Introduction

The Christmas before my 19^th birthday I had a severe case of salmonella poisoning; I had as a teenager always been a fairly healthy, average weight. In two weeks I lost over a stone in weight (over 14 pounds); I believe that this had an effect on my metabolic rate and by my birthday the following year, about 3 months later, I had gained the stone back plus another stone on top of that. I was still within a healthy range, living at home and having my meals cooked by my mum but this was the start of my weight problems.

At several points in the following 20 + years I tried to lose weight on my own plus joining slimming classes. I joined WeightWatcher’s meetings 3 times and on 3 July 2011 I re-joined WeightWatcher’s for the 4^th time. I lost a total of 30 pounds to reach my goal weight!  The first time that I ever seen the programme through to the end! Once I got there I realised that I wanted to share my passion with others and encourage them to lose weight in a healthy, sustainable way; I trained to be a WeightWatcher’s leader in September 2012 and started taking my own meetings in October 2012.

At the peak I was taking 4 meetings a week plus having a full-time job working in a Secondary school. This took its toll and I realised that I had no work-life balance. I LOVED being a WeightWatcher’s leader and I have met some fantastic people along the way but in May 2015 I made the decision that I needed to stop running meetings. . . to do something for me . . . for a change!

I took my last meeting on Saturday 4 July 2015; 4 years after re-joining as a member.

I know that I need to be accountable to someone other than myself and the idea for the blog came about to try and keep me on track with my weight loss and to continue to try and motivate others.

The name ‘Tessa’s Moments’ came about through a discussion about whether a blog was a good idea on Facebook. Hopefully, through the blog those of you who follow and do not yet know me will get to understand that I have ‘moments’!! Those of you that do know me already know that I have ‘moments’!

My intention is to blog about ‘me’; and maybe raise comments/discussions about things that happen in my own life that maybe you are experiencing or can relate to. I am a real person who will openly admit that I make mistakes but I am someone who will always look back at a situation and try and see where I might have gone wrong, then try and learn and maybe get it right the next time. . .