Years of trying to “fix” herself through diets eventually became the reason Aoife Deane built a successful business that helps other people step out of the same trap. Today her work as a registered dietician, mind coach and clinical hypnotherapist is about guiding clients away from scale fixation and towards a healthy weight and a calmer relationship with food.
Aoife’s relationship with food began to change at a very young age. Growing up in Drimoleague in West Cork, she remembers clearly the moment she first believed there was something wrong with her body. “I was eleven and I remember changing for PE in primary school in fifth class thinking that my thighs looked big.,” says Aoife.
At the time it didn’t seem unusual to think that way. Diet culture was everywhere. Magazine and newspaper articles promised quick weight loss. Thinness was the goal and very little attention was paid to health, strength or individuality. “I grew up like many other people around a lot of influence from the diet industry and it’s even worse now with the prevalence of social media.”
Like many households during the height of the dieting years, the shelves in Aoife’s home were filled with diet foods and recipes. “We had all the Weight Watchers stuff at home so it was very easy to go home and estimate the points I should be on for weight loss and try to follow it.,” Aoife explains.
From then on, food slowly divided itself into good or badu in Aoife’s mind and she judged herself accordingly. Over the following years she tried almost every diet, from Weight Watchers to the cabbage soup diet and the three day diet. “Every failed diet was followed by another but none lasted more than a few days. Within three years, I went up three clothes sizes from the diet and binge cycle.”
Her teenage memories are full of moments where food and body image overshadowed everything else. She remembers cycling for a swim with friends when they were in first year of secondary school and her mind being fixed on how her body looked.
“My main memories of those days was thinking of my size because we were wearing swimming togs and that was where my focus was. I was hyper-focused on my size and food, I was breaking my back dieting and banishing things like sweets and treats, while my friends were eating them and being slimmer than me.”
If she could go back to that younger version of herself now, Aoife would tell her something she believes many people still need to hear. “You are an individual with your own taste buds and your own signals for when your body gets hungry or full. You have a very unique body composition, body metabolism and unique emotions. We all do,” she says.
It is a belief that sits at the centre of her work today. “People need to realise that there isn’t one diet to fit all, so the one suggested breakfast and dinner won’t sustain everyone.” Through years of working with clients she sees just how differently people respond to the same foods. “The foods that fill some people up leave others feeling hungry.”
When she looks back at her own dieting years she can see why she was constantly hungry. The low fat diets popular with Weight Watchers at the time encouraged foods like jams, jellies and diet yogurts. They fitted the rules of the plan but they didn’t satisfy her body. In reality she was trying to force her appetite to obey a formula that simply didn’t suit her.
One of the most common assumptions Aoife hears from clients is that some people are simply lucky when it comes to weight. She disagrees. “I would say there is no such thing as luck, there is always a mindset and an approach involved.” In her experience people who maintain a stable weight usually have something in common. They do not diet. They eat when they are hungry, they stop when they feel satisfied and they don’t spend their lives swinging between restriction and bingeing. “They are a bit like young kids who eat the food that they like. They are confident to listen to their own body signals.”
Dieters, on the other hand, often stop trusting those signals. They follow plans, lists and rules instead. “You are literally listening to other people’s suggestions about what you should eat.”
Living that way can leave people stuck between two extremes. Meals that are supposed to be healthy often leave them half hungry, while periods of overeating leave them feeling physically uncomfortable and guilty. “As a dieter I was always feeling uncomfortable. I was either still half hungry after my meals because I was trying to follow a diet or I was eating food that only rated five out of ten on taste for me.”
For Aoife the change came when she stopped trying to eat according to what someone else said she should do. “I have no interest in becoming uncomfortable for the rest of the day and I have no interest in eating something that someone tells me is good for me.”
realisation that changed everything was understanding that food serves more than one purpose. “Food has three functions when we eat. It is nutrition, it is calories but it is also pleasure.” Diet plans often focus on the first two and ignore the third. When pleasure is missing people try to compensate for it later. “By Friday night it is empty so the pleasure eating starts.”
That is where binge eating often appears, not because someone lacks discipline but because they have spent days depriving themselves. “The more dieting you do the more nutritionally incomplete you are so the bigger the cravings and the binges and you start binging and feeling out of control and you blame yourself for being out of control rather than blaming the restriction.”
Diet culture can also damage something more subtle. “Disordered eating and weight loss puts us in an awful relationship with food and the number one thing we lose is the appreciation with food.”
When every meal is judged through the lens of weight loss it becomes difficult to enjoy eating. Aoife believes that when appreciation returns it naturally reduces the urge to overeat. “If you are really appreciative of your eating it is very hard to get to the level of overeating.”
Aoife went on to study Nutrition and Dietetics in Edinburgh and later worked in London as a registered dietitian. From the outside it looked like she had reached the solution she had been searching for. Privately she still struggled. “I used to feel like such a fraud. There I was as a registered dietician working with a diet company putting people on diets that I don’t agree with now like low fat rapid weight loss and I was telling people to eat so little while I couldn’t stop binge eating.”
That experience taught her something important. Understanding nutrition and having a healthy relationship with food are not the same thing. “In my masters I learned that the more we know about nutrition the more likely we are to have disordered eating.”
The real turning point came during a free session with a life coach in her gym in Fulham. “He said you think you’ll be happy when you get the thing you want but you need to reverse that. You need to get happy to get the thing you want.”
For most of her life Aoife had believed that happiness would arrive once she reached the right weight. That conversation made her question the idea completely. Instead she began asking how she wanted to live right now. “I don’t want to be a person sitting at the side of a swimming pool not being able to be grateful for going on holidays or having fun because I was obsessing about my body or food.”
Over the years she invested heavily in personal development, listening to writers and speakers such as Gabrielle Bernstein, Louise Hay and Wayne Dyer. Gradually her inner dialogue changed. “Personal development led me to be kinder and less judgemental to myself.”
Ironically, once she stopped obsessing about weight, her eating began to regulate naturally. “As soon as I stopped fixating on weight and food the more my weight and my eating started to regulate.”
Today she works with a wide range of clients. Some are underweight and struggling with anorexia. Others are living with obesity. Some are only slightly overweight but feel deeply uncomfortable in their bodies. “Outwardly they would all look different but the inner bully or critic is always the same.”
She also works with people who are using weight loss injections or trying to come off them. One of her concerns is that the drugs are often prescribed without proper nutritional guidance. “You’ve got people with no clinical or nutritional experience prescribing them and you’ve got a huge wave of people now learning to binge and restrict using the jab.”
In her view the real work is about trust. “To have a regulated weight you have to be able to trust that your belly will get full and that you will get hungry again.” For some people the shift happens quickly. For others it takes longer to undo years of dieting. “I never know who is going to be a spontaneous remission and who is going to require a much longer time.”
For Aoife the biggest change has been mental freedom. “The main freedom for me is that my mind is free to think about other things and fully engage in other things now.” Food is no longer the centre of every thought. “I want people to get to the stage where food is a happy thing that is in the background of our life.”
Her own weight has remained stable for the past eleven years, something that once felt impossible. “Previously I could be a different size every three months, it felt very out of control.”
What still frustrates her is the level of misinformation online. She recently saw a post from someone with no qualifications holding a plate with bread, avocado and egg and claiming you will never be slim if you eat it. “I was wondering how this is allowed.” Dietitians in Ireland are regulated by CORU and can be struck off for providing inaccurate advice, but social media doesn’t operate under the same rules.
Aoife also believes that every decade seems to produce its own food obsession. “Back when I was younger everything was low fat. Now we’re living through the protein era,” she says. While protein is important, she believes the current craze has gone too far, with highly processed protein snacks and drinks marketed as everyday necessities. “ Eating a protein bar mid-morning with a coffee is the equivalent of eating 3 – 4 boiled eggs as a light snack. Once people think that is normal, or normal for your body, something is up. Most people are just peeing the excess protein out.”
Today she focuses on working in the clinic and online and sharing what she has learned. Through her work with clients, her website happyweight.ie and The Happy Weight Podcast, she continues to challenge the idea that suffering is the price of being a healthy weight.
Aoife’s message is simple but powerful: when the constant battle with food finally quietens, life has a way of opening up again in a way you could never have imagined. Quit dieting and lose weight permanently, says Aoife’s website, a line that will sound like sweet relief to anyone who has spent years battling the scales.
To read more, contact Aoife or sign up to the happyweight newsletter see happyweight.ie
The Happy Weight podcast is available wherever you listen to podcasts
