The challenges of maintaining a healthy weight and positive body image have become universal in an increasingly interconnected world. The transformation stories are always inspiring and one of the most fascinating among those is the story of Marleen Mour. Today she is a weight-loss coach, radio show host, author, and a leading self-love advocate. She was once a troubled teenager from Egypt struggling with obesity, but after running away from Egypt, she turned her life and health around and is now she’s helping thousands of women do the same each year. Her angle towards weight loss challenges the status quo and looks nothing like traditional dieting and exercising. Her program, Self Love for PERMANET Weight Loss ventures into the psychological root cause of emotional eating and self-sabotage so clients lose the weight to never e regained again.
Marleen’s story is quite inspirational and entails perseverance, strength and courage to go against the grain. She struggled with binge eating, cultural issues, and personal obstacles, but she became the face of Permanent Weight Loss and is now helping others quit diets and lose weight permanently without pills, shakes or even counting calories.
Today, we are going to interview Marleen and share her stories that define her philosophy and the change she is creating in women’s lives around the world.
- You fled Egypt at 19 years old to begin a new life in Australia. In what way did this brave decision affect your perception of fighting obstacles?
That’s an excellent question. Before running away from Egypt, I had spent my life following the rules set out by others and praying things would change. Nothing changed. I made the decision that I was going to take charge and leave Egypt when I realized God wasn’t going to magically change my father, but he was giving me the clarity, courage and power to take action and change the situation myself.
It completely changed my perception of fighting obstacles, in that, I realized sitting in anger and resentment was disempowering me and not actually over coming anything. It was when I turned the anger, hurt and resentment into fuel to Make the Decision to run away that everything changed. Despite my Australian passport being locked away in my father safe and not being allowed to work and earn money, I made the decision to find a way to get to Australia. That decision alone changed everything.
In the next 4 weeks that followed I not only won a competition that paid me $2000 in cash, but I also managed to declare my passport stolen and have a new one issued. And for every obstacle that arose, like my mum locking me in the 4th floor apartment till my flight left without me, or my uncle snatching my Australian passport out of my hands at the airport…. The solution to remove it landed in my head like God was clearing the way. I learned that when you make the decision to stop being the victim, you discover God gave you the power to do something to change it.
2. Your journey includes overcoming binge eating. Can you share how this experience informs your coaching methodology?
Simple. I could not be the coach I am today, with the 95% success rate we have, if I did not understand first-hand the emotional, physiological and physical struggles of being addicted to food and reliant on it for ‘self soothing’. I wouldn’t understand that so many women consider numbing themselves with food when sad or upset as an act of “self-love”.
Understanding where my relationship with food was damaged, how it played out in my self-care and the impact it had long term has meant I can guide clients with the right questions for them to unravel their own patterns and how they were formed.
This alone replaces the pattern of believing they are failures with clarity, understanding and compassion for how they got to this place of reliance on food for emotional comfort.
When I help them discover, as I did 15 years ago, that food as no ability to emotionally soothe us. only to numb, supress and disconnect from our feelings… they then understand that the change that is needed is not another DIET, but discovering a more loving way to self soothe and address the cause of the negative feeling.
My understanding of the process it takes to replace lifelong habits, like turning to food for comfort, with more helpful habits, means I can set realistic expectations for clients. This means they ditch the perfectionist mentality and focus on progress instead. My understanding that emotional eating is not a sign of weakness but unhappiness, means I can help my clients actually resolve the issue from the root cause rather than simply trying to put a Band-Aid on it with more self-punishment and self-restriction.
3. As a published author, how has writing helped in the fulfilment of your mission of supporting people for lasting weight loss?
Publishing my learnings after battling and overcoming obesity, self-loathing and binge eating has meant ensuring that the information is out there and no longer reliant on me having to come into physical contact with every woman who needs it.
I felt I had a responsibility to share what allowed me to lose 49kg/ 108lbs Permanently because I know the average women spends 17 years of her life dieting, only for 95% of them to regain all the lost weight plus more. If I can save women the half of the 17 years and half of the $40,000 they spend on failed weight loss attempts, my job is done.
4. Your transformation enabled you to be a Bikini Competition winner. How do you balance being a fitness competitor and an influencer that aims to promote body positivity?
I’m so glad you asked this because fitness competitions have a reputation for being extreme, unsustainable and self-punishing. They are also known for use of steroids and others products like fat burners and pre-workouts. My mission when competing was to demonstrate to mothers everywhere that it’s not all downhill after kids, and that you could get into the best shape of your life without a single supplement or product.
I ate real food, never underate, used no products and trained in the gym or at the local park with my baby strapped to my chest every day. I’ve competed 3 times, won Gold medals every time and was able to maintain my weight within a 3kg range of my stage weight all year, without dieting. For me, looking and feeling great isn’t about being SEXY to others. It’s about enjoying my life in a body that feels like a tool, rather than a prison. To be able to pick my son up over my head and chase after him in playgrounds is the sort of body positivity I strive for. I also love that being fit communicates to the world that I value and respect myself enough to invest time and effort into looking after me.
5. For your efforts, you have been presented with the Women’s Small Business Award in Health Improvement Services. In what ways has the concept of entrepreneurship helped you achieve your goal of positively affecting other people’s lives?
Entrepreneurship has given me a platform through which I can challenge the status quo with the diet industry. If the diet industry was making $75illion dollars a year in 2000 and now it’s making $300billion in 2024, obesity rates should be decreasing. Instead, we’ve gone from 30% of adults being overweight to 67%!
Obviously, what the diet industry is pushing, promoting and selling is fuelling the rise of obesity. And it makes sense because 95% of dieters regain all the lost weight plus more. All the quick fixes and products sold actually damage your metabolism causing you to regain whatever you lost plus more. Being an entrepreneur, to me, has meant viewing myself as someone capable of identifying what’s missing, what’s needed and creating a solution to fill the gap in the diet industry. It’s this belief that has allowed me to create the PERMANENT WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM and help thousands of women, not just ditch diets and lose the weight, but never have weight or food be an issue again.
