Fit, Healthy, Happy
Trisha Lewis has come a long way since she topped the scale at 27 stone. She’s lost weight but, far more importantly she tells Carissa Casey, she’s learnt to feel happy with who she is, as she is.
Like many women, Trisha Lewis firmly believed that if she could only lose weight, she’d be happy. Today, the former chef at Jacobs on the Mall in Cork city has abandoned the scales, the step counting and the calorie tracking in favour of listening to her body and supporting herself.
“I found I was getting obsessed with the number of the scale, with the number on the watch. I was waiting for everything else to tell me that I’m doing well.
Now I tell myself, I’m doing absolutely brilliantly. It feels so lovely. I’ve never slept as well. I feel good and it’s because I’m doing it myself. If I’m feeling bad then I have to be just as honest. Do I have to nip it here? Do I need to ask for a bit of help?”
As she so eloquently puts it herself: “I’m not chasing the number on the scales anymore, I’m chasing the feeling.”
The ‘feeling’ she says is freedom. “It feels empowering, sometimes it feels like nothing, neither up nor down, just normal. Sometimes it’s just relief. But that’s the feeling I chase. If I find that I’m stressed I don’t blame the things around me. I look inside and ask myself, What am I not doing? Am I not exercising right, am I not drinking enough water, am I not getting enough sleep?
“For every action there’s a consequence, and that’s what I’ve realised. If I eat crap food, I feel crap. If I eat good food, I feel good. The overwhelming feeling of my life today is absolute freedom. It’s so good to wake up and not have to feel stressed about something that took over a decade of my life.
The focus on her weight started when Trisha was just 12 years old and she went on her first diet. Since then, Trisha has battled many demons, in a world that values thinness in women in particular, often to the exclusion of other more important qualities. “I worried that people would mock me in the street, that people would stare at me. Every move I made, the worry was there.”
Six or seven months in to her last weight loss eff ort, she came to a profound realisation. “I’m not going to get a fast metabolism overnight, nor a fast-acting thyroid,” she explains. “I asked myself,
Do I really want to be doing this for the rest of my life and not really enjoying it?
So I flipped my mindset and I thought, regardless of what happens on the scales, I want to happy. I realised this is forever and I need to do this with a healthy mindset, a mindset that wants to do it instead of has to do it.
It’s no real surprise that Trisha’s story has resonated with so many women.
During Covid, with the restaurant closed, she decided to change tack and today has 208,000 followers on Instagram, a second cookbook hitting the shelves and has become a brand ambassador for Aldi. And while the straight-talking Corkonian is undoubtedly happy in her own skin, she is about as far from the usual air-brushed influencer as it’s possible to get. She’s upfront about her flaws and isn’t afraid to talk about her ongoing issues.
At the moment, she’s in therapy for an eating disorder. She is also practising intuitive eating, a non-diet approach to changing your relationship with food by listening to what your body actually wants. “I think what’s happening with me is that I have to retrain myself to trust my body,” she says. “For a long time, I ate past when I was full, so now I have to learn how to listen to myself, how to trust myself again.”
She likes the idea of meditation but, refreshingly, admits she’s “brutal” at it. “My attention span isn’t great.” Her mindfulness practise is a walk. "Not a fast walk and I’m not frantically checking how many steps I’ve done. It’s just to get out,” she says.
Self-care is also important. “I couldn’t fit into my own shower during the worst part of my life. So a simple thing for me is a shower, to blow dry my hair, put on a bit of lipstick – those kind of things really help me live in the moment.”
She also takes time out from social media. “I know that’s ironic because I have a career on Instagram. But I find I want to unplug now and again, put away the phone, put away the devices, just have a cup of coffee with a friend.”
Despite being an influencer, she doesn’t claim to have discovered the secret to anything other than what works for her, and that is a work-in-progress. “At the end of the day, you can only do you. If I tell you what time I get up and you get up at the same time, it might not work for you. You might have two kids. And then we get into this rat race of telling ourselves, I’m not as motivated, I’m not as good. We start these self-deprecating series of thoughts,” she says.
With eight sisters and two newly born nieces, female empowerment is central to her mission. “It hurts me to see people not loving themselves for who they are.
If we get a Christmas present, do we care about the wrapping? It’s what’s inside that counts. That’s what I’m focusing on, and if someone doesn’t like the colour of my wrapping paper, that’s their problem not mine.”
She believes that any weight loss programme or health kick should be done for the right reasons.
“People start these plans restricting themselves out of hatred for who they are right now. Do it out of love for the person you’re going to become. Do it for that girl in six months’ time that looks back and thinks, you didn’t give up on me.”
“I’m still the person I was when I was 27 stone. She was strong because she got me to where I am now.”
Exercise is an important part of Trisha’s life. “It’s all about the ability to move, to get the happy endorphins going. I’ve struggled with my mental health in the past. I feel strong when I’m doing something that I never thought I’d be good at, which is working out. So I exercise three or four times a week, do an extra walk and then two of the days I do nothing. I do just enough to challenge me but not enough to make me hate it.”
Her new cook book Trisha’s 21-Day Reset is full of tasty hearty home-cooked recipes. “You’re getting two different chefs,” she points out. “There’s Trisha Lewis who was the executive head chef of a restaurant for 13 years and then there’s the Trisha who wants to eat good food and lose weight. Some cookbooks can be really overwhelming, with a list of ingredients you have to go to three different shops to get. I cooked this entire book from €280 ingredients bought from Aldi.”
She bought in a nutritionist to break down the calories and the macros in the book's recipes, because, for the moment, she’s careful not to obsess about calories for herself.
“With the steps and the scales and the calories, I end up feeling like a human calculator. I just want to break free from that kind of culture. For me it doesn’t work. Anything that adds guilt or shame or regret, I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m 33 I’m not doing that for the next 60 years.”
Trisha’s 21-day Reset by Trisha Lewis is available now