6 Easy Steps to Create Your Own Amazing Before And After Weight-Loss Success Story

You can absolutely create your own before and after weight-loss success story. Your weight-loss transformation can be as easy or as hard as you want to make it. So do yourself a kindness and make it easy. Simply follow the 6 easy steps below to start your weight-loss journey.

1. To create your own before and after weight-loss success story, identify the obstacle

If it’s not about food, then what is it?

That single question started my final weight-loss journey at age 39. For over twenty years, I’d been on what I call the diet-go-round, jumping from one diet to the next, hoping this next one would be the answer. It never was. I always lost the weight, sometimes a hundred pounds at a time, but then I’d always gain it back again in short order after I stopped following the diet.

During those decades, I also struggled with eating disorders, primarily bulimia (bulimia nervosa) and binge eating disorder (compulsive overeating). At my heaviest, I weighed 304 pounds and wore a size 26.

I wrote that question in my journal because, after all those years of dieting and learning about nutrition, memorizing calorie counts, measuring food, and eliminating entire food groups, I still could never keep the weight off. I knew there had to be something else going on, and I was determined to figure out what it was.

2. To create your own before and after weight-loss success story, clarify what you want & need

I knew I needed to heal my relationship with food and also with myself. I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin so I stayed home a lot, hid away in my room, and didn’t much feel like I was truly living my life. I didn’t want to be seen, didn’t want to have my picture taken, didn’t want to risk stepping out of my comfort zone to go after what mattered to me.

I was also having health problems with pain in my lower joints (ankles, knees, hips), breathing hard when I went up a single flight of stairs, and was dangerously close to becoming diabetic. And so, out of sheer desperation and because I didn’t know what else to do, I made a commitment to myself to save my own life.

3. To create your own before and after weight-loss success story, trust yourself

I decided to stop listening to everyone else (their rules and guidelines and ideas on how I should live my life) and start listening to myself (what did I want to do, what works best for me).

That was a scary day (all the responsibility for how my life turned out was on me) but also an incredibly empowering and freeing day (for the same reason, because all the choices were mine and mine alone). I also remember feeling like I was at the bottom of a mountain, looking at the summit (my goal weight), and thinking: there’s no way.

4. To create your own before and after weight-loss success story, believe you are worth the commitment

But I made a commitment to myself anyway to see my weight-loss journey all the way through to the end.

1. It took believing I was worth the commitment, which I hadn’t always believed was true.
2. It was choosing to make that commitment unbreakable, meaning no matter what I was not going to abandon myself and quit.

And it was those two things combined—believing in my own worth and value and making an unbreakable commitment to my own health and healing—that made what seemed impossible to me (a 174-pound weight loss) into I’m possible.

To turn your life into what you want it to be, you need to do the same.

5. To create your own before and after weight-loss success story, make that commitment unbreakable

So do this:

1. Know that your worth and value are innate. You were born with them and nobody can take them away from you. You can choose not to believe in them but that, I say kindly, is your choice. And if you believe you don’t have worth and value, aren’t worthy of good things, and/or are undeserving of the life you most want, then all you have to do is change your mind.
2. Believe you can succeed at anything (weight loss or otherwise) if you’ll just make an unbreakable commitment to yourself. And if you don’t think you’re worthy of making that commitment to yourself or capable of seeing it through, then all you have to do is change your mind.

6. To create your own before and after weight-loss success story, believe in your worth and value

You are worth the:

•  time
• money
• effort
• resources
• focus
• and whatever else you need to reach what matters to you.

I believe that about you. Now you just need to believe it about yourself.

How I created my own before and after weight-loss success story

I shed the weight naturally, without pills, surgery, disordered eating, or anything along those lines. I listen to my body and let it be my guide, eating only when I’m hungry then stopping when I’m comfortably full. I don’t have any restrictions on food except if I’m allergic to it. I eat whatever I want without judgment. That’s what I needed to do to heal myself and my relationship with food.

I also did some deep introspection as to why I was using food in a way it was never intended to be used. That introspection—the answer to the question, if it’s not about food, then what is it?—eventually became a book I wrote called, Start Where You Are Weight Loss.

I believe, having lived it, that weight loss has very little to do with food choices and mostly to do with healing your mindset about food. Mindset is what my book aims to help people heal.

My weight-loss transformation and how you can do it too

It took me two years to shed the weight, finishing at age 41. As of this writing, I weigh 128 pounds at age 50, and I’ve kept the weight off for nine years and counting.

• I have no fear of gaining the weight back and not knowing what to do about it.
• I no longer have any raging eating disorders.
• I don’t live in fear, confusion, frustration, and shame about food.
• I got free.

Your life can be that way too

How to have your own before and after weight-loss success story

I transformed my body by trusting it and listening to it. I transformed my life by trusting myself and listening to my intuition. You can and need to do the same for your own life.

It doesn’t matter how slowly you go. Truly it doesn’t. The only thing that matters is that you don’t stop. So you keep going and refuse to give up on yourself. If you do that, you’ll get to where you most want to be—in a body that feels like home to you and to a life that makes you excited to be alive. Oh yes, you will.

This interview first appeared in D’FYNE Fitness Magazine.

Get off the diet-go-round. Get on with your life.^®

Stop wishing, start doing.
Create your own weight loss before and after success story.

My weight loss transformation & how it can help you succeed at weight loss

You absolutely can break the diet cycle. I got free. Your life can be that way too.

I made my own path because I needed to get myself out of the crazy-making behavior I was having around food. I needed:

• no more dieting.
• no more restrictive eating.
• no weighing and measuring food.
• no off-limit foods.
• no more judgment around food.
• no more trying to figure out healthy eating or just what healthy foods to eat.
• no more judging my self-worth based on the scale.
• no more you’re-not-doing-it-perfectly diet rules that were only fueling my constant thinking about and obsession with food.

I needed to stop: searching for weight loss tips, wondering how to lose belly fat fast or how to lose weight fast, worrying about how to eat healthy or finding healthy snacks for weight loss, coming up with yet another healthy eating plan, trying to have quick weight loss, or forcing myself onto yet another weight loss diet. What I needed instead was to find, out of all the weight loss programs out there, the best weight loss program for me. Turns out, the best way to lose weight was to find out what works for me and do that.

• I’ve lost 160+ pounds naturally by simply trusting myself and listening to my intuition (mindful eating and eating intuitively).
• I have maintained that weight loss for 9 years and counting by trusting myself and listening to my intuition (mindful eating and intuitive eating).
• I no longer have any eating disorders, including bulimia (bulimia nervosa) and binge eating disorder (compulsive overeating).
• I no longer have a fear of food.

Just imagine what you could be doing with your life if you’d just commit to having your own before and after weight loss success story. You could be: following your own dreams and reaching your own goals, cultivating your own passions, and making both your inner and outer worlds a more blissful and peaceful place.

I got that for my life. I want it for yours. I will teach you how.

Start Where You Are Weight Loss Coaching

Start Where You Are Weight Loss Books

Start Where You Are Weight Loss™ Online Course

Let today be the day you make peace with your body and with food.

For more information, check out the Start Where You Are Weight Loss^® page.