A couple of weeks ago, Abang Abu invited me onto his My Business Journey Talkshow — a show where entrepreneurs from around the world share their real journeys with a community of over 8,000 members.

We talked for nearly an hour. And while we covered a lot of ground — business mistakes, decision-making, walking on hot coals — the conversation kept circling back to the thing I care about most: why women over 40 struggle with weight loss, and what actually works when diets don’t.

Here’s the full interview if you’d like to watch it:

Below, I’ve pulled out a few of the key ideas from our conversation — the ones I think matter most if you’ve been going around in circles with food and weight.

You’re not fighting food. You’re fighting yourself.

Most women who come to me have tried everything. Keto. Paleo. Calorie counting. Mediterranean. Meal replacement shakes. Maybe a gym program that fell away when life got busy. They’ve watched friends succeed on diets that didn’t work for them, and quietly concluded they must be missing some superpower.

But here’s what I’ve learned after years of doing this work: the problem was never the diet. The problem is what’s happening underneath.

I used the iceberg metaphor in the interview because it’s the simplest way I know to explain it. Your conscious mind — the part that plans and reasons and decides “right, Monday I’m starting fresh” — is only about 12% of what’s going on. The other 88% is your subconscious mind. And if that 88% is running a story that says I’m someone who always fails at this, then no meal plan in the world is going to hold.

You’re trying to override 88% with 12%. The maths just doesn’t work.

Identity before behaviour

This is where the real work begins. Instead of starting with what you eat, we start with who you’re becoming.

BE .... DO .... HAVE

I talked in the interview about the principle of Be, Do, Have — something I learned years ago in personal development that completely changed how I approach everything. Most people try to do things in order to have things. Lose weight to feel confident. Get the body to feel worthy. But it works the other way around. You have to be first. The doing and the having follow.

In weight loss, that means getting your identity aligned before you change a single meal. Who do you want to become? What does she look like, feel like, decide like? When that vision is clear and your subconscious mind is on the same page as your conscious mind, the behaviour follows naturally. You’re not white-knuckling it anymore. You’re just acting like the person you’ve already started to become.

Small changes. Genuinely small.

One thing I was clear about in the conversation is that the subconscious mind doesn’t like big, sudden changes. It resists them. That’s why most diets trigger an internal rebellion — you’re asking your whole system to overhaul overnight, and the 88% pushes back hard.

So we go small. Tiny habits that are so simple they don’t trigger resistance. And every time you follow through on one of those small habits, you’re proving something to yourself: I’m the kind of person who can do this. That proof builds. It compounds. And over time, it rewrites the identity story from the inside out.

Sally’s story

I shared Sally’s story in the interview because it’s one of the clearest examples I have of what this looks like in practice.

Sally came to me after years of yo-yo dieting and self-sabotage. She knew she was doing it — starting a diet, making progress, then destroying it — but she couldn’t stop the pattern. Each cycle eroded her trust in herself a little more. By the time she reached me, she had a deeply embedded identity of failure around food.

We didn’t start with what she was eating. We started with connecting her to her future self — the version of her who’d already crossed the bridge. We turned down the volume on her inner critic and embedded an inner coach to counter it. Then she began making small changes, building proof on a daily basis that she could trust herself again.

In eight weeks, she’d lost 18 pounds. She told me she did it without even really trying.

And then she said something I’ll never forget: “As I become more aligned to my true self, it feels like I’m coming home to me.”

That’s the work. Not calories. Not willpower. Coming home to yourself.

Why I’m going full out at 69

Abang Abu asked me whether I’d ever felt like giving up. I have. Especially in the early days when the marketing wasn’t landing and new clients weren’t coming through the door.

But here’s what keeps me going: I believe each of us has gifts we’re meant to use during our lifetime. And the worst thing I can imagine is getting to the end of mine and feeling like I played small. Like I hid instead of putting myself out there.

I’m turning 70 this year. I retired last year — for the second time — and I thought, this is it. This is my window. I see a clear ten years ahead of me where I can still do this work at the highest level. I want to go full out and give it everything I’ve got. Help as many women as I can. Build something I’m proud of.

Because there’s a saying that the most expensive real estate in the world is the graveyard — full of dreams that never saw the light. I don’t want mine to be one of them.

If this resonates with you

If you’ve been going around in circles with diets and wondering what’s actually going on underneath — I write about this every week. Not theory. Not meal plans. The real stuff: identity, habits, the mental game, and what it looks like when women start trusting themselves again.

Sign up for my free weekly insights HERE

And if you know someone who needs to hear this — a friend, a sister, a colleague who’s been blaming herself for not having enough willpower — please share this with her. There’s nothing wrong with her. She just hasn’t found the right approach yet.

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Thank you to Abang Abu for the generous invitation and for creating such a warm space to have this conversation. If you’re interested in business and entrepreneurship, his My Business Journey Talkshow is well worth exploring.

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