I am committed to me being my best. This means I will not:

- Reward myself with food. I love food, and I love beautiful tasting food, but it's not a reward, I am not a dog. I have to maintain a healthy relationship with food, which means I can enjoy it without it being the centre of my life.

- Forgot that that for most people, achieving 'fullness' at every meal is not their goal. This is something I realised just recently. My partner is not a big guy, and he stops eating when he's no longer hungry. I have spent my whole life stopping only when I'm full. This is a FUNDAMENTAL difference between us, and the reason I have struggled with my weight all my life. But not any more.

- Tell myself I don't have time. If I can find time to be there for others, I can find time to be there for me. Whether it's exercising, sitting on the couch reading a book, or just doing what I want to do instead of what someone else wants to do. In this way, I nourish myself and allow myself to be a better person for everyone around me.

- Focus on being skinny instead of being healthy. This is important - I got to a BMI of 21 at one stage, and my ribs were showing and my hip bones stuck out. I had no muscle tone to speak of. That's not healthy. My BMI is 24 now and I get sick less, I feel strong, and I feel womanly. My body fat percentage is lower now than when my BMI was 21. I was so focussed on losing, I was losing sight of why I did this, which was to be healthy.

- Hate my body. It has borne 4 beautiful kids, and my eldest is now 23 and watching how women hate their bodies and themselves in the process. That's not a lesson I want my daughter to learn. I have parts of me that I don't like, that's just human nature and it's silly to pretend I could stop doing that, and that's actually ok in small doses, but I will not hate my whole self. I am beautiful, whether I was big or small, and I am the same person on the inside. And I will value that, even if society may not (yet).

- Compare myself to others. This is part of the above point too. Envy is a nasty, self-destructive thing. "I wish I was younger, prettier, smarter, thinner, richer". I now say "I want to be happy" and to do that, I need to stop hurting myself by wishing my life away and not seeing the things I should be thankful for.

- Sit by and do nothing. Counting my blessings doesn't mean I just sit by crying into my soup about the things in my life that make me unhappy either. I change what I can if it's important to me, don't change what isn't important and accept what I can't change. And know that no one is responsible for my happiness but me.

I'm writing this because in the last few years these ideas have formed in my head but I've never said them out loud in one place. Yet I think it's important for me now to see it in black and white. And while it's not just about me being a lapbander, but a person, I thought that this was a good place to put it.