A woman lost almost 13 stone after having a lightbulb moment while driving along the motorway.
Carla Piera FitzGerald said she had a realisation in 2019, and embarked on a journey of self-reflection, which would ultimately lead to her transforming her life and losing the weight. She told the Irish Mirror : "Everything I thought about myself was a lie.
"I was literally driving down the motorway and I had been doing a bit of journaling, a process called the morning pages and a couple of other things, and things had started to kind of stir within me… my doctor calls it a Damascus moment."
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The 35-year-old said she had been battling with constant negative self-talk, but after time it became clear that these thoughts were not her own. She said: "I just had this realisation that all of this negative self-talk wasn't actually my voice.
"This person that is speaking constantly in my head isn't actually anything to do with me. This is stigmas that I picked up from society and from people around me, and I was like, 'Huh, so who am I?'"
Carla had tried to lose weight through various diet plans over the years, but nothing ever seemed to work. She said: "I tried to lose weight my whole life. I've always been overweight, always.
"I was a bigger child. I've always snuck food. I have done every single diet, and nothing worked, and I realised it's because I was punishing myself. This time what was different was that it was coming from a place of love."
Carla had suffered from food addiction for many years and said this time was her last attempt at trying to lose weight naturally before she looked into having a procedure like a gastric sleeve. She said: "I had binge eating disorder about ten years ago, and I had food addiction then for my whole life, basically since I was a child, and I realised that my food addiction was just this methodology of escaping how bad I felt in myself.
"Similar to addiction to drugs or anything else, it's just using something to numb out and stop the bad feelings I was having about myself. Once I started to realise that, I was on a massive road to recovery."
To ensure she was ready to begin the huge lifestyle change, Carla decided to see a therapist to understand herself and her relationship with food better. She said: "I realised that there was still a mental health issue that I needed to work on, and once I did, I finally felt ready to actually start losing weight.
"I did the body slims programme, which is this fantastic Irish programme unlike anything else you've ever done before, and it really focuses on three pillars of weight loss which is mental health, exercise and diet. So it's a calorie-controlled diet, but you pick what you want, and you listen to weekly seminars, and it was really just backing up everything I was learning in therapy about food and why we reach for food."
In just ten weeks of the programme, Carla lost three stone, and she kept going until she reached her goal weight. She said: "I felt like I had been given the greatest gift. It was a sense of freedom I've never experienced in my whole life."
Not long after reaching her goal weight, Carla discovered that she was pregnant with her first child, Brannach. She said: "I had basically a month at my goal weight before I got pregnant, and then I had a couple of weeks before I realised that I was pregnant, and it was difficult to see my body grow again, but I went back to my therapist and spoke with her a little bit on it.
She added: "In a way, I reaffirmed for myself that… I am not getting bigger because I'm putting on weight. I'm growing a human, and this is what my body needs to do it, and after a while, I was completely fine with it."
Carla decided to document her weight loss journey through her YouTube and Instagram platforms, halfofcarla, where she has praised her for her openness about her battles with weight loss and postnatal depression. She said: "You know, social media gets a lot of stick, but there's also something so wonderful about it because it allows people to share their experiences and help people to not feel alone, and I think that that's one of the most beautiful things about it."
Carla said the best thing about her weight loss is the "freedom" it has given her. She added: "The freedom of thought that I don't have to worry about going into a meeting and not fitting into a chair, which has happened to me before. I don't have to worry about if we are going out to a restaurant. Will I fit in the booth? I don't have to worry if I have an event to go to or if I need something to wear in the morning. I don't have to worry that I'm going to be shamed if I go to hospital, you know, because of my weight or some doctor will blame my weight on something.
"There's a freedom of thought that comes with losing weight and freeing yourself mentally that is so rewarding, but also on a kind of a bigger scale outside of myself, it's the most rewarding thing, and honestly, it brings me to tears nearly on a daily basis is the private messages that I get from people telling me that I changed their lives or that I've given them hope or you know that seeing me do this has helped them in some way."
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