“Once a fattie, always a fattie.” Right?

After spending most of her life obese, weighing in at one-hundred-and-sixty-five kilograms (364 lbs) at her heaviest, Mart-Mari Breedt, software engineer and mother of four, lost just over eighty kilograms (176 lbs) in a mammoth battle against the scale. She then found herself in a frightening dilemma: how would she manage to keep the weight off and maintain her massive loss after she had spent her entire life as a morbidly obese person? All she had ever known was how to be fat. Being thin was a new and daunting experience.

In her dazzling debut memoir, Mart-Mari asks hard to answer questions: Can you recover from obesity? Is it possible to maintain a weight loss of eighty kilograms?

There are so many books on how to lose weight — an entire industry has been built around it, yet so little — apart from stick to your eating plan, keep exercising and continue to be perfect — is written about keeping the kilos off and maintaining one’s weight.

Refusing to accept defeat and realising that she cannot spend the rest of her life obsessed with her scale, Mart-Mari started blogging about her maintenance challenges, which turned into an introspection journey. In the process, she dug deep, confronting long-buried emotions. Along the way, she found her true self, who had still been hiding in eighty kilograms of shame.