How I work
The Inside Out Approach
If you’ve tried to change before and it didn’t last, the problem wasn’t you. It’s that the problem was never understood properly: a human problem, treated as a knowledge and willpower problem. This is a different way of doing it, built from years of working alongside people in the difficult work of change.
Take the free assessmentIf this sounds familiar
You already know what to do. That was never the problem.
Most people who come to me could write the diet themselves. They’ve done enough of them. They know more about nutrition than they ever wanted to, and they’ve spent years, and more money than they’d like to admit, learning it. What they can’t work out is why knowing hasn’t been enough.
The dieting cycle usually goes like this. You find what looks like the perfect plan and tell yourself you’ll commit properly this time. For a while it works. You restrict, you deprive yourself, you push through, and you tell yourself it will be worth it, because you’ll finally get the result you’ve wanted for so long.
Then your body does what bodies do under restriction: your metabolism slows, hunger climbs, and food takes over your thinking. Life happens on top of that, a hard week, a birthday, a night you’re simply too tired, and a rule gets broken. The broken rule doesn’t feel like a slip. It feels like proof. So you think, why bother, and your body, which has been quietly waiting out the restriction, takes its chance to eat everything you weren’t allowed.
Then comes the rebound. Most people regain the weight they lost during that time, and often more. But that’s not all that comes back. The shame and the dissatisfaction with yourself return too, and they’re exactly what fuels the next attempt: next time, more discipline, more willpower, a better plan.
Every lap around that loop teaches you something false: that you’re the one who keeps failing.
The Dieting Cycle
At least three in four people who start a diet regain the weight they lost, and often more.
You haven’t failed many times. One approach has failed you many times, wearing different clothes.
Why it keeps failing
We’ve been treating the wrong problem.
Almost everything in weight loss rests on a hidden assumption: that people don’t know what to do, and that if they were just given the right diet or the right plan, they’d get the result they want. Hand over the information, the rules and the plan, and the behaviour will follow. It works beautifully in theory. It fails in practice, because human beings are not machines.
Three things the old approach gets wrong
Information doesn’t change behaviour.
If it did, you’d have solved this years ago. You’ve read the labels, counted the calories and finished the programs. Knowledge was never what you were missing. The gap sits between knowing and doing, and that’s where the real work is.
Willpower is not a strategy.
It’s a finite resource that runs out for everyone, usually the moment conditions stop being perfect. Any approach that depends on it has an expiry date built in. It isn’t that you lacked discipline. The plan was unsustainable from the start, broken from within.
You are not a machine.
You’re a person with a history, a nervous system, and physical and psychological needs behind the way you eat. Those needs don’t disappear because a plan says they should. They go underground and resurface somewhere else. You can’t logic or plan your way out of your own needs. They’re part of you, which is why the work has to be with yourself, not against yourself.
So if you keep trying the same approach harder, you’ll keep getting the same result, and you’ll keep paying for it in the currency the diet industry values most: feeling not enough. It’s much easier to sell to people who feel bad about themselves, which is exactly why so much of what you’ve been sold was built to leave you there.
What if the solution ran the other way? What if understanding yourself better helped you understand your patterns better, and hear your own internal messaging more clearly, and from that place you could work with your body instead of against it?
The goal behind the goal
It was never really about the number on the scales.
Ask someone what they’re hoping for at their goal weight and some will say the number. But underneath the number is how they think they’ll feel, and what they’ll finally allow themselves to do. The permission they’ve been waiting for.
Here’s what I see, again and again. People arrive at the number, and the permission doesn’t arrive with it. The scales were never in charge of it. They were.
That’s difficult news, and it’s also very good news. It means that part of the work can start today, at whatever weight you are now. And it’s the part that makes everything else hold.
What people are really waiting for
To wear the thing.
To be in the photo.
To walk into a room with confidence instead of bracing.
To stop thinking about food all the time.
To feel worthy.
To finally feel like enough.
None of these live on the scales.
How this is different
The same goal. A different way of getting there.
You’re not here for a philosophy. You’re here because you want to change, you want it to last, and you want to feel good about it: to end the war with yourself and live a life that’s more aligned with what actually matters to you. And you’ve been through enough programs to be wary of anyone who says this time is different. So here is exactly how it’s different, side by side.
Why this is how you get the result you’ve been chasing
Change that lasts is downstream of the person making the change. It’s what happens when someone has the right information and principles, and a deep enough understanding of themselves to make choices that line up with what they actually want. Very few approaches do both. This one is built to. It’s how I’ve worked for years with people through bariatric surgery and medically supervised weight loss, and with people who simply want a better relationship with their health and their weight, and a change that lasts, so they can feel better. That’s the difference between another attempt and a different, lasting result.
The map
Three rings, and the one almost nobody works on.
The Inside Out Approach is built on a simple map of where change actually lives. Most care starts and stops at the outer ring. The work that lasts happens across all three.
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The outer ring: your body
Food, nutrition, medical care, body composition. The clinical essentials: losing weight safely, protecting your muscle, nourishing your body properly. Non-negotiable, and done properly here. It’s also where almost all weight loss care begins and ends.
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The middle ring: your patterns
The habits, skills and routines that shape how you actually eat, move, sleep and look after yourself. Better programs reach this ring, but they try to force it from the outside: more rules, more discipline, more white-knuckling. Change pushed on from the outside, which is why it never holds.
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The inner ring: you
Your relationship with food, your beliefs, the needs your eating has been meeting, and your identity, who you believe yourself to be. This is the ring that drives everything above it. It’s where I spend the time others skip.
How the work unfolds
What it’s actually like to do this.
This isn’t a plan you follow and then get marked on. It’s a way of working with yourself that we build together, and it moves through the rings from the inside out. Here’s what that looks like.
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1
Get clear
We start with you, not a plan. Where you want to be, why now, what it would mean to get there, and what you want beyond the number. Where you are clinically. Out of that we build a vision that’s actually yours, and the groundwork for change is laid before anything has to change.
You stop chasing a weight and start moving toward a life.
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2
Understand
We make sense of how you got here: what you’ve tried, what worked, what didn’t, and the patterns underneath the way you eat. Behaviours are strategies for meeting needs, so the question is never what’s wrong with you. It’s what need this has been meeting, where you learned it, and whether there’s a better way to meet it, one that serves what you actually want.
We also get to know you: your circumstances, your preferences, what matters to you, what you’re already good at. The fuller the picture, the clearer the work ahead.
The behaviour stops being a character flaw and becomes something you can work with.
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3
Build
Regular, adequate, nutritious eating that you enjoy and your body can trust. Movement you choose because you enjoy it. Sleep, stress and mental wellbeing treated as part of your health rather than extras. The clinical fundamentals underneath, tailored to anything you’re managing. All of it at a pace that fits your life, never everything at once.
And beyond habits: skills, awareness, strategies, beliefs, and ultimately identity. You learn to read your own body, listen to your internal messaging, test what’s working, and become the expert on yourself. Slips are expected here and met with curiosity rather than condemnation, because understanding what happened is how the next choice changes. Radically pragmatic. Never expecting perfection.
The food noise quietens, and you start to trust yourself.
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4
Make it yours
The shift from effortful strategies to a way of living. It holds because you built it: you decided, you judge whether it’s working, and you have the skills to come back after a deviation, which is the real skill behind anything sustainable. Progress is measured first by what matters to you: how you’re living, how fully you’re taking part in your life, and how your health serves that. Then by how you eat, move, sleep and feel, and the scales too.
It stops feeling like a plan and starts feeling like who you are.
Toward what actually matters to you. At your own pace. And never judged.
If you’re having surgery, or taking a weight loss medication
The tool opens the window. What you do inside it decides the result.
Surgery and medication are the most effective tools we’ve ever had for weight loss, and I say that as someone who works alongside them every day. They’re powerful against the biological processes that make significant weight loss so hard. They change how much you can eat and how hungry you feel. What they can’t change is your skills, your habits, your patterns, your understanding of yourself, or your ability to make change that lasts. Those are yours to build.
That isn’t a criticism of the tools. It’s being realistic about what they can do, and what they can’t do for you. Two people can have the same surgery, or take the same medication, and get radically different results. The tool doesn’t decide the result. It opens a window in which change is easier than it has ever been. What you do inside that window is what decides your result, and whether it lasts.
What the tool changes
- How much you can eat
- How hungry you feel
- How quickly the weight comes off
What the tool can’t change
- Your patterns, and what eating has been doing for you
- Your relationship with food and with yourself
- Your skills for the years after the window narrows
What decides your result
- Protecting your muscle and nutrition through rapid loss
- Building the eating patterns the tool needs in order to work
- Doing the inner work while the window is open, so the change is yours when it narrows
If your surgeon or doctor sent you here, this is why. This isn’t an add-on to the surgery or the medication. It’s the part that decides the results you get, and whether they last or you find yourself back where you started.
Is this for you
Who this is for, and who it isn’t.
This is for you if
- You’re on a medically supervised weight loss program and you want to use the window it gives you, not just wait and see what happens when it closes.
- You’re preparing for bariatric surgery, or living after it, and you want the surgery to be the start of lasting change rather than another lap of the cycle.
- You’ve spent years losing and regaining, and you’re done with the exhausting cycle of starting over every Monday.
- You suspect there’s more underneath your eating than a lack of discipline, and you’re willing to be curious about yourself rather than at war with yourself.
It probably isn’t if
- You want a meal plan to follow to the letter and nothing more.
- You’re looking for someone to push you harder. Harder is what you’ve already tried.
- You’re hoping for a fast fix that asks nothing of the way you relate to yourself.
A note on scope: this isn’t psychotherapy. I’m an Accredited Practising Dietitian with a degree in psychological science, and I work alongside your GP, surgeon, psychologist and specialists throughout, so your care stays connected.
Where this came from
The question that built this approach.
I believe health is the most valuable resource we have. When we’re healthier we take part more fully in our lives, and everyone around us is better for it. I became a dietitian because I wanted to help people live happier, healthier lives.
Early in my career, I kept meeting the same person: someone who knew what to do, had tried with real effort, and blamed themselves when it didn’t last. I assumed the answer was to know more. I studied harder, read more, and trained in Europe under some of the leading experts in nutrition. But knowing more didn’t help my patients change more. Most of them already understood what they needed to do. This wasn’t an information problem, so the answer had to be somewhere else.
So I went looking: a degree in psychological science, mentoring from a clinical psychologist, and thousands of hours of clinical work, all in pursuit of one question. Why don’t people who know what to do, do what they know? And if information isn’t the answer, what is?
It was never a missing fact. It was the relationship people had with themselves that made the facts impossible to live by. Skills they were never shown. Ways of coping they’d learned because no one had taught them another. And over time, an identity: a quiet acceptance that they were an unhealthy person, or didn’t deserve a happy, healthy life. I reject that.
The Inside Out Approach is what those years produced. It distils everything I’ve learned from the people I’ve been lucky enough to work with into a radically different way of doing this, one that makes change possible. Read more about me.
Damian Kukulies, Accredited Practising Dietitian
Ready for this time to be different?
You don’t need to be sure. You only need to be curious enough to have a conversation. The free two-minute assessment tells us both whether we’re the right fit, and if we are, I’ll be in touch to talk it through.