Dr Ashley Ng

Being a slightly larger Asian girl, I’ve always been a bit conscious about my weight and body. Going through my inital diabetes diagnosis period with a type 2 label brought all those insecurities to the forefront as the messaging from clinicians was always around “if you just lost some weight, you would go into remission”. I then fell into some highly disordered eating and exercise behaviours in a desperate bid to lose weight and control my blood sugars. So my relationship with food, exercise and the scales have since been fickle.

My current gym membership comes with access to body scans. Being a nutrition professional, I know how inaccurate these machines can be. I know how exercise is not always about the numbers. I know exercise is about strength and cardiovascular wellbeing. I know exercise is about mental wellbeing. I know moving my body should be about so many other things that what numbers from a machine tells me, whether that be blood sugars or otherwise. But a moment of weakness and a build up of insecurities led to fall back into the numbers trap.

Out of curiosity, I did a scan at the start of the year; unsurprised but slightly horrified that I was sitting at 36% body fat. I don’t know what “normal” should be, but I just seemed like a lot. I was also conscious that my weight has been slowly creeping up after two babies, which has been very slowly eating away at me. Some days, I’m all body confident and happy to embrace this amazing body, lumps and all, other days nothing in my waredrobe looks good on me. Doesn’t help I have a terrible fashion sense (if you know a good styler, hit me up).

After the scan I was sold the story that I could lose 6% body fat in 6 weeks. I laughed but joked that I would do it in 6 months. Over the next few weeks, I pushed myself, not realising I was slowly falling back into obsessing over my exercise and eating. So when I checked in again a month later and lost 0.5% body fat, I felt horrible. Straight away my thought was “why bother”. That’s when I really caught myself and realised that I needed to reset and find a different goal.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned over the years, thanks to diabetes, is that you tend to lose sight of the bigger picture that is life when you’re so busy chasing numbers. Right now, I’m trying to show up and push through, hoping that my motivation will come back soon as I rebuild the narrative to shift my mindset. And this is something I am dedicated to making a conscious effort to change, especially for my girls. I want them to love their body and what they can do with it, rather than focusing on numbers on a scale. It’s time to break that cycle.