Thomas Ta Walls: When Hitting Your Target Weight Doesn’t Fix the Depression
Thomas Ta Walls: When Hitting Your Target Weight Doesn’t Fix the Depression
The story we are told about weight loss follows a reliable arc. Set a goal. Do the work. Hit the number. Feel better. The doctor says well done. Everyone around you says well done. You are supposed to feel it too.
Thomas “Ta” Walls hit the number. The doctor was happy. He was still miserable.
What followed was a depression diagnosis, suicidal thoughts, and a moment alone where he came very close to ending his life. What brought him back was the thought of his two children. What he has built in the years since that moment, in terms of understanding himself, his relationship with his own worth, and the Change Wellness Programme he now runs, is the subject of the latest JustMentalTalk episode.
Thomas grew up, as he describes it, as the happy fat kid. The one who made everyone laugh. Always performing, always people-pleasing, always ensuring the people around him were okay. It is a role that many people will recognise, the person who carries everyone else’s weight while burying their own. The person whose pain nobody sees because the performance is too convincing.
The target weight was supposed to fix it. It is what the culture around weight loss often promises, that if you change the outside, the inside will follow. For Thomas, it didn’t. The depression was not about the weight. The weight had been one of the many things he had been using to avoid looking at what was actually there.
In this honest conversation, Thomas talks through the arc of his experience: growing up masking pain with humour and a relentless focus on other people’s feelings; the moment the depression arrived properly and the medical system finally had a name for what he was experiencing; the suicidal thoughts that followed; and the moment alone where he nearly did not come back.
He is clear, in the way that people who have genuinely processed something are clear, that what stopped him was the thought of his two children. Not a system. Not a service. The people closest to him.
What he discovered in the aftermath changed his understanding of everything. The relationship you have with yourself, with your own worth, your own story, your own right to exist and to take up space, is the foundation from which every other relationship in your life is built. His relationship with his children. With his partner. With his community. All of it rooted in that one relationship that nobody had ever taught him to tend to.
His Change Wellness Programme is built on that understanding. It is not a weight-loss programme. It is not a fitness programme. It is a programme about what happens when you stop performing and start looking honestly at who you actually are.
This episode of JustMentalTalk contains no scripts and no corporate wellness speak. It is one man’s raw account of getting to the bottom of who he really was, and building something worth living for.
The full episode is available now at justmental.net, and on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Search JustMentalTalk.
If this article resonates with you or someone you know, Lifeline NI is available free of charge, 24 hours a day, on 0808 808 8000. You do not need to be in crisis to call. Struggling is enough.
This is not wellness. This is war against stigma.
