The Cookie Dough I Hid Under My Bed
And what it took me forty years to understand
I was seven years old when my parents divorced.
Everything changed at once. New home. New neighborhood. New life. And for the first time, I had access to something I hadn’t had before… junk food.
I remember it clearly. A roll of cookie dough. Hidden. Just for me.
My friends had candy and snacks too, that was normal. But for me it was different and I knew it even then, somewhere beneath the surface. My whole world had fallen apart and everyone around me just seemed to move on. And I was seven, doing my best to move on too, finding comfort in the only way that made sense to me at the time.
By the time I started my new school at eight I was chubby. And honestly? I didn’t care. I was happy. I was active. I had friends. The occasional cruel comment from some kid in the hallway stung for a moment and then I let it go. I knew who I was.
But middle school has a way of changing things.
Then high school. Then adulthood.
Chubby to thin. Thin to chubby. Losing and regaining the same weight over and over, sometimes 20 pounds, sometimes 30, sometimes more. Over the course of my lifetime I’ve probably lost and regained over 100 pounds. Not because I didn’t know what to do. I always knew what to do.
Knowing was never the problem.
I had my children late by most standards, my first at 39, my second at 41.
Becoming a mother changed me in ways I didn’t expect. I became deliberate in a way I had never been before. Intentional. I noticed patterns. I thought carefully about environment, about routine, about the stories I was telling my children about themselves and the world.
And somewhere in all of that careful attention I turned it on myself for the first time.
I started giving myself the same grace I gave them. Noticing my own patterns the way I noticed theirs. Catching the moments before they became habits. Building an environment that set me up rather than sabotaged me.
And that’s when something shifted.
Not the number on the scale. Something deeper. The way I saw myself.
I’m a clinical weight loss practitioner. I understand the science of what happens to the body after weight loss, how metabolism shifts, how hunger hormones change, how the body fights to return to where it was. I work with people on GLP-1 medications who are terrified of what happens when the medication stops working or when they want to stop taking it.
And what I’ve learned, both professionally and in my own skin, is this:
You don’t keep the weight off by doing more of what got you there.
The strategies that work for losing weight are not the same strategies that work for keeping it off. And no amount of discipline or restriction or willpower bridges that gap.
What bridges that gap goes much deeper. It goes to the core of who you believe you are.
That little girl hiding cookie dough under her bed didn’t have a willpower problem.
She had a broken heart.
And for forty years nobody, including herself, ever told her those were two very different things.
That’s why Stop Starting Over exists.
Not for another plan. Not for more rules. But for the work that actually lasts, understanding who you are becoming, not just what you are losing.
If you’ve ever lost the weight and found it again, this is for you.
If you’re on a GLP-1 medication and quietly terrified of what comes next, this is for you.
If you’re exhausted from starting over, this is for you.
You’re in the right place.
— Heather