IN front of me there is a piece of paper ...

... with 12 smoking guns on.

At the top of the page are the words, “Eating triggers”.

Under each picture, and within a Countdown-like timeframe, me and three other women with weight “issues” or a Curly Wurly-like body image were asked to write down under each one what we thought our triggers are.

I started off with “breathing”, as in I’m awake and that’s normally enough to set me off into the dangerous playground of carbohydrates if unsupervised, then I got to “thoughtlessness”.

Confused faces from the room resulted in me explaining this away in my usual cockeyed manner.

“Girls,” I said. “It’s like this, see. The only time I DON’T think of eating or how wrapped up I am in the confusion of what I can eat versus what I can’t is when I’m actually stuffing my face. See? That’s thoughtlessness. Because if I allowed myself some space to actually think about what I’m doing, or try to iron out the lumps in my self-perception, maybe I wouldn’t want to act out in the way that I do.”

My new pals all nodded their “ahas” and “yeps” and “God, I know what you means” with gusto, as we each shared our divergent stories about what binds us all together.

And that’s lasagne with crusty bits on the edge. It’s melted cheese. It’s full-fat pop and orange. It’s knowing you’re going to have chicken salad in a hotel restaurant when you’re travelling on your own only for your mouth to betray you during your order and you somehow silence the guilty chattering in your mind with beef burgers and chips. It’s about saying no to dieting. Or yes. And back again, without really understanding the force of your yo-yo. It’s about paying for that choice afterwards in the currency of guilt.

It’s the desertion of will power, the constant battle to DO something about it, to exercise yourself away and back into the safety zone of average.

It’s lack of motivation, it’s confusion, it’s bloody bonkers, that’s what it is.
And that’s what Lifeshapers, a multi-media Welsh company which helps you “find the tools you need to reduce your comfort eating, escape the dieting game and still lose weight”, aims to help you sort out.

It’s a big promise, but one that its founder, Chrissie Webber – think Cinderella’s fairy godmother only in turquoise and without anything made of pumpkins – says she can deliver on. Unlike most women who have been there and done it and lost the T-shirt as it’s now waaaaaaay too small, Chrissie is still a big woman. The difference between her and others who have “struggled” with their weight, is that she celebrates the fact that she has achieved so much – a 5st loss and counting – and doesn’t beat herself up about the fact that she’s not “there” yet, that holy grail of self-acceptance, or can always turn down a blueberry muffin. She can’t. And that, as I’m yet to fully understand, is the twist in the sanctity of being human.

Her voice, lying somewhere between caramel and Nutella on the gooey and gorgeous scale, is an exercise in joy; her demeanour kindly but never condescending; her message so hopeful and helpful it should come in tubes to rub in on doubtful days.
The whole ethos of Lifeshapers is to discover the weight you were born to be. And that, even by my wonky reasoning, means that it could be what you are right now.

Right this minute. It’s to adopt what wonder Webber calls “conscious eating” (and that doesn’t mean knowing you’ve got gravy running up your arm), “mindfulness” (meditations to reduce stress and therefore the need for comfort eating), “feeding your soul” (this is about loving yourself, perhaps the hardest skill to learn of all) and “body awareness” (loving the skin you’re in, another corker).

After only one session, I felt lighter, in spirit if not in stones. The danger for me is that I’ll fall hopelessly in love with this new philosophy. It’s happened on every diet I’ve ever been on, a full-on passionate affair which eventually fades away to something less promising when reality, or at least my version of it, sets in.

But if you’re looking for something new, something different, something not judgmental, something which you can do on-line as well as off, give Lifeshapers a go.

After all, it’s better to have loved and not lost a pound, than never to have loved at all.