A Tale of success, loss, and success again: How eating Keto changed my life

So I feel like this will be fairly long, but at the request of another ketoer in response to some comments over on r/loseit, I’m sharing a bit of what brought me here, my success so far, and how r/keto changed my life.  

**Stats**
So first off, I’m female and have had two kids (they are teenagers now, so no excuses about pregnancy weight or baby fat). I went back on strict keto in September 2011, in the year and a half prior to that I lost about 30lbs on Weight Watchers (although I was mostly doing keto at that point as well, but probably closer to 60-80 carbs a day than my current goal of 20). Since September, I am down 25lbs. I was incredibly ill for most of the spring, so it slowed things a bit, but I never went off keto and didn’t make excuses, I just drank tea and keto’d on.  

Age: 36
Height: 5'3"
Heaviest: 263, size 20/22 (June 2009)
Current: 208, size 12/14 (June 2012)
GW: 132 (might change once I get closer)  

I will preface by saying that BMI is a crap measurement of health, but it is a good tool for setting goals, and especially for setting goals that your regular doctor will understand and recognize. These are the goals I have made for myself and when I will meet them based on my height. I am just about 10lbs away from my next goal of Obese Class I (When I was at my heaviest at 263, I was in Obese Class III, also called Morbidly Obese.)  

Goals:
[X] Obese Class II (225 lbs) - Jan 2012
[ ] Obese Class I (197 lbs) -
[ ] Overweight (169 lbs) -
[ ] Slightly Overweight (155 lbs) -
[ ] Healthy Range (141 lbs) -
[ ] Goal Weight (132 lbs) –  

**History**  

I was a really fit kid. I played baseball in an all-boys league, I climbed trees, I rode my bike for hours every night, I was always outside. And then the league took away my waver and told me I had to play softball. I was twelve and full of attitude and said I’d rather not play than have to play with a bunch of girls. So I stopped playing, stopped walking to school because my junior high was on the other side of town, and I started cooking for myself. Sweet and sour meatballs with rice. Every day after school. I lived on soda and candy bars. In high school we lived on coffee and Italian sodas and French fries. I weighed 140lbs in high school, and thought I was the fattest girl on the planet. My boobs were huge, my self-esteem was shit, and boys liked me for both of those reasons, so I let them. To absolutely no one’s surprise I got pregnant at 18, and six months after we got married, I got pregnant again.  

I was married to a football player for about 12 years, he was massively obese (well over 460 lbs for most of our marriage, although he was 6’9”, but just a huge guy and, unsurprisingly, he became diabetic during that time). I grew up on game meat and vegetables that we raised in the back yard. He grew up on a farm where they ate beef and pork, had potatoes with every meal, and had dessert every night. By the time I gave birth I weighed 199lbs. My relationship was emotionally abusive and I took comfort in the food I had been introduced to. I baked almost every day, cookies, bread, you name it. When I was 23 my best friend started doing Atkins and asked me to join her. I instead went on a ‘high carb’ diet and put on about ten pounds, at that point I weighed 220lbs. That Christmas, my boss’s sister came for a visit from Taiwan and took a picture of me at my desk. I didn’t give it much thought, but then a month later she sent me the picture. I was wearing a giant blue jumper and my face was unrecognizable from what I believed myself to look like. On the back she had written one line: “I’m worried about you.” I sat at my desk and cried for the entire afternoon. 

I looked at that picture and decided it was time to join my friend on Atkins and see what happened. I had absolutely no support from my husband, so I basically cooked two meals for every one I ate. I had two little kids, so many times I was cooking something different for everyone. I was incredibly sedentary as well. I worked in an office and was writing every night, so my whole life was spent at the computer. I watched an insane amount of TV and while I was a camp fire leader, I wouldn’t call us an active/outdoorsy troupe.  

Over the next six months, I lost 50lbs without really trying. I made a list of foods I could eat and stuck it to my desk at work. I made a reverse pyramid on my white board and filled it in as I lost weight. Everyone knew what I was aiming for and I had great support there at work and in my ‘buddy’ who was losing at the same pace as me. After six months the struggle started. I had to *fight* for every pound. I was working out twice a day, every day. Before work I went swimming, after work I went to the gym and met with my trainer, a mean Samoan who would threaten to take my car keys away any time I said I couldn’t lose another five pounds. There was a great BBQ place near where I worked, so every day I would go get roast pork with mayonnaise in a bowl for lunch, or I would go to the deli and get meatballs, rinse them off in hot water to get rid of most of the sauce, or I would get a spinach salad at the salad buffet. In total I made it down 63lbs. I felt amazing. I had made it to a size ten. Here is a picture of me at that time (Note: I am not Gina Torres). I took a celebratory trip to a Xena convention in Florida (because OMG, I was *so* awesome) and never felt better about myself. I still felt that I could have lost another fifteen pounds or so, but I was on track!  

And then everything changed.  

I had been in pain for years, lots of pain. It hurt when I had sex but my husband wouldn’t let that stop him, so I would be left sobbing when it was over and that became my cycle every night. I would cry myself to sleep and in the morning I would put on my ‘mom’ face and just get through my day. I saw dozens of doctors trying to get someone to explain to me why I felt as though my guts were being ripped apart, why I couldn’t even pee without my breasts hurting, why sex had become the most unbearable thing in the world to me. One day I was getting my tires rotated before taking my now very active camp fire group camping. I was running late and didn’t have a ride to the tire shop, so I ran there. It hurt, I was out of breath and sweating like a pig when I got there, but I made it in time and took my little troupe hiking through the woods all weekend. Somewhere along the way, I realized my foot was killing me. So a few days after getting back, when it didn’t get better, I went to the doctor and had an x-ray. While I was there, the doctor suggested we do my annual exam so I wouldn’t have to just come back in another week. About three seconds after he began, he looked at me, he looked at the nurse, and with tears in his eyes apologized for not knowing. What I learned that day, was that four years earlier, when I was giving birth to my daughter after seven false labours, my uterus had prolapsed. My guts were, quite literally, falling out. By the time I broke my foot that fall, I could hardly exercise without wetting my pants. I was in so much pain I didn’t know any other way to be. By that day in the doctor’s office, it was so obvious what had happened that my doctor couldn’t believe it had taken them all so long to diagnose me. He asked me how I felt about taking a month off of work, and that afternoon we scheduled a hysterectomy for later in the month.  

It’s safe to say that it was *very* hard to not eat my way through that news. I was now in a walking cast, facing massive abdominal surgery, as everything was far too damaged to be dealt with laproscopically. I was still eating low carb, but I was no longer losing, just maintaining, which at that point was enough. After the surgery, my husband was doing all of the cooking, unless it was my mother cooking, as hard as I tried to stay on track, food was out of my control. I couldn’t exercise, I could hardly move. Eventually it got a little better and after about a month and a half I went back to work. Two weeks later, I was sitting in my office when my mother called to tell me that my cousin (who I had been as close to as a sister) had overdosed. I spent the next six days sitting in a hospital room holding her hand, sleeping in a chair besides her waiting for decisions to be made. And then it was made and she was gone.  

**The interim**  

After she died, I left my job, as I was useless, sitting at my desk crying…missing my sister, missing my kids. I spent every minute I could at their school, I did camp fire, I went to the farmer’s market with my kids, we wore flowers in our hair, and we baked cookies. We made pies. We made fudge. We laughed, we made art…and at night I cried myself to sleep. The only difference was that now I cried for both the life I was living and the life I had lost. My physical pain was subsiding, but my mental pain was getting worse by the day. Once I started to put weight back on, my marriage got even worse, I wanted him to leave me so I became, quite frankly, a really horrible person. He was abusive, I was spiteful. I didn’t want him touching me now that it didn’t hurt, because he hadn’t cared when it did. I couldn’t imagine living without him, and couldn’t stand the thought of staying with him…and we lived like that for another five years. During that time I put on nearly a hundred pounds. All that I had lost and an additional forty pounds to boot.  

Over the years my kids got to be quite overweight, and so did I, so one summer we went on low carb (although my kids were still eating fruit and milk) and all of a sudden, my kids were much closer to healthy weights and I had shed thirty pounds or so.  

Even at my heaviest, probably 240, I was a lot more active then than I had been at 220lbs, so I carried it very differently; I was less fluffy, more thick. By the time my thirtieth birthday rolled around, I was actually feeling pretty good, I was probably around 200lbs, and was mostly pain free, except for my back. I had had back pain all along, but my other pain was so severe it took a back seat. Now, at 30, I decided to have a breast reduction and I immediately felt better. Unfortunately, just a few weeks after my reduction I had a piece of cartilage come detached in my ankle and had to have surgery. And, to add extra insult to injury, just weeks after the first surgery…my husband (finally) left me. The next seven months were spent on crutches, and while I had great abs, I also had a cadre of people helping me with meals. It was wonderful, and not in any way low carb. I shot back into the 240lb range.  

I started a new job, even dated and found out that sex with someone who doesn’t (or hasn’t) hurt you is kind of amazing. I felt alive in a way I hadn’t in years, and I felt determined to get fit. I worked at a university that paid for employees to join Weight Watchers, so I went with some coworkers and gave it a shot. I really didn’t buy into the points system, so I tried to follow ‘points’ as best I could while keeping low carb in the back of my mind. I managed to lose 15lbs or so and was feeling pretty good. And then I fell in love.  

It was wonderful and great motivation to get fit, right up until the moment when I was at a party with friends and declined dessert and a friend said to me, “you know he loves you the way you are.” And something broke in my brain and I began to believe it. And I stopped counting points and I stopped counting carbs and I suddenly became a version of myself that ate for comfort and stress and decadence. And by the time he ended things in June 2009, I weighed 263lbs. 

**The Change**  

It’s hard to say at exactly what moment everything changed, but it started with getting some therapy. I was that obnoxious, loud, red-head that you work with. I laughed at everything, even the tragedy, I was incredibly defensive of my parents, the way I was raised, even my ex-husband. I referred to my body as ‘this body’. I was completely disconnected from the world I was living in. I knew exactly what it took for me to be fit, and every day I made a choice to not be fit. It’s that simple. Instead of ordering a coffee, I ordered a pumpkin chai. Instead of going to McDonald’s and ordering a couple of cheeseburgers and tossing the bun as I did when I lost weight the first time around, I ordered the 2-for-1 Big Mac meal. Supersized. I always drank diet soda, because so long as I wasn’t drinking carbs that made up for the carbs I ate. “I only chew my carbs.” I actually said that. *head desk*  

Every April for ten years I had quit my job or moved to another apartment or had a break up or shaved my head, found some way to tear my life apart on the anniversary of my sister’s death. But in 2009, after I had applied for a job I didn’t want, I walked into my boss’s office and told her that she might be getting a call about me, wanting a reference, and that I didn’t want to leave. I was happy where I was, and for the first time in nearly ten years…I didn’t want to tear everything apart. I wanted to find a way to work through it. I started meeting with my therapist twice a week.  

Over the course of the next year I graduated from university (I both worked there and took classes, finishing the degree I had started 16 years earlier). I moved back to Portland that spring, and at my last session with my therapist, he told me he was retiring. He actually said to me that I was his closing argument. In the time I had seen him, I stopped dying my hair, stopped laughing at every horrible thing that had happened to and around me…I even came to realize that *my* body needed my help. I look at pictures of the woman I had become and I wonder who she was. There was a time when I was so desperately broken that I would eat an entire package of oreos just to spite myself, but I had them with milk, so I was being healthy. By the time I moved back to Portland I was getting closer to recognizing that the life I wanted wasn’t so far out of reach, I just needed to work at it and to find new ways to deal with temptations.  

I was accepted into graduate school, which handily came with access to the rec center, and around that time, my best friend re-introduced me to reddit. r/loseit was one of the first subreddits that I front paged and while I was often frustrated with the advice people gave there, I was excited about the progress pictures that people posted. My first year back in Portland I lost about twenty pounds, mainly because I was walking a lot more, taking the bus instead of driving, taking the stairs, and had given up my ridiculously carb heavy pumpkin chais. I was using loseit.com to track my food and my weight and found it incredibly helpful (and still do, I’m the same username over there, for those who like friends, as well as on myfitnesspal.com.)  

In August of last year, my best friend (hi Miryenne) said she was going to give keto a try and did I want to go full ketard with her. I was slowly moving myself in that direction already, because again, I knew exactly what it took for me to lose weight, I’d done it before. So we front paged r/keto and right around the beginning of September, we dove in…again.  

Since September, I am down another 25lbs, bringing my total weight loss to 55lbs since I was at my heaviest weight. I still have right about 70lbs to go til I hit my ‘goal weight’ of 132lbs…half of my heaviest weight.  

**What works for me**  

I always try to preface advice by saying that my keto is not your keto, and your keto is not mine. What I mean by that is that keto is about finding what works for you; it’s all about trial and error, adjustment, and never having to apologize to your body.  

What works for me is aiming for 20-30 carbs a day. Sometimes I go into the 40-50 range, but I know that at that level I’m not losing, I’m maintaining. Also, I don’t plateau, which is not to say that sometimes I don’t stay at the same weight for a couple of weeks, that’s been happening to me for the last month actually, but instead of thinking of it as a plateau, I’ve congratulated myself for maintaining this much healthier weight for a month! I am up four pounds over a month ago, but I’ve lost an inch around my hips and waist. The scale only tells part of the story, so I make sure to measure each month so I can see what other tales my body has to tell me. At my heaviest I was wearing a 20/22 trouser. My favourite pair of jeans right now are a size 12. That’s a story I enjoy telling.  

I sometimes fluctuate two or three pounds a week...but so long as the overall trend is going down, I am encouraged. We can't let little ups and downs derail us, they are just reminders that we have to look and see what we might be doing that would account for the fluctuations. This is why I weigh in every day, because never again will I jump up 30lbs and tell myself that I didn’t know what was happening. Most often I find that if I'm not losing, it means I'm not getting enough fat in my diet. Coconut oil is the closest thing I've found to a 'miracle drug', a spoonful a day, and things usually pick back up, losing half a pound a day or so.

I also don’t cheat. Ever. Not one bite. Any time I’m tempted I remind myself that instead of eating a single piece of toast I could eat a 2 cup spinach salad with 2 chicken breasts, 1/4 cup of sunflowers, 1/2 a cup of mushrooms, 1/4 cup of olives, a thin slice of onion, 1/4 of a tomato, 3 tbs of ranch dressing, a cup of steamed broccoli or brussels sprouts, a cup of coffee with heavy cream, and even have a sweet treat like 1/2 cup of unsweetened coconut mixed with a bit of melted 90% cocao chocolate, coconut oil, and butter...all for about the same amount of carbs as that one single piece of bread.  

How does someone choose the bread? I've been on keto so long, I just don't get it.  

I also eat out. A lot. I still sometimes grab McDonald’s on the way to school…two McDouble’s with no bun and light ketchup please. I’ll have an unsweetened iced tea with that. I love Outback’s prime rib with broccoli. I adore eggs Benedict…with spinach instead of an English muffin. I order my salad without the croutons and tomatoes, with ranch on the side. I’m a fork dipper now. I love hot sausages with sauerkraut, in fact I made my own sauerkraut last month, it was delicious. I make my spicy chicken dish at least three or four times a week, tossing in broccoli, cauliflower, or spinach. It took me months to get over my need for sweetener in my coffee and to switch from chai or mochas to Americanos...but I did it, and easily cut 20 carbs a day out of my life.  

My ‘go to’ snacks are Bacon!! Pepperoni slices, Dubliner cheese, pork rinds, artichoke dips, walnuts, almonds, sunflower seeds, Greek olive mix, marinated artichoke hearts and mushrooms, shredded unsweetened coconut, 90%+ cacao chocolate, dill pickles, basically any green veggie.  

I also no longer have a car and walk everywhere. I occasionally do crossfit (although I still have some joint injuries, so I have to modify quite a bit). I also swim, and when I can’t swim because it is hurting my shoulders, I water jog, I do cross country under water, I do sit ups, I do lunges, I do pushups against the side of the pool. I just get in and move my body. It’s amazing how much my body shape has changed just in the past eight months.  

**My advice**  

Sometimes it's hard to be harsh because we are all adults here, but anyone who tells me that they tried keto and weren’t able to be successful just makes me sad, because the truth is they may have tried keto, but they clearly didn't get it. When I did Atkins years ago, I had great success but then when my sister died I fell off hard and went on a ten year 'omg bread is so nummy' pity party, and it wasn't until I found r/keto that I really seriously was able to say 'enough' and to take full advantage of having 25k other people watching my back, sharing recipes, and tips that I really got just why I had such a hard time sticking with keto the many times I tried to go back on my own...the truth is, once you get keto and see what a difference it makes in your life, you know that going back to eating mainstream diets is the same as saying, "I know this is bad for me" as you stuff a s'more into your mouth. If you eat bread and corn and potatoes and sugar you will be fat. Period. Once you know that, eating that stuff can make you feel awful because you are willingly poisoning your body.  

What reddit and sites like loseit.com and myfitnesspal help me accomplish is amazing because I've had a complete shift in attitude, I just can't put things into my body that I know will hurt me. I can't look the other way and pretend that I don't know what it takes for me to be fit. I used to easily eat two or three grilled cheese sandwiches in a day...and then I realized that it was the cheese I wanted, not the bread...that shift can lead to great success if you let it, but if you make excuses such as “I eat healthy, it’s just the portion sizes I struggle with”, then it's just denial. And both r/loseit and r/keto are about accountability. We already know what we have to do, we just don’t always want to, so we come here looking for someone to tell us that losing the weight will be easy and that we can keep eating turkey sandwiches for lunch if we only have one or two, instead of four, but that's bullshit. You can eat turkey every day, but so long as it's wrapped inside that bread, you haven't made any changes at all.  

A lot of people will call Keto a fad. The amusing part of this is the whole point where obviously if a diet is working it is the way you should be eating for your body. That's not a fad, that's finding what works for your metabolism, so of course if you go back to eating shit your body will respond accordingly. The reason paleo/keto works is because it is good for your body and you will find that the people who are successful on those diets and who stay fit continue to look at sugar and starch as poisons that are not worth putting in our bodies. I just think of the food others eat, like desserts and bread, as poison, because that's what it does to me. It poisons my body, it poisons my mood, it poisons my progress...so I'm not any more tempted to put, say, an oreo in my mouth than I would be an arsenic tablet.  

Things you can do right now to get started...absolutely no sugar, no soda, no bread, no corn. Get rid of those empty starches and carbs that just turn to fat, instead give your body carbs in the form of vitamin rich, protein heavy foods like green vegetables, cheese, and meat (any kind of meat you like, pork, fish, chicken, beef, lamb...there are lots of options, so don't feel like you have to just eat chicken every day). We're not here to tell you what you already know, we're here to support you once you are ready to face it and to do something to change your situation.  

Remember that it's a lot easier to lose weight if you stop putting crap into your body and then try to take it back out (whether it is through exercise or 'calorie deficits'), better to not put things in your body that you already know are responsible for getting you to this weight. Instead start each meal asking if this food is part of the problem or part of the solution. Once you start shedding pounds (and you will!) then you will be able to start exercising because you want to be more active, because you won't be able to sit still, you will be burning so much energy (in the form of stored fat) that you will be compelled to get up and get active.  

**Epilogue**  

Last September, right about the time I was switching back to strict keto, I met my boyfriend. I was grateful for the attention, but was still incredibly uncomfortable in my own body. I have scars from all of the surgeries, I was still close to 240lbs, and wanted the lights out as we got undressed. He’s a guy who prefers curvy girls, but this time, I had to say to him that while I too love my curves, my body is on a journey and this isn’t the finish line. In the nine months we have been apart (he lives in the UK) he has rooted on every success, but would also joke that we are together again (in two weeks) that he wants to feed me cake. I declined the invitation for cake and instead sent him the final picture in my series of progress pics and told him I was much more focused on having my lover find me sexy. The verdict was that my goal is being well met. Since that time, the talk of cake has been replaced by planning geocaching trips we are taking together and other ways that we can be active while we are together this summer. This time around I’m doing it for me, and he will just have to adjust his views to fit the new me. I’m on a mission here. The face in the mirror is finally one that I recognize and I have r/keto to thank for that.  

Tl;dr: I did Atkin’s, had success, lost my sister, had a ten year pity part, and now I’m back on track, thanks in large part to r/keto.