A REMARKABLE TESTAMENT TO THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THINKING SLIMMER

A Slimpod's not just about losing weight and controlling what you eat. It affects every other aspect of your life, says author Dawn
		Dawn's inspirational book

  * Dawn has lost over 70lbs in a year and kept it all off
  * With a Slimpod she's gone from size 22 to a comfy 14
  * She's taken up running and finished the London Marathon

WE’RE very proud of the achievements of Scottish mum Dawn Walton, who is living proof that Slimpods do more than help you lose weight – they can transform your life in many other ways, too. Dawn has already almost 70lbs (that’s five stone) and has been so energised that she even ran in the 2012 London Marathon. Dawn has also written a remarkable, inspirational book called Nothing Needs To Be The Way It’s Always Been, which is now available on Kindle. Click on the book cover above if you'd like to buy a copy.

This is what Dawn wrote about weight loss early on in her Slimpod journey:

I have now been listening to my Thinking Slimmer track for five months. It doesn’t feel like five months. It feels like only the other month that I started listening. Strange that isn’t it? When we want to lose weight quickly, you’d think 5 months was a long time but it isn’t when you are making slow and steady progress every week. The biggest change is in my thinking (guess the clue is in the name of the product eh?) Most of us struggle with the willpower needed to stick to a diet for any length of time. We can find a way to motivate ourselves and can stick to it as long as there are results.

The challenge comes from the fact that we are “on a diet”. We have not changed our lifestyle, we are changing the way we behave, using willpower, for a time to achieve a goal. This means if you go on holiday, or go out for a nice meal, or have a birthday, then you allow yourself “time off” your diet. And in my experience, it’s really hard work to get going again after! Once you are off the diet bandwagon, the weight often creeps back on, and some. For me, each time I went back to normal after being on a diet, I gained an additional 1-2 stone. Not good. But this time, this is different.

I am losing weight and I am not on a diet. I don’t have to think about it or make any deliberate choices. I just get full quickly when I eat and I don’t feel like snacking very often. When I do snack, 2-3 mouthfuls later I don’t want any more.The other morning I took out a pair of trousers from my wardrobe and put them on. They fitted fine. I found a receipt in the pocket that was from 2003! In my mind there is absolutely no question that I will continue to lose weight to my target of size 10/12 jeans. It is not an ‘if’, it’s a ‘when’. Also there is no danger of putting the weight back on when I stop. Because there is nothing to stop!

It might be hard for those of you who have not tried this to understand what I have written here. In all honesty, it still feels weird for me. Let me summarise about what the Slimpod has done for me:

I eat whatever I want. I just want to eat less.

I feel fuller sooner when I sit down for a meal. I have cut my portions down by at least half and still rarely manage that.

If I want something nice to eat, I have it. Because I manage a couple of mouthfuls max I don’t have to consciously limit myself.

I am full of energy and confidence. I will continue to lose weight. I won’t put it back on again.

Status – WEIGHT

Target: Start point for 'healthy' weight is 11st6lbs

Start weight after 2 weeks :15st 11lbs

Weight after 30 weeks : 11st 11lbs

Status – SIZE

Target: Between size 10 and 12

Starting size: 20/22 (don't tell anyone will you, I am really in denial on this!)

Size after 30 weeks: Comfortable 14. Size 12 here I come!

Here, totally in her own words, Dawn tells how her Slimpod journey came about and what is has meant to her life:

In May 2011, as I was chatting on Twitter I heard talk of a product that you listened to every night and you lost weight. Scam! I thought. But the people talking about it were friends and people I knew, not actresses, actors or PR companies. And when curiosity got the better of me I discovered I could buy the CD for only £29.99. So I bought it. Even at the time it seemed like a bit of a no brainer.

I had a *lot* of weight to lose. So much that I didn’t dare weight myself. So much that I was in denial whenever I bought a size 22 top because it ‘must be the cut of the clothes’. I didn’t take a ‘before’ picture because I really didn’t think it would work. This product claimed to change your thinking. It claimed that you wouldn’t need willpower. You can see why I thought it was a scam, can’t you?

I was on it about 4 days and I posted on Twitter that I didn’t think it was going to work for me. I had emotional connections with food from my childhood and was sure that this product wouldn’t work. People talked about how quickly they fell asleep listening to it. I was wide awake all through. People talked about forgetting what the voice on the track said. I argued all the way through. I couldn’t see myself slimmer as the track suggested. I disagreed with pretty much the whole track as I listened.

Then Sandra, the CEO and founder of Thinking Slimmer, gave me a call and offered to help. Sandra is unique. She cares about everyone who buys Thinking Slimmer. She wants every individual to have every chance of success even though she knows it won’t work for everyone. After all, she came up with the idea for the product because she didn’t think it was fair that only people who could afford Harley Street fees could benefit from this approach to weight loss. She reassured me it should work but also got me connected with Trevor and my journey of improvement started from the inside out at about the same time as outside in!

Soon I started noticing differences. I stopped snacking. I started leaving one of the two pieces of toast I had for breakfast. Then one day, I ordered a Frappuccino from Starbucks (my absolute favourite ever) and I couldn’t face drinking it. For a while I was upset. This was not on! After 2 weeks I was brave enough to weigh myself because I could tell I was losing weight. Clothes were getting looser. I lost a stone within a few of weeks  of stepping on the scales for the first time.
 

And then I started running. Because there is something about listening to the Slimpod that just makes you want to do more. Pretty soon I was running daily. The weight stopped but the size kept on changing. I stopped using the scales as a gauge because they didn’t reflect what was happening with my clothes. One day  I took 6 bin bags of clothes to the charity because now I was wearing size 14 clothes and knew I would never be going back to that weight again.

I got a chance to run the London Marathon and under a year after starting Thinking Slimmer I ran the London Marathon in 6 hours 21 minutes. I was, and still am, as shocked as anyone that I did this. How do you go from being a size *ahem* 22, to being a size 14 and running a marathon in the space of less than a year? But if you think about it, you realise that it’s very difficult to make a fundamental change to your behaviour in one area without it affecting everything else.

If you decide to do more exercise, then it’s very difficult to maintain old lazy habits because you get the endorphin and energy rush from the exercise. You find yourself doing more.

If you decide to eat less and lose weight, then the confidence you gain as a consequence of your success permeates beyond just food and into all other aspects of your life.

Thinking Slimmer is not a diet. It is a way of changing your thinking and your behaviour around food so that you eat less. I’ve always been overweight and am used to being ruled by what I should or shouldn’t eat. So once the guilt around food was gone, once I stopped worrying about what or how much I ate, I was actually in a position to do some of those things in my life that I wanted to do. Luckily I have been blogging all the way through this journey. I decided it would be great to publish the blog posts about this personal journey I’d been on, into a book so that others can see that anything is possible. That nothing needs to be the way it’s always been.