 miles!

I was being way too hard on myself – beating myself up for not running more of the 26.2 miles – but I struggle to run 2.

26.2 miles was an amazing achievement for me.

And now I know I can do it. I have nothing left to prove.

As I struggled along on my 2 mile route I realised that just doing this regularly was an achievement. Getting out and running when I find it so hard is an achievement.

Running a marathon – no matter how long it took – is an achievement when you don’t even enjoy running.

And so now I think I can have a beer and celebrate the fact that I ran the London Marathon this year…and I never have to run a race again. 2 miles a day is fine.

This time last year, as I was chatting on Twitter I heard talk of a product that you listened to every night and you lost weight. Scam! I thought. But the people talking about it were friends and people I knew, not actresses, actors or PR companies. And when curiosity got the better of me I discovered I could buy the CD for only £29.99 and that was it.

So I bought it. Even at the time it seemed like a bit of a no brainer.

I had a *lot* of weight to lose.

I had been on the Tesco Diet with some success but diets are just not sustainable longer term. I knew I could lose weight. I also new I would put it all back on…and some. This product claimed to change your thinking. It claimed that you wouldn’t need willpower. You can see why I thought it was a scam can’t you?

I was on it about 4 days and I posted on Twitter that I didn’t think it was going to work for me. I had emotional connections with food from my childhood and was sure that this product wouldn’t work. People talked about how quickly they fell asleep listening to it. I was wide awake all through. People talked about forgetting what the voice on the track said. I argued all the way through. I couldn’t see myself slimmer as the track suggested. I disagreed with pretty much the whole track as I listened.

And yet it did work.

I just refused to weigh myself at the start because I didn’t want to know. I did know that I was mostly wearing size 22 clothes and some of them were too tight. I didn’t take a “before” picture because I didn’t believe it would work.

The Sandra, the CEO and cofounder of Thinking Slimmer gave me a call and offered to help. Sandra is unique. She cares about everyone who buys Thinking Slimmer. She wants every individual to have every chance of success even though she knows it won’t work for everyone. After all, she came up with the idea for the product because she didn’t think it was fair that only people who could afford Harley Street fees could benefit from this approach to weight loss.

She reassured me it should work but also got me connected with Trevor and my journey of improvement started from the inside out at about the same time as outside in! But that’s a whole other story

Soon I started noticing differences. I stopped snacking. I started leaving one of the two pieces of toast I had for breakfast. Then one day, I ordered a frappuccino from Starbucks (my absolute favourite ever) and I couldn’t face drinking it.

For a while I was upset. This was not on! But I was losing weight. Clothes were getting looser, pounds were disappearing from the scales. I lost a stone very quickly.

And then I started running. Because there is something about listening to the Slimpod that just makes you want to do more. Pretty soon I was running daily. The weight stopped but the size kept on changing.

I stopped using the scales as a gauge because they didn’t reflect what was happening with my clothes. I took 6 bin bags of clothes to the charity because now I am a size 14.

I got a chance to run the London Marathon and under a year after starting Thinking Slimmer I ran the London Marathon in 6 hours 21 minutes

But to train for the marathon I had to come off listening to my Slimpod. Because I needed to be able to eat freely and while listening to the Slimpod I couldn’t. Not being able to face breakfast before a 3 hour run is not good. In fact, I barely ate before the marathon day and that was not good.

So anyway, you might at this point think “Hang on, if this reprogramme’s your thinking, how come you could "’stop’ it?”

You’d be right.

You see I have an emotional connection with food. I have used food as a weapon my whole life. Where most people scoff when depressed or stressed, I stop eating. I punish myself by removing food. And that needed a little more to fix than the Slimpod.

Frankly it’s a miracle it has worked this well. And a credit to Trevor and Sandra in an amazing product.

So in my last session with Trevor Silvester, founder of Cognitive Hypnotherapy and voice of the Slimpod, the work we did broke that emotional connection. I am now free around food. And initially this has meant that as I am no longer using food as a punishment, I’m eating in a very unconstrained way.

So I’m back listening to the Slimpod at least once a day. I have a goal to get to a size 10/12 and at the moment I am a size 14 and not even close to a 12.

I will get there though.

And I will never be obese again. Because I’m not on a diet. I just eat differently these days.

You can read my whole journey here (you’ll have to keep scrolling back to start at the start)

We went to McDonalds for breakfast as we do every Sunday. Aurora and Schubert joined us

She sneezed and farted. She thought this was very funny!

It was a lovely day so we went to the park after to play

We went to Matalan to get her some clothes because she’s grown out of so many of her old ones. Then we went to M&S food hall and the cafe after

We played outside

She chilled

Then she watched Robots.

I even got a whole load of washing dry!

We started off with the cinema to watch Cars 2 which we both quite enjoyed.

Then we picked up Jen and Josh and went swimming

And that’s it really. We watched, we swam, we chilled, we played. We had fun.

A fellow Cognitive Hypnotherapist, Chloe,  wrote a blog recently about a big black cloud – and she ended with this phrase (which has different flavours by the way!)

“It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness”

This phrase talks to me right now.

It’s a week today since I had session number 5 with Trevor and I have found myself wondering why I do this to myself? Why don’t I accept the way things are. I was happy with my life. I was looking forward to my future. Everything was good in a way it had never been before.

But I still went for a Cognitive Hypnotherapy session with Trevor. Why is that?

It was because, despite all these things I was not happy with me. For some reason I was unable to make my achievements about me. They were something I did not who I was.

And that was enough to allow me to continue to wallow in my misery. Something I have become quite a pro at over the years!

But it seems, despite believing I’m not a very positive person, I can’t help striving to make things better. When given the choice it seems I choose to light the candle (and curse the darkness at the same time).

I’ve had some pretty challenging sessions so far and this was up there as one of the hardest. Maybe because this is the last big thing I need to overcome. For quite a number of days afterwards I felt like at any moment I was just going to go into meltdown.

How does it feel? Well think about a jar filled with water with silt at the bottom. Now pick that jar up and give it a good old shake. That’s how I’ve been feeling all week.

But the silt is starting to settle. The good thing is that I am used to looking for positive changes now. I used to blog it in the early days and this is why these posts are tagged “positive of the day”.

This is a tough one though because what I am aiming for is a change in attitude. I needed to change from “I am happy with my life” to “I am happy being me” and that has caused all out war in my head!

It’s hard to find signs that things have changed. Especially when some of the signs seem to be things I don’t want. For a few days after the session I didn’t want to eat. The first thing to shut down when I am in turmoil of very upset is my appetite. By Tuesday that had  passed and since then I have been eating anything and everything I can lay my hands on. I feel like I am constantly scoffing and that scares the heck out of me! Now I expected a change in my behaviour around food after the session. I am aware that beyond the help the Slimpods have given me, I have an emotional attachment to food. I hoped, and am still hoping that this work will overcome that. But right now it’s going the wrong way!

Then on Wednesday I had an awful day. I just wanted to cry all day. I am aware that I am clinging on to something and I don’t know why. I am resisting this change. And it’s making me mad at myself. Honestly, do I really want to see myself as useless and pathetic? Why would I hold on to that view when I have been given a way to change it.

I went to my friends on Twitter and asked them if there was anything I could help anyone with. Because being able to use what I have learnt, both from my past and from the Cognitive Hypnotherapy course, allows me to see the point in all of this. And then the next day I got an amazing mail from someone who has used my chronic pain download. It has worked so well they’ve been able to stop taking their pain meds. 

I went from rock bottom to cloud 9 in the space of a few words.

And that is when I realised that the path to liking myself is laid out before me. I am already walking it. Doing what I love, using my experiences and my skills to help other people, is what will allow me to become the person I love.

And with Trevor’s help, I am gradually learning to accept my achievements as being about who I am and not just what I do.

So this is where I am 1 week on. In the smallest of ways I am beginning to forgive myself. And from that I can begin to accept who I am and not just what I do.

One day soon I will be telling you how happy I am with my life and how happy I am being me.

And I think, when I get there, I will turn these blog posts into an e-book so I can see how far I have come…

Thanks to Shaun Ward from Perth for doing this.

You can see the portrait photo he did for my Cognitive Hypnotherapy website  at Think it, Change it