The power of looking at your diet history:

Bronwyn Fletcher
Jul 29
2 min read

Updated: Sep 3

Why Charting Your Weight Story Changes Everything.

Most women trying to lose weight start with the same question: what should I eat? But the better question might be: what’s really been happening all these years?

When I first spoke with Karen, she did what most women do. She told me about her last diet. How she tried intermittent fasting. How she’d cut out breakfast. How she’d signed up to Weight Watchers - twice. She could list the methods, but not the reasons why none of them lasted.

Why didn't it work got Karen?

What we needed wasn’t a new strategy. We needed a map.

That’s where charting comes in. Not calorie counting. Not step tracking. I’m talking about charting the real story: weight patterns over time, life events, emotional triggers, and what was happening in the background when the weight came on, not just when it came off.

Most women can’t see these patterns because they’ve never been shown how. Diets only focus on food, not the system behind the eating. But once Karen and I laid out her history, on paper, in sequence, things that never made sense suddenly clicked.

She realised the vending machine raids weren’t about hunger. They were about exhaustion. Her ‘lack of willpower’ was actually her system responding to stress.

Charting isn’t about control. It’s about clarity. When you can see what’s been hidden, you stop blaming yourself and start working with reality.

This is what systems thinking brings to the weight conversation: a way to find what the food-focused lens always misses. Not because you’ve failed, but because you’ve never had the full picture. The power of looking at her dieting history showed Karen exactly what was wrong.