The story behind Hi Food I’m Home podcast

Good morning.

I wanted to tell you why I decided I had to make Hi Food I’m Home, the story behind the podcast.

When I was 19, I was living in a university flat in my final year of university. And I was binge eating every day.

In the morning, I’d go to the library with a packed lunch and eat it all by 10 o’clock.

And then I’d go home. While all my housemates went out, I would eat the most enormous lunch.

Things like pitta after pitta after pitta bread, things like a whole bag of 12 samosas from the local Indian shop.

I eat so much I couldn’t study it was like a Get Out of Jail Free card. It was like, “Oh, I don’t even have to try anymore”, because I was trying so hard, putting so much pressure on myself to pass my final exams.

And I just go into a food coma every afternoon sleep until it was dark and then wake up like “I’ve missed the day! I’ve wasted it! Now I’ve got to work!”, and somebody would come through the front door and I had this, this front room and I painted it like avocado green, because I thought it would be really modern at the start of the year, and I’d wake up in this avocado green room and it would feel so dark. Like the walls were closing in and I was so at the end of my rope.

And I didn’t care if I lost weight anymore. I didn’t care about anything. All I wanted was to be able to eat without guilt because I couldn’t eat normally anymore and I wanted to be a normal eater.

And then somewhere in that mess of that room. I saw like stacks of papers, whatever student mess – oh my gosh, half finished projects, probably a bicycle, needing some repair. All kinds of stuff in there!

And under the bed or on the side there was somebody who bought a copy of The Guardian. Saturday. And Saturday has a weekend magazine in it. And in those days, that weekend magazine (it probably still does) had like pages of adverts.

And one of the adverts was a product and it was a slimming product but it had the word From Within in it. That was radical for me because in those days, if you went into Waterstones the self help shelf was about [gestures with hands about half a metre apart] that big. Like, there weren’t many people talking about ‘mind-body’, so to see something with food and from within in it…The idea of food and psychology together was like you know… something fizzy some fireworks went off in my brain.

So I cut out the coupon – that’s why has to do in those days. I sent away a cheque in an envelope and through the post came something a bit similar to this.

You can’t get this anymore. It was a great product for me at the time. You see that? That’s Carol Vorderman. Shows my age.

And inside, it was a little book which was like a little introduction to cognitive behavioural therapy, my first experience of cognitive behavioural therapy which is now like, you know, underpins the coaching that I do every day. And these four audio cassettes.

This isn’t the this isn’t the set I had to buy this off Ebay you know, this says Milton Keynes Council library service! So that’s shows you, you know, it helped somebody somewhere, maybe, but it really helped me because I just decided this was it. And every time the book said lose weight I was gonna cross out and like eat normally.

And I just, over the course of about two years. I made this my daily bread. I listened to these audio cassettes on my Sony Walkman and I would listen to them when I was on a bus on a train. And they just piped in a voice that was absolutely absent from my brain.

It was just telling me I was on the right track that I was figuring it out. That change was already happening. It gave me some imagery to sort of think about this cognitive behavioural therapy, to think about the critical voice in my head.

It didn’t really talk about food much – it might have… there might have been a couple of visualisations around junk food being– looking a bit like – a pile of rubbish and things, but by and large it was it was the tone of the voice. It was the positivity of it, it was the confidence of it.

And that was so at odds with the self doubt. And you know where I was starting from which was such a place of hating myself, being so fed up with myself and having lost I binge eat and then for about seven years, I’d be bulimic at times too. And, you know, by that time I completely lost any faith that this could change at all.

It didn’t change me on its own. The audio cassettes were just one element. But the power of having that different voice in my head was so valuable to me.

And recently, in the last couple of years, I have found some of the greatest teachers and coaches through podcasts, and I listen to them when I’m on walks. When I’m folding washing, sometimes when I’m cooking if no one’s around, and I feel like they are on my journey with me. I feel an immense intimacy with them and their words if their words, do something for me, I will listen again and again to those particular bits of wisdom.

I feel like there’s such a need for us to share these voices around and for us to start listening in to each other and being in conversation.

There are so many of us, like me, who are on a journey with food and sharing that journey. And I really wanted to give you the chance of having someone in your ear who has walked in your shoes walked more than a mile in your shoes.

And also someone who has got that perspective, that coaching and to just teach you some of these basic tools. That began here, of, of cognitive behavioural therapy and hypnotherapy. But in a language that you can understand that so simple, that’s coaching orientated, that’s really just going to change the conversation in your head.

So (if you’re reading this in October 2022), please join me for Hi Food I’m Home! if you haven’t yet. You can sign up to join my Podcast Launch Group. It’s on https://lauralloyd.coach/hi-food-im-home/.

That’s gonna be a place where you’ll be able to access the podcast in the future too.

If you join me for the launch, there’ll be giveaways and a launch party.

It’s been such a pleasure putting together the first season for you and I can’t wait to see how this grows and expands and I really hope you have a listen and that you find my voice just a tiny bit as helpful. As I found this one.