HOW FOOD & FITNESS CHANGED MY LIFE
My Journey with Weight Loss
The result of 30 years of diets.
5 months on a proper ketogenic diet.
đź’śIf you don’t want to read my story, scroll to the end to just watch my storyđź’ś
My story of 30 years trying lose weight
What is a Transformation?
One way Google define​s it is, “a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance”. This is exactly what happened to me. Not only did I transform one direction towards obesity and chronic illness, poor balance, with weakness in my body and joints and plagued with chronic pain, but then I transformed another direction thanks to a specific ketogenic diet and later exercise, which returned me back to health and complete wholeness in my body, mind, and spirit!
Family Life
​I grew up in a family of wonderful cooks. Food was woven into our daily life with dinner around the table every night – special food for special occasions, and mom always knew how to make things fun! My fondest memories were of my mom’s cooking and being in the kitchen with her.
I never thought about food with regard to my weight. I always heard that you either had a good metabolism or you didn’t and watch out – because once you turn 30, its all downhill from there! If I only knew then what I know now!
I weighed 110lbs for most of my young adult life at seventeen years of age and beyond. I didn’t know about nutrition, carbs, fats, or things like macronutrients and frankly, I didn’t care because I was too busy enjoying my life and looking forward to my future!
The Oblivious Years
In college I was super busy and active. I ate whatever I wanted. I never thought about food, but later and as I approached my late 20’s, I remember putting on a few pounds. At the time, I wasn’t overly concerned because when you’re 110 pounds, gaining 5 or even 10 pounds isn’t a big deal. Some people said I looked better. However, I became mildly concerned when I went up a size in my pants! I remember thinking, “Well, here it comes, the slow metabolism everyone told me about. I am going on 30. Maybe I have the bad metabolic gene in my family.” My solution? What most people did – exercise! I started walking and taking expensive aerobics classes and when the weight didn’t budge, I started drinking Slim Fast shakes. I was quickly going broke and was so sick of being hungry and not eating real food with my friends, that I quit. Later, I tried being a vegetarian because everyone I knew who was a vegetarian was thin and looked healthy, but I got tired of juicing, cleansing, and eating raw vegetables. It was expensive, didn’t work, and I was still hungry! So I stopped. This is also when the start of mild but frequent headaches began. My dad often had them, so I just figured it was a family thing and brushed it off.
The Exercise Years
By my 30’s, I was now 20+ pounds heavier and had transformed into the overweight category. I tried to wear clothes that hid my extra weight but I felt bad about how I looked. There was always that little bit of unhappiness with myself that existed like a smoldering ember that slowly burned away at my soul. I hated that feeling!
I got married and had two beautiful children and was excited for the first time in a long time. I anticipated pregnancy with so much naivetĂ©. Pregnancy was hard on my body, I didn’t eat right, and my babies were big. I was big! I was repeatedly asked if I was having twins and although I never let on, the comments hurt. I ignored it most of the time because I figured it was just baby weight. I had no idea that very little of this weight would come off after my first child was born. My weight and my sleep were a huge problem. I gained 50 pounds, to be exact, and less than 20 came off.
Still knowing nothing better about food and nutrition except to just eat the healthy low fat 3 meals a day and two snacks, I ate all the wrong things. Since I was unsuccessful at getting the baby weight off and even heavier now, I was much more careful with my second pregnancy. Although I didn’t gain any weight, I looked and felt awful. I didn’t even recognize myself. In my head, I was still that 20 something person! How did I get here? Desperate because I felt I was losing this battle, I started getting up at 4am to run before my little ones got up. My son was about 4 months old at the time. When I got tired of that, we got a noisy used treadmill that took over our small family room so I could exercise anytime. I acquired exercise bands and balls, videos, and hand weights. Our family room looked more like a gym! I wasted so much money. I was exhausted beyond belief and had begun having trouble sleeping through the night. Headaches increased, but I just brushed it off to being a busy mom of two little kids and trying to run a piano studio from our home.
As time went on and because I wasn’t having success, I visited with my doctor at the time for help. He literally told me I wasn’t being honest about my calories and that I just needed to follow a very low fat diet, eat much less and exercise much more. So that is what I did. Without any measurable results, feeling exhausted, defeated, and even more ashamed now and living in fear of seeing anyone who knew me before I got fat, I gave up. I just figured that this is what happens when you get old. There is nothing you can do about it. I began to believe I just wasn’t beautiful, capable, or even lovable anymore. I was a failure. My unhappiness often spilled out to those around me, usually my kids, which just added a nice dose of guilt to the already terrible feelings I had about myself. I lay in bed in those wee hours when I couldn’t sleep punishing myself for my inadequacies and failures that seemed to be rooted in this roadblock of weight loss and what had become a miserable self image. I didn’t feel like me. I smiled on the outside but felt so angry, defeated and emotionally out of control.
The Dieting Years
As the next decade of my life appeared, things had not improved. My health was declining and I didn’t even know it. It had been years since I had slept through the night and I was taking Tylenol during the day for headaches and Tylenol PM at night to sleep. I realized I needed something better than just a low fat diet. Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be someone with an answer. I tried Weight Watchers first but quickly gave up after 6 months because not only did I always use up all my points by 10am, there were no apps, smart phones, or laptops with quick ways to figure things out back then! A simple chicken salad could take me 30 minutes to figure out! Who had that kind of time with young kids and a busy life?! I later tried “The Dr. Phil Weight Loss Challenge”, I watched “The Biggest Loser” in amazement and wished it was me. My husband, who was now diagnosed with fatty liver disease, and I paid for an expensive metabolic diet recommended by his doctor. It worked beautifully…for awhile. The one factor with all the diets? I was always hungry, it wasn’t easy for me to stick to, and the weight always came back on the second I cheated because it just wasn’t adaptable.
Nevertheless, giving it one last try in my late 40’s because I was now 186 pounds, I joined a gym. I worked out for an hour each day and counted my calories. I lost a little but when I stalled, I added another hour, then another, and another until I was working out on average 3, sometimes 4 hours a day for 5 days a week. I swam, I stretched, I ran, I took classes. You can imagine this was absolutely unsustainable. I got in great shape but only lost 10 pounds and not an ounce more. I consulted a trainer, who said I was eating too much and needed to mix it up. Try something harder! So, I dragged all 186 pounds of me to a boot camp and swore I was going to be just like those people on The Biggest Loser throwing up in a trash can! I could barely walk for days after that class. I went back the next week and consulted a female trainer, thinking she might understand better. She told me I wasn’t eating enough. So, I ate more and put what little weight I had lost back on. Between the lack of sleep, the headaches, the fatigue and now migraines that began in the middle of the night, I was DONE.
​
I just decided…to…be…fat.
The Fasting and “Internet Keto” Years
Upon turning 50, I was at my all time heaviest. Each decade of my life added 20 pounds whether I exercised, dieted or not. I started having memory problems. I thought it was menopause or perhaps I was getting Alzheimers. I had been teaching piano for 30 years by now and several times could not remember how or what some of the music symbols were. I sometimes forgot how to get to the grocery while I was driving there. I never told my family, but I was silently freaking out and went to the doctor. He began sending me for tests for all my issues. My bloodwork was pitiful. He was also nudging me to get off sugar. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t “eat sugar”. Oh, I liked fruit, popcorn, chips and salsa and the occasional croissant or doughnut, but I didn’t drink soda or eat sweets or even keep them in the house very often. I really was trying to be good. Even still, he told me I was nearing pre-diabetes and needed to take it seriously. What does that even mean??? I felt awful. I looked awful. Everything hurt. I had been trying for almost 30 years to lose the weight. My health was declining and I knew it but had no effective tools to fix any of it except drugs for all my ailments. I had zero hope.
With this current news of pre-diabetes in my future, now I wasn’t worried about being obese anymore. I was worried about being a diabetic. I thought, “This must be as is as good as it gets. You grow old, get fat, get some kind of disease and you die.” I felt like a complete failure as a wife, as a mom, as a person. Those smoldering embers were turning into burning flames by now and destroying any sense of self worth I had left. I began to disengage from life, from people, even from my social media. Losing this fight to lose weight felt like I was losing at life.
One day in 2018, I was in Costco and saw a book by Dr. Jason Fung called The Obesity Code. I must have walked around that book table 5 times before I decided to buy it. I didn’t think there was much point, but I bought it anyway. Thankfully, it explained insulin resistance in a way that I finally understood. It also introduced me to fasting. I thought, “Well, there’s a diet protocol I haven’t tried! So, I embarked on a journey of fasting. Along with that, I did make a concerted effort to stop any and all things I knew were sugar and starchy things that turned in to sugar. I began to keep a food journal. I made some progress! In the process, I also found out about the ketogenic diet on the internet and began following what seemed to be a very successful protocol, and I had great success….for awhile.
In fact, I lost 45 pounds but not without a LOT of fasting. I was very hungry but was trying my best to stay in ketosis. When I hit a stall every month or so, I fasted more. I measured ketones more, I tried figuring out macros more. It consumed my life and my time. IT BECAME LIKE EVERY OTHER DIET! I was eating one meal a day (OMAD) and fasting, starving, and getting zero results. I was so hungry, I began adding a meal or two back and the weight came back on and I quickly gained 20 pounds. This was my rock bottom. What do you do when fasting or OMAD doesn’t work? Not only that, I was still not sleeping better and many other ailments did not improve by any permanent measure.
It was 3am and like clockwork, I was now awake for the millionth time. I lay quietly, ever aware of how bad my body hurt just laying there. I was just staring at the ceiling fan with tears running down my cheeks as I silently begged God for help. It wasn’t the first time I prayed about losing weight but felt like it might be my last….
THE ANSWERED PRAYER…
ADAPT YOUR LIFE ACADEMY
I first saw Dr. Eric Westman at an online Keto Summit in the summer of 2020. I remember him well because he disagreed with the protocol I was using that was taught by the chiropractor hosting the summit. Because of that, when I saw his ad for his Keto Made Simple Masterclass, I looked him up. Although skeptical, I knew I had to give it a try. I knew keto was different and that I was on the right track, but maybe there was something more I could learn to figure out why it wasn’t working for me. Besides, I had reached my limit when I was at almost 200 pounds a few years prior. That was my line in the sand. I decided no matter what I had to do, I would never be heavier than that, nor would I ever return to that weight. So, when I lost 45 pounds doing keto and fasting but promptly gained 20 pounds back because I got tired of being hungry and eating one meal a day, I was worried.
When I read about Dr. Westman’s way of teaching keto as “prescription strength”, I was intrigued. After all, isn’t that what doctors do? They give us a prescription to help fix a problem. Well, no doctor had ever given me something to fix my weight problem or the chronic illnesses and pains I developed because of it. I was only given pills and repeated visits asking if any of the drugs and hormone pills they were giving me helped. It was more like, “Try this. Good Luck. Let’s see if it works.” Dr. Westman was offering something he KNEW would work. He had seen it happen. He had the science to prove it. I looked at his years of success teaching it in his clinic at Duke and the rest is history. I haven’t looked back. I lost 12 pounds in the first 3 weeks of that Masterclass and for the first time in 30 years, I HAD HOPE!
FITNESS
As the weight started peeling off, things began to heal. My headaches went away, my joint pain went away and I no longer had to walk 10 steps behind my family at Disney World anymore! With renewed energy, I knew it was time to address how out of shape I had become. Because of chronic pain and weakness in my body, I had stopped doing many household chores, like changing the sheets on the bed because the mattress was too heavy. My son had taken up vacuuming for me and I couldn’t take out our recycle bins. I love to cook and just bending and squatting to get my cast iron skillet was hard! Fearing how this lack of mobility, poor balance and weakness might affect me even more as I age, I embarked on a journey to just move. Every day my goal was to move more than I did the day before. I found rowing classes and later kickboxing, which both energized me, got me in shape but brought back a social part of my life that I had abandoned. I began to discover and do things I never thought I could or would do! In fact, the very things I used to avoid doing years ago when I exercised (like squats and lunges) because of pain are the very things that I discovered have healed my sciatica and chronic back pain! I sometimes still can’t believe what has transformed in my life.
I am forever grateful for where I am. I have lost 68 pounds and not only reached but exceeded the goals I set for myself. All my chronic pain and problems have resolved and I don’t take any medicines. I am in the best shape of my life and I am sleeping perfectly for the first time in 20 years. Best of all, not only is my health restored but so is my spirit. That is complete healing and wholeness to me. It is a gift beyond measure. I am living my best life and it all started with one Masterclass. I could never have done any of this had it not been for Dr. Westman and the AYLA team who decided to bring what they knew to the virtual world.
​
If you need a change in your life, struggle with food addiction, are doing keto and/or are stuck in a stall, and you are interested in learning more about Dr. Westman, Keto Made Simple, Adapt Your Life Academy, or the books and courses, please see my Resources page!
I had the honor of stepping outside my comfort zone and sharing my story on a Low Carb Cruise!
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so perhaps this video of my first year with AYLA will show you the power of this corrective, “prescription strength” keto diet and what happened to me when food and fitness changed my life!