The Beginning of My Weight Loss Journey

This is a sad picture in many ways. This Is what I looked at my heaviest weight. My heaviest weight was 375 pounds. I had given up on ever losing weight because nothing I had tried had ever worked. I hated pictures of myself, so I always deleted the pictures that I wasn’t hidden behind someone. January of 2019 I quit eating pancakes and waffles and I quit drinking Dr. Pepper unless I was on a trip and needed something to drink.  In June of 2019, I found this picture on Facebook that a friend of mine had taken and shared. I cried when I saw this picture. I knew that I had to find something that worked. I started researching Keto in general and found that there are many versions of Keto, but the basic theme is low carbs. I started playing with the idea of less carbs and not fully committing to it yet when someone recommended that I look up a Facebook group “Eat Like A Bear”. I started reading all of the free information on the sight. The units were full of information. I read every story that came through my feed. The more I read the more I thought that I could do it, but I had to take meds at least twice a day with food. By now, it is the beginning of August and I had lost 15 pounds by just playing around with the idea of Keto, and I left home on a work trip for 10 days. In that 10 days, I was not allowed to eat the way that I would prefer, and I gained 12 pounds in 10 days. On August 13th I am back at home and I realized that it was my cousin’s birthday. My cousin who had died four years earlier. I laid in a ball on my bed crying that day remembering what I believe was the last conversation that I ever had with him. We had met at a gas station because we were going opposite directions. He had lost a lot of weight himself. He told me “Tonia, you have to loss the weight. I don’t want to be here watching our grandchildren grow up without you.” 

Well now I knew that Keto would work for me so why not try it Amanda Rose’s (founder of Eat Like A Bear) way with a twist. So I dropped from eating five times a day to three times and I made one of them a RBS (Ridiculously Big Salad) and stay Keto the rest of the time. I knew that I would be doing this by myself; because, my husband wanted nothing to do with anything Keto. He was going to drink his Slim Fast shakes for breakfast and lunch, then eat whatever I fixed for supper. So I went to the store and got started. I researched supper ideas and did my best to come up with ideas that the whole family would like and would still be Keto and had my RBS for my lunch. 

The weight started to melt off. By New Year’s Eve, just a bit over four months later, I had lost 75 pounds. I hit 300 on New Year’s Eve. I was very excited! Then I did a dumb mistake and ate a large danish for a celebration. It totally threw everything off. 

The month of January, I dropped to two meals a day.  I wasn’t hungry enough anymore to eat three times a day. Still, I didn’t lose a single pound the whole month.  After losing 6-12 pounds in a two week period, losing nothing for a month was discouraging. Also, I found some protein slim fast shakes that my husband liked, so he decided to switch to Keto as well. January 19th my husband helped me do my measurements. Then at the beginning of February the scale started to move again. By February 10th, I lost 5 more pounds and we measured again. In that same time frame, I had lost 6.5 inches. 6.5 INCHES. How many inches would I have lost if I had measured at the beginning of everything in August? If you are starting now, please take my advise and measure now! I regret not measuring soon. The two things that kept me going during the month of January were the Eat Like A Bear community and a video that I had found. 

https://youtu.be/xF3rmi4DJAw

These two things kept me looking forward to what was next.