The journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.
-Lao Tzu
My Story
Six years ago, I found myself exhausted, in chronic pain, and 100 pounds overweight. I was a new mom, and couldn’t take proper care of myself or my newborn son. I was miserable, both in my head and my heart. My body ached, and my spirit was crushed. I wanted more than anything to enjoy this new baby, but I needed energy and physical capacity to do it. I needed myself back, all of me - my mind, my heart, and my body.
My physical state was a disaster. Every time I got up from the couch, my feet ached, my knees locked up, and it took me a full minute to stabilize my body before starting to walk. I imagined this was what being 90 years old felt like. I was 38. When I finally did get up, I moved slowly, with bulk, and without agility. I bumped into door frames and ran into table corners. When I looked down, I could see my massive belly, but no toes. I was plagued by a constant state of bloat, and my mental fog was so bad, I would forget why I walked into the kitchen the moment I managed to get off the couch. I suffered from chronic pain all of the time. I couldn’t cross my legs when I sat, and my belly had gotten so big that I couldn’t reach around it to tie the sides of my bathing suit bottom. Everything about my body was heavy, slow, sluggish, achy, bloated, and I couldn’t focus, concentrate or sleep. I felt old, creaky, unproductive, and disgusting.
Also frustrating me was how my weight affected me, emotionally. I deeply value discipline, commitment, rigor, integrity, authenticity, and health. These values embody me; they are who I am. But none of these values were being lived or demonstrated through my diet, my food decisions, my food habits, or the way in which I cared for my body. On the contrary, I was living the very antithesis of these values, dishonoring that discipline, commitment to self, and priority of health every time I made a food decision that perpetuated my physical problems, rather than solved them. I was disgusted with myself for letting my self-care slide, for living in a way that was so grossly inconsistent with my values. I wanted desperately to create a diet and a body that embodied those values and returned my mind and physical self to a place that looked and felt like ‘ME.’
My weight felt like a massive act of betrayal. Because unlike the person who lacks food education and just doesn’t know any better, I was deeply educated about food and nutrition; I was a corporate executive for the world’s largest vitamin, mineral, and supplement brand. I made a conscious and deliberate choice to actively ignore everything I knew about nutrition and wellness to indulge my broken palate and emotional baggage. I knew it had to stop, but I didn’t know how to stop it. What I did know was that my relationship with myself, and my relationship with food, was destroying my integrity.
And if my obesity wouldn’t kill me, a loss of integrity surely would.
I had been overweight my entire adult life. I yo-yo-dieted for 20 years straight, spending countless time and energy, and thousands of dollars on commercial weight loss programs, and nothing had worked for me long-term. Though I learned how to be a master calorie-counter and food-tracker, I had not learned anything about how to make food decisions. The emotional toll of gearing myself up to ‘go on a diet,’ to restrict food so I could lose weight, just to watch the weight fall away but then come back harder and faster the next time, was so terrifying that I had nearly thrown the towel in on the idea of losing weight, entirely. Twenty years of this dieting nonsense, and I just surrendered. I finally submitted to the belief that I was destined to be obese for the rest of my life. It was at this point of surrender that I experienced the most catastrophic effect on my health: my weight ballooned and I became the heaviest I had ever been.
I was caught in a vicious cycle, drowning, and of all the things I didn’t know or understand about why I couldn’t manage this part of my life, I knew one thing that was an unequivocal fact: I was the only one who could pull myself out of it.
In January 2017, I declared that I would start my last weight loss journey. This would be the last attempt at weight loss I would ever participate in. If it didn’t work, I would never again initiate another attempt.
What I needed more than anything was to design a way of eating, and a relationship with food, that was stable, unshakeable, timeless, enjoyable, and that supported, rather than eroded, my health. I needed to design a diet for life that built a sense of permanence and sustainability into the way I interacted with food. I needed my relationship with food to be purposeful, of a high quality, and I needed to be able to indulge at various times. I needed a values-driven commitment to eating. To accomplish this, I had to design a way of eating and making food decisions that felt easy, simple, and enjoyable, but which was consistent and sustainable over the long-term. The good news was that I knew WHAT I needed. The hard part was designing HOW to accomplish it.
I didn’t have all the answers, but I knew where I wanted to start. I would follow a Whole30 program for one month to see what I could learn from eating a pure, whole-foods diet. I was curious to know what it would feel like not to consume any sugar, sweeteners, gluten, grains, dairy, alcohol, or other foods responsible for the chronic pain, inflammation, and obesity that I was plagued with. I was curious to learn what it would feel like to make different food decisions in restaurants and at parties that were designed to support my health rather than my obesity. I was eager to learn what I would discover if I had to make food decisions according to the new rules and standards that I had set for myself, rather than allowing the standards of the environment to control my food decisions for me. It seemed a totally backwards concept socially, but a completely logical one, nutritionally. I would do this for just one month: to learn how my thinking would shift, how my heart would heal, and how my body would feel.
My Whole30 began on March 1, 2017. Within seven days, my brain fog was gone, I was completely clear of mind, the pain in my knees, ankles, and lower back was significantly reduced, and my energy level was the highest it had been in years. This all happened in the first week. By the end of the second week, I was no longer bloated, my digestive system was normalizing, and my sleep had become powerfully restorative. By the end of the third week, my face had cleared up, I was taking daily walks to energize myself, and I was seeing a color and a vibrancy to the world around me that I had been craving and finally had access to again. It was bliss.
As my Whole30 program approached its end-point, I began to think about what I would do next. I couldn't stop. I felt amazing, and I was not willing to let go of this new person I was becoming.
At the end of the third week of my Whole30, I mapped out how I would continue eating and making food decisions once the Whole30 ended. What I had discovered was that maintaining a whole-foods diet absent of refined sugars, starches, and grains, was my way forward. And on day 31 of my Whole30, I transitioned to that whole-foods diet, with a new set of terms. The question that sat before me: could I practice my new diet permanently, consistently, sustainably, and joyfully, forever? Could I do it through birthday and anniversary celebrations? Could I do it through the holidays? Could I do it through vacations, trips, and business travel? Could I do it through weddings, funerals, and other parts of life that drive us to the cookie bin? I knew there was only one way to find out. I would have to test-drive my new way of eating across all of those events, at least once, to see how it felt.
What I needed was an experiment.
For the remaining nine months of that year, I ran my experiment and followed my new diet, without exception, to learn how my mind, heart, and body responded. I wanted to learn more about how I could navigate social contexts without subjecting myself to the sugar and alcohol-laden traditions that come with them. I wanted to learn more about how I could eat a diet without refined sugar and still keep things sweet. I wanted to learn how to build my meals around plants and protein. It was a nine-month experiment fueled by wild success from the past four weeks of that Whole30. My head was focused, my body was feeling amazing, my heart was hungry, and I had a collection of plans, ideas, and solutions to experiment with.
Nine months later, my experiment had produced some interesting results. I had lost 70 pounds - more than I had ever lost in my entire life at one time. I had gone from 225 to 155 in 10 months.
The thing I was most proud of? I had fixed my mind.
My experiment concluded on December 31, 2017. Of course, all I could do was KEEP GOING. Always looking to one-up myself, I added one new thing to the mix: movement. I had spent the whole of 2017 focused on re-inventing my relationship with food. But 2018 would be about fitness. After all, that was a major part of my health, too. I started working out, trying a variety of different activities to spark my curiosity and interest. I discovered a love affair with strength and conditioning workouts. Moving weight made me feel strong, powerful, and in charge - three things I never experienced when obesity ran my life. I began working out two days a week. Then I hungered for more, and added a third day. Months later, when my arms became toned and I could see definition in my legs, I craved more. I added a fourth day. And by mid-year, I had lost another 30 pounds. More importantly,
I had built a love affair with what my body could do.
By the summer of 2018, my body had shed 100 pounds. I had done it naturally, without drugs, medications, shakes, fasts, cleanses, detoxes, and ridiculous fitness regimens. I did it through a whole lot of self-exploration, tough self-love, compassion, patience, grace, experimentation, and discipline. I’ve kept that weight off for six years. I am currently in the 5% of the formerly-obese population who is successful at losing and keeping off excessive amounts of weight.
I know what it takes to lose it, but more importantly, I know what it takes to keep it off.
Building a solid system of new thinking, skills, and habits for how we take care of ourselves, and how we interact with food, is at the heart of real health and weight transformation.
To this day, I have not stopped. I have not stopped extending myself the compassion, love, and grace I show everyone else. I have not stopped choosing foods that support my beautiful, hard-working body. I have not stopped moving and celebrating the incredible capacity and strength that my body has.
Life is a collection of moments. I make the best decisions for my mind, heart, and body at the time those decisions need to be made, and then I let the rest go. I don’t worry about yesterday, and I don’t worry about tomorrow. My weight is up some days, and down on others. Some days eating well is easy and other days it’s harder. Some days I feel like working out, and some days I don’t. I stay the course 90% of the time because self-care is self-respect, and I believe my #1 job is to take care of myself.
The things that work for me are living my purpose, living my values, and exercising daily commitment to myself around my eating and movement practices. I live and make decisions every day in accordance with those elements, and I don’t make excuses. I focus on, and put 100% of my energy into my habits, and I let the outcomes go. I take pride in the process, and I put little emphasis on the destination. And I always celebrate the wins. They happen every. Single. Day.
It doesn’t matter where we land, it matters how we get there. Learning how to take pride in the process is one of the greatest secrets of creating weight-happiness, and it all begins with one tiny little step.
Let me show you how we start....
Free Guide
How would you like to learn how to lose weight and keep it off for life, in a way that is simple, energizing, and brings you JOY?
Let me show you my top ten secrets to lifelong Weight Happiness. These are the mindset shifts I used to lose 100 pounds, and keep them off for more than six years.
