Lydia Sprenger (1984) was born and raised in Amsterdam. As a child, she practised many sports, albeit sequentially rather than simultaneously. Not unlike Tiggers who like everything except honey, she tried and didn’t like gymnastics, judo, tennis, football, squash and bowling. (Yes, bowling is a sport. Shut up!) As of three years, she finally found she likes swimming.

Applying similar tactics to her academic endeavours, she tried and dropped out of political science and psychobiology before finding that social psychology was completely to her taste. Obtaining a BSc from the University of Amsterdam in 2009 and an MSc from the London School of Economics a year later, she’s mostly pleased that her parents can no longer claim she never finishes what she starts.

If introspection was still considered a valid scientific method, she would have continued with a career in research and be a professor by now. Instead, she started working for a big international corporation and became miserable; chocolate pie and creamy pasta being the few joys she still found in life. Two years ago she broke free and has since found a job she really enjoys, while also starting the process of de-miserablising and restoring Pie and Pasta to their rightful place of Food! Not! Friends!

Of course you want to know about her weight: she reckons she lost over 50kgs in the past 15 years, and gained even more in the same period. As far as she’s concerned, this makes her as good an expert as any on the subject of being fat and losing weight. At least twice she achieved a peak weight of more than 100kgs (which is a lot by any standard, but seriously A LOT at a height of 1.62m), although she doesn’t know how much exactly as her scale and she were not on speaking terms at the time. At the time of writing, she comes in at 85kgs, having lost 15kgs in as many months. Put in one sentence like that, she makes it sound easy-breezy, but trust her: it wasn’t and it isn’t.

In 2015 she started Fat in the Head where she can play Professor of Introspection to her heart’s content. She imagines herself lecturing in front of a practically empty auditorium, so she’s very happy you showed up for class. Please, don’t slip out through the back door, hoping to get away before she notices you. There’s plenty of space in the front and if you would like to join the conversation or have questions, don’t hesitate to send her an email through the form below or find her on Twitter