Start telling yourself that you are enough. Because, chances are, no one else will. My whole life I have been told repeatedly that I needed to lose weight, I was always made to feel that I was never good enough. This was done by people I knew, by friends, by family and in large part, by society. You all know this pressure, it starts when you realise you don't look like the "beautiful people", that you are different. It started for me when I was about 6. I didn't really look different then, but I felt different from everyone around me.

It's harder when this is coming from the people in your life. And, to a large degree, I don't think it's done on purpose but that doesn't make it sting any less.  When you spend your whole life hearing that you need to change, be better, be thinner, be different than you are; you start telling yourself this stuff. STOP THAT BULLSHIT RIGHT NOW. No one else is going to be your cheerleader, if you don't do it for yourself and by yourself, it won't happen.

Losing weight is bloody difficult, and I don't mean the physical stuff - because compared the things that come afterwards, that stuff is cake. The hard bits are the emotional baggage, adjusting to yourself and fielding other people's reactions. These things usually happen during and after weight loss. Despite this, weight loss is still 100% worth it. If only for the valuable lessons you learn about yourself and other people.

I used to see people reading labels in grocery stores and I would wonder what they were using that information for. I was perfectly happy continuing to live in happy ignorance of what I was putting in my body. I did not take my health seriously at all. When I started doing keto I had to train myself to READ EVERYTHING. No more blindly trusting that if a product had a heart health symbol on it, or it said "diabetic friendly" (the biggest lie you can find on packaging in South Africa), "sugar free" (when the contents list maltodextrin), "wholegrain", "all-natural", "organic", "gluten free", "low calorie",  oh and my favourite "superfood". I quickly figured out that the only person I could trust regarding my nutrition, was myself. Which meant I had to educate myself.

In the first few months I did a lot of reading and watched all the food related documentaries I could get my hands on, regardless of their point of view. I wanted all the information. Then I started filtering the information based on what I felt was working for my body. As I'm sure you've all figured out by now, I do keto, which means I severely limit my carbohydrate intake to less than 25g a day. I had to teach myself how to make sense of what food labels said so that I knew what I was eating each day.

I've been giving this post a lot of thought lately and honestly, I can't remember exactly how I stumbled on keto. I live in South Africa and banting is a big thing here and has been for a while. Banting is Tim Noakes' version of the Low Carb High Fat diet. So I wasn't totally unaware of this way of eating but I was very against it. I bought into the rhetoric that fat will kill you, carbs are fuel and complex carbohydrates are absolutely necessary for life to continue. Yup. Hook, line and sinker. At least until I started testing my blood sugar after eating "healthy foods".

I would also like to pause here to say, I am not a doctor or a dietician. This is not medical advice, and everyone responds differently to carbohydrates. So, if you feel strongly that people need complex carbs to be healthy… you should probably stop reading now.

Hi! So after finally starting my food blog I guess I should start by introducing myself. My name is Elizabeth (or Lisa, or Liz, or Littlebit, or Pix - I have too many nicknames and no idea how this happened). I am a type 2 diabetic, I also have hypothyroidism, PCOS, anemia and on the 9th of March 2016 I had a BMI of 40. For the last ten years of my life I had been slowly, passively, killing myself by pretending that everything was ok. My husband and I had decided that maybe the next step was kids and so, as one does, I went off the pill. As it turns out the birth control pill was the only thing holding my body together like a tiny piece of dental floss keeping the house from falling down. And the minute I went off it, all hell broke loose.