What I Thought Was Normal Weight Loss When I Was 215 Pounds

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What I thought was normal to lose weight when I was 215 pounds was doing whatever extreme thing I could tolerate long enough to see the scale move. I truly thought something was wrong with me because losing weight felt hard and miserable.

When I was 215 pounds, I thought it was normal to eat in really strange ways to get healthier. Skipping meals, eating one food on repeat, cutting out entire food groups, or forcing myself to “just be disciplined” felt like that’s what a weight loss journey was supposed to look like.

I didn’t see it as extreme or disordered at the time. I thought it was just what you had to do if you wanted results.

In this Dish On Ditching Diets podcast episode, I share what I believed about weight loss back then and why those restrictive, hard diets kept me stuck in the same cycle of restrictive dieting for years.

I talk about how diet culture convinces us that suffering equals progress, why healthy habits lasting results never come from starving or rigid rules, and how real change comes from shifting your behavior. Not punishing your body.

If you’re exhausted from “doing everything right,” craving weight loss motivation that actually feels sustainable, and wondering if you’re capable of reaching a life of feeling good in your body, this episode will feel like a relief.

In this Dish On Ditching Diets Podcast Episode, You Will Hear:

What I thought was “normal” to lose weight was actually disordered
Diet culture teaches us that suffering equals progress
Restrictive diets keep you stuck in the “oh crap cycle”
Weight loss isn’t about the scale, it’s about behavior change
The chair-to-chair lifestyle is a major driver of weight gain
Non-scale victories matter more than quick weight loss

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What I Thought Was Normal To Lose Weight When I Was 215 Pounds Podcast Transcript

Hello friends!

I often think about what I was thinking when I was 215 pounds and what I was thinking was normal to lose weight. Because I always thought if I could exercise seven days a week for 30 days I could lose weight, or if I could just eat one meal a day I could lose weight, or if I could just eat carrots and cantaloupe and lose weight then I could eat like normal (true fact I did that once).

I always thought these things, but never once did it cross my mind that that was really weird that I thought that was normal to do those things to lose weight. It was very unhealthy and disordered to think I should skip meals or only eat carrots and cantaloupe to lose weight.

Essentially, I was looking for a way to starve myself, and when I was 215 pounds, I thought this was normal. And, if I thought this at 215 pounds, I’m guessing you think this way too.

I mean the goal of losing weight is to get healthier right? Fitter, stronger, get leaner? How does it make sense to think the way to getting healthier is skipping meals, not prioritizing feeding my body proper nutrients, starving myself and only eating carrots and cantaloupe.

To get healthier, fitter, stronger and leaner I should insanely starve myself? It makes no sense at all! No one who lives a healthy lifestyle does that.

You see when you’re so focused on just losing weight and the fact that they’re so out of control with certain foods and here’s the specific foods that you struggle with you just have no control, or you don’t like your body or how your clothes fit and you don’t want to be fat anymore you don’t see how weird and disordered what you’re doing really is.

You don’t see that how you look at losing weight and improving your health doesn’t make sense and diets you see fuel this all or nothing thinking.

Like cutting out rice and potatoes and oatmeal? Some of the healthiest foods we can eat to improve our health and add nutrients to our diet. There are so many women who think it’s normal to demonize certain foods and cut them out, but that is not health.

That is disordered dieting, and this used to be me so no shame if this is you. I didn’t recognize it at the time and maybe you don’t either.

When we are in that uncomfortable, desperate place, we don’t question like hey, does it make sense for me to follow this diet or do this thing if I’m trying to get healthier and fitter? Nope, we never do because when we’re in it, we can’t see it.

That is how deeply ingrained diet culture, social media misinformation and all these crazy diets that you have been exposed to have messed up how you think about getting healthier. It’s not just losing weight. It’s about getting healthier. I think we miss that key distinction on a weight loss journey.

A weight loss journey is figuring out how to better care of your health and I never realized this until one day I decided to stop dieting because it wasn’t working.

Now when I look back on, I’m like wow, I was really doing weird things and none of it was healthy. One time my mom went on the carrot diet. Lost a ton of weight only eating carrots for a few months. Her skin turned orange.

She couldn’t keep eating carrots and then she regained all her weight back and even more weight on top of that. I was a teenager when she did that so in my mind, I just thought that was what you’re supposed to do to lose weight. That must be normal. But it is not. It’s disordered.

The other day I posted a video on my social media about this topic and someone commented just eat anchovies and then you won’t want to eat anymore. Essentially, eat until you’re so sick of the thing you’re eating that you won’t want to eat.

That’s not normal. The thing is this is what everybody does. Don’t be everybody does. You’re looking for the easy way to lose weight, but you’re not changing your behavior.

Your behavior has to change. How you’re living your life has to change. It’s not just how do I lose weight. Sure, you can lose weight eating anchovies because you get so sick and grossed out from eating that food, so you’ll lose a few pounds and then what?

You just gain weight back and you’re back to square one! You’re not actually changing and trust me I used to do this stuff all the time.

I talk all the time about how that one time I tried to eat only carrots and cantaloupe. I mean how stupid like nobody can do that and it’s not even how healthy people live.

You go on a weight loss journey to get healthier. Anchovies, carrots and cantaloupe ain’t it. Changing your behavior is it!

The perfect example is the chair of changing behavior is the chair-to-chair lifestyle that’s what I call it.

Most people are living the chair-to-chair lifestyle where they go from their bed to their car to commute to work or they go to the breakfast table or their couch or the recliner and then they move to the office chair and then they move to their lunch chair and then they move back to their office chair back to their car back to the dining room table chair back to the couch back to their bed.

You’re living the chair to chair lifestyle and you’re wondering oh my gosh why am I getting fat? If you look over the course of your life you’re probably living the chair-to-chair lifestyle way more than you were 20-30 years ago because 20-30 years ago you were a lot more active.

Body fat is just stored energy. If you’re moving very little, you’re not using much energy. It’s not uncommon for me to see clients who only have 1500 steps a day. That’s very sedentary. We don’t solve excess stored energy with anchovies.

We solve it by moving more to use that stored energy and we change the behavior from the chair-to-chair lifestyle long-term so that extra body fat (which is just extra stored energy) never comes back. How does anchovies fix that? It doesn’t!

But most women want to avoid that behavior change so they’re like I’ll just eat anchovies because “I’m fat I don’t like that I’m fat right now.”

I want to be un-fat as quickly as possible so let me go do some restrictive diet like just eating anchovies so I can get un-fat as fast as possible.

But you can’t stick with a restrictive diet like anchovies because it doesn’t fit in with your normal lifestyle. What happens when your coworkers want to go out for lunch? Or you want to go on vacation?

It doesn’t work to be on such a strict diet and healthy people don’t live their lives that way. So, then you stop this strict diet and then you’re back at square one you’re like living your life in this cycle of restrictive dieting.

I call it the “oh crap cycle.”

You’re living your regular life and what happens? You’re gaining weight because that lifestyle is contributing to weight gain.

And then you have your oh crap moment. Something triggers you where you go oh, crap. I’ve gained weight. Sometimes it’s a number on the scale. Sometimes it’s your clothes. Sometimes it’s how you ate on vacation or the holidays.

You go oh crap, I’ve gained weight. I gotta do something about this! I need to lose weight. I gotta go on a diet which to you means I need to massively restrict.

I need to solve this problem right now. I’m fat now. I don’t want to be fat now. I need to change this really fast. I want to be un-fat right now.

What is the absolute fastest way I can get this fat off my body? So, you go on a restrictive diet and then what happens?

Because it’s super restrictive and unsustainable, you get frustrated, annoyed or something happens, or you get into a situation where you can’t follow the rules. You’re on keto or whatever diet and traveling and realizing you can’t and enjoy yourself sticking to your diet.

So, what do you do? You stop the diet. And then you go back to your default lifestyle that created the weight in the first place.

You see women tend to miss that this entire OH CRAP pattern of their default lifestyle.

Weight gain, oh crap, restriction, solve everything now, diet, frustration, stop diet, back to default lifestyle, gain weight, oh crap, restriction, solve everything now, diet, frustration, stop diet.

It’s a cycle that keeps repeating and meanwhile a person’s weight zigzags up and up and up and up even though they’ve lost weight on some of those diets. Because restrictive dieting becomes part of your lifestyle.

If you want to become healthy, fitter, stronger and leaner, you must stop restrictive dieting because that is part of the problem contributing to your weight problem. You must get rid of that. Your default lifestyle plus the restrictive dieting are keeping you stuck at the same weight.

That that was me at 215 pounds. I was always looking for the shortcut, so I didn’t have to change. Whatever I had to do to avoid changing how I was living that was contributing to my weight problem.

Like the supplements – I’d always buy the latest supplements or the exercise with the meal plan that was like oh, you’re gonna lose 10 pounds in a month. I always bought that stuff because I didn’t want to be fat.

I wanted to be un-fat right now, as quickly as possible and I was avoiding change, and I was living the chair-to-chair lifestyle until one day I realized like this restrictive crazy stuff does not work.

That’s when I started walking just 10 minutes every single day. That’s all I did. I didn’t change anything else for a very long time. Now, today, 15 years later I get 10,000 steps daily. Some from walking. Some from moving.

But if I had begun on day one at 215 pounds trying to do 10,000 steps every single day. I wouldn’t have lasted a week. Many women are in this extreme thinking so you go from no steps to 10,000 steps in one day and wonder why you can’t sustain it. Because that’s NOT how habits for life are created.

Diets have taught you to live in that extreme land with exercise and nutrition. In your mind, you don’t want to be fat anymore so why would you wait to get to 10,000. You’re crash dieting with steps. People do this every January.

Because they don’t like how their body feels. But it’s not normal. It’s not how you become someone who’s healthy and fitter.

The crazy thing is its less time when you work on small, gradual and incremental changes over time and you pull up your patience pants.

You can’t Amazon Prime this stuff. It’s less time versus like doing (ZOOM) that your entire life and trying to force yourself to eat anchovies and driving yourself crazy with food and rules, and on and off and what’s wrong with me?

When I was 80 pounds overweight at 215 pounds and struggling with my relationship with food, I always imagine that people who were healthy and fit who went to the gym regularly who prioritized meal prep and prioritized eating a lot of healthy, nutrient dense foods and regulated themselves mindfully around more calorically dense foods.

I always imagined those people were living strict, rigid lives. They were super boxed in. Super rigid and extreme and they had no flexibility and no fun that was how I always thought. Boy, was I wrong! I was thinking the way that a dieter thinks.

When you think like a dieter, you think that the way to get healthy is to be super strict and extreme. Except that’s the way you’ve always dieted.

That’s what diets have always taught you and so that’s what you think a healthy lifestyle is. But that is not a healthy lifestyle. A healthy lifestyle is not being strict and rigid and having all these rules.

Living in the extreme is not sustainable. Nobody can do that until they’re 85 plus years old. That’s not a YOU problem. That’s an everybody problem. Everybody tries to do that, but it doesn’t work long-term.

When I did that carrots and cantaloupe diet and another time, I did a shake diet where I ate one meal a day and drank two shakes. They didn’t work very long. You want to know why?

Because I was drinking alcohol like crazy and eating an entire large Domino’s pizza every Friday night. I was living in extreme diet land, and I was still thinking this is what it takes to get healthy and lose weight.

Except that is not someone who is healthy. That is someone who still thinks like a dieter. You still think in extremes. I’m either all in, or I’m all out. That’s not how healthy and fit people live.

That’s not what’s going to keep you consistent with your taking care of yourself for the rest of your life. You know because the whole purpose of going on a weight loss journey is to get healthy, right?

Finding balance, developing new routines, learning to allow yourself flexibility, changing your default lifestyle – that’s what diets aren’t teaching you and that’s exactly what you need to lose weight and have results you keep forever.

When you think about, diets and diet culture have really messed people up and taken them so far away from what a healthy and balanced lifestyle looks like.

One of my clients was doing Optavia diet prior to working with me. She stopped doing Optavia because she felt something was wrong that they told her not to exercise while on their program. She started counting her calories and was eating about 1400 calories. She was starving, and her weight was not budging.

You know why her weight wasn’t budging? Because she was trying to eat in a 1,000-calorie deficit. Her maintenance was 2400 calories, and she was still trying to count calories and eat what Optavia told her which was 1400 calories.

1400 calories is a deficit for her, but it’s a starvation level deficit. She could not be compliant with such a low deficit so her weight wasn’t budging because she couldn’t be compliant. We brought her calories up to 1900 and she lost weight beautifully.

Another client did Weight Watchers over and over and her weight was not budging. She started tracking calories and was eating 1500 and starving. She was starving and her weight wasn’t budging. Her and I began working together 3 months ago, she is now losing fat at 2400 calories. Her maintenance was 2900 calories. She is happy, content, full and losing fat.

You see diets like Optavia and Weight Watchers are starving women. They are bad diets because they put you on the least amount of food so that in your mind you think it works because you get fast results.

Because when you think it works, you will keep going back to them because you don’t want to be fat anymore. You want to be un-fat right now. This second!

Optavia and Weight Watchers want you to have to come back. They know what they are doing. Their goal is to profit off of you regaining weight over and over and coming back.

Steep calorie deficits always result in more hunger. It’s like a sling shot. You feed your body too little; your body is going to overcompensate with hunger so you will always end up eating more than if you had just eaten like normal.

The first time you lose weight in a steep deficit your body may be fine. But your body has a memory so they you go back, and your body is like nope. Not doing this starvation thing again. Nope. Not having it. Your body throw out more hunger signals to fight back.

Both clients thought something was wrong with them that they could not starve their bodies. They both thought they were broken, and something was wrong with their bodies that they couldn’t starve themselves long enough to lose weight.

They were internalizing this thinking it was a failure somehow on their part that they couldn’t be compliant with starvation level diets. And neither of them recognized this until they began weight loss coaching. I could tell you a hundred more client stories just like these where it was the same thing.

This is what I want you to hear and understand today.

We have been conditioned to think about losing weight in a crazy way. We think this is normal. It is not normal, and I was once right where you are.

So, I want you to really consider what I’m telling you today before you sign up for the next sugar challenge, detox program, do Whole30 in January to reset sugar cravings, sign up for Weight Watchers, Optavia or calorie count for the hundredth time. Is what you are doing helping you improve your health long-term or is it only a short term fix?

Are you thinking the way a healthy person thinks or are you thinking like a dieter – anchovies’ diet? Are you thinking what I thought was normal for losing weight when I was 215 pounds?

The way you get to a place of peace is by accepting that restrictive dieting must stop to reach your goals and that your default lifestyle has to change, gradually and incrementally over time. If you don’t know how to do that, I can show you. I can help you. Schedule a free 30-minute weight loss consultation with me and I’ll tell you how I can help you!