Is it too late to change??

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My friend said something to me recently that has really got me thinking.

I’m not in a great place right now. I have awful insomnia. I’m overweight. I have no energy. I am tired and fat and irritable and crashingly lacking in confidence and I so desperately want to be thin and outgoing and interesting. Like all the middle class school mums around me.

i have done diets and had periods where I’ve worked hard to exercise and keep myself well groomed etc. I just can’t seem to make it stick. I want to eat better - eat less meat, exercise more (I loathe it), drink less wine/coffee and more water. I just don’t seem to have the ability to keep any of it going. It’s like I need to really be in “the zone” to make any progress and I come out of the zone just as quickly as I get into it and once I’m out of the zone I just can’t seem to make any headway.

I guess I want to just…be an entirely different person. Change everything up. My friend believes that it is too late to make major lifestyle changes. We are tired. We have full time jobs and small children. We just are what we are and we’ll never make it stick, so why bother?

i just feel full of self loathing to be honest. Is it really too late? I don’t know how to change anything on a permanent basis. The thought of spending the rest of my life battling my weight and resenting myself for not dragging my saggy arse to the gym more often just really gets me down.

The way i think about it is, I’m doing it for my kid. It’s not about me, anymore. I just want to be healthy for him. Would re-framing like that help? It’s still really hard though!

I’ve found that trying to change everything at the same time never works.

Choose one thing you’d like to change or improve. Start with drinking more water for example. Stick to it for a month. They say it takes 21 days for something to become a habit. After you’ve made drinking more water a habit, address another small thing.

Don’t try to address a million issues at the same time because it will just be too much and you’ll feel like you’re not achieving anything.

If you have a list of 12 things you’d like to improve in your lifestyle, think that you could do one per month and be / feel slightly different by the end of those 12 months. A year is not that long. Even if you take 2 months per habit, within two years you might have addressed an awful lot of problems that seem impossible to tackle all at once. Baby steps, one by one.

It’s never too late! Take one day at a time. When you want to eat unhealthy food eat your planned food first and tell yourself if you still want it afterwards you can. 90% of the time you won’t want it.

The only thing I would add though is losing weight won’t make you love yourself. You need to love your body for everything it has done for you and celebrate your achievements ( I know it’s easier said than done!).

I'd say you need to tackle the insomnia first, everything else could be caused or made worse by sleep deprivation.
Have you had medical help for the insomnia?

No. I think it’s just who I am. It’s like I don’t need a lot of sleep. If I fall asleep at 10pm I’ll be wide awake by 2.

But yes I think the tiredness is a huge issue to be honest.

If the tiredness is a major issue then you probably do need more sleep than you're getting and have just developed some long term bad habits.
I'd start by going to your GP and seeing if they can offer any help.