How I Lost 25 Pounds…And Kept It Off For 10 Years
You might be wondering why an Austin food blogger (hi!) is writing about weight loss when it’s something I’ve literally never talked to y’all about in my decade+ of blogging.
I know it might feel random to you!
And if I’m being 100% honest with you guys, this feels a tiny bit embarrassing to me.
But I’ve been getting this subtle nudge for a while to share this magical side of my life with y’all. It’s been confirmed by weird, kismet conversations that have popped up in my life. And I asked on instagram yesterday if anyone was interested in hearing more, and the response was a resounding yes sooo…here we go.
The story is a little weird. And also kind of wonderful. And it’s been a constant in my life for more than 10 years now, so it just seemed time to talk about it.
The Season I Struggled With My Body
There was a stretch in my early 20s when I did not feel like myself in my body.
See that photo above? I was about 25 pounds heavier than I am right now. For four years I constantly felt puffy, uncomfortable in clothes, and frustrated.
I was a college athlete. I was disciplined, motivated, a planner, a do-er. I was working out 15 hours a week. I followed every “healthy lifestyle” food plan on the internet.
My body just felt wrong on me. Not “my” body.
✨A Quick Note On Body Positivity✨
Ok, I’m wary with my wording in this part because I want to very clear here:
I love the body-positivity movement. Truly. I mean, 👏🏻good job society in embracing more body positivity in mainstream media. Yay!
When I say I was “overweight,” I mean I did not personally feel good. My body. My natural shape. My personal comfort level.
We each have our own ideal way our body feels – our own alignment. My “best self” body is never going to be Kardashian-level curves or Scarlett-level classic beauty. Kelsey, the human, is naturally fairly lean, athletic — that’s just how I feel most me. Yours might be completely different, and that’s perfect.
A reminder...
(in case you're conflicted)
It’s not vain to want to feel good in your skin.
There’s nothing shallow about wanting to live in your healthiest body.
If you want to lose some weight and it’s coming from an authentic, internal desire, it’s not bad or wrong.
Your desire to feel light, strong, and “yourself” is allowed. It’s not too much to ask for, and you deserve to feel amazing.
When Nothing Worked
So let’s get into how I lost 25 pounds and kept it off for a decade (spoiler: it didn’t come from any special diet I found or a magic exercise routine.)
Back then, I was stuck on the struggle bus:
- Running marathons
- Constantly working out
- Jumping between vegetarian → vegan → raw vegan
- Trying “healthy desserts” but actually just bingeing on them. 🙃
Every time I tried to “be good,” I’d swing the other way and crash.
I knew more or less what I needed to do: stop overeating on sugary things (brownies and ice cream, giant bowls of sugary cereal, and baking and consuming loaves of banana bread were all regular habits), learn to stop eating when full, add more veggies, eat fewer processed carbs.
I knew what to do, and why I wanted to do do it. I just couldn’t seem to make it happen.
It was really frustrating. I felt inflamed, stressed, puffy, and mostly just defeated.
I couldn’t “willpower” myself into the body I wanted.
The Accidental Solution
Then something happened that I will always look back on as a little bit magical.
I was gifted a 10-pack of yoga classes. I was a broke grad student, so obviously accepted it. 😉
Except…yoga wasn’t really a workout. Not in the way I had previously thought workouts had to be.
Yoga was quiet and sloooow. The classes at Yoga Yoga here in Austin were authentic and full of breathing and stillness and weird humming and lying on the floor.
I honestly didn’t think it would “work” because I was stuck in the belief that my effort = results, and yoga didn’t “burn enough calories” to be worth my time. (<- ugh!! Such a common belief, and it’s just not true!)
But joke’s on me, because two months later at a routine doctor appointment, I stepped on the scale and —
The weight had dropped. A lot.
It was so weird, because for once I hadn’t been trying to lose weight or restricting or tracking anything.
Ok, so here’s the thing that finally, truly clicked for me:
The way you FEEL in your body is what your body becomes on the outside.
(Read that again.)
I had accidentally shifted out of “try harder to lose this annoying weight” energy and into “having a lean body is easy and obvious” and my body responded magically.
During all that slowness, meditation, and breathing during yoga classes, I started to feel lean. (Even though I was still 25 pounds overweight.) I was so convinced that I felt amazing and lean and strong during those yoga sessions, my subconscious was picking up on it and my body started to physically become that.
Here’s a simple way of saying it:
BEFORE: My main feeling was “I’m going to try so hard to lose this weight because I feel awful in my body” – so my body’s response was to feel awful and try to lose the 25 pounds. (AKA hold on to the 25 pounds.)
AFTER: My main feeling was “I’m light and lean in my body” so my body naturally started craving all the things that make a body light and lean.
(And if this is sounding a bit wishy-washy to you, I promise I’ll share my exact step-by-step process with you.)
Throughout years of food blogging and dining out, multiple pregnancies, and seasons of having zero time to work out, my body has stayed steady. Life changed, schedules shifted, stress came and went — but this approach kept me at my natural weight effortlessly.
The Meditation That Changed Everything
After that accidental experience, I wanted to find ways to more actively use this approach for keeping the weight off easily (still without dieting or restricting – yay!)
(Because I’m still me, y’all! And as much as I love a passive approach to body size, I still always love goals and plans and I was all about figuring out how to make this a permanent part of my life.)
I found a meditation on a business podcast (lol, life is funny) about choosing an emotion for your day.
Instead of a mood, I felt the ping to pick a physical sensation:
Lean.
And I didn’t pick it in a desperate way. Not “I need to lose weight.”
But: What would it feel like to already be in my ideal body?
And that feeling is what I really tapped into during the meditation. So that’s what my body aligned to.
I felt lean → I became lean.
I felt strong → I became strong.
I didn’t obsess about food or exercise. I ate what I wanted. I moved how I wanted. And my body found its natural set point and just stayed there.
For more than 10 years now.
The Science I Learned Later
At the time it felt magical.
Later, I learned:
– Epigenetics
– Quantum thinking
– Subconscious programming
– Nervous system regulation
all back it up. 🙂
We become who we feel we are.
I know it sounds woo-woo. I knoooow. I rolled my eyes, I thought some people were just “lucky” and were naturally good at intuitive eating, and I might be destined to have to fight the food cravings for the rest of my life.
And then…magic happened. (Yes, if you haven’t caught on yet, I 100% believe in magic! I think it’s a fun way to live!)
And year after year after year of life this keeps working, through every stage and season.
And when I start to feel like I might be gaining weight or not feeling like my best self, I lean into this magical process and it works again. 100% of the time.
What I See Women Struggling With Now
I have so many friends who talk about:
- Losing weight after babies
- Losing weight in your late 30s
- Weight loss after grief or stress
- Wanting weight loss without obsession
- Keeping weight off long-term
And first, I just want to say:
Good job for desiring health for your body.
Also, I remember the feeling of being stuck and frustrated by the pounds adding up and wondering if this is just how life will always be.
Which is why I’ve been getting the nudge to share this now.
I know that me sharing this will rub some people the wrong way
My ego tells me that it’s shallow to talk about weight. I worry people will say, “omg, is she weight obsessed?”
But that couldn’t be further from my truth.
The opposite is true – I’m obsessed with living a life where I DON’T think about pounds that I want to lose.
I am obsessed with having a body that’s at a comfortable weight because, well…it just feels good.
I’m obsessed with having a body that I can train like a machine for marathons and triathlons. It’s so fun.
I’m obsessed with making it all so easy that I don’t really put much time, effort, or energy into it and I can put that energy into other things.
It has become easy and effortless, and I desperately want to share this with women who might be stuck in the cycle of obsessing over their size, starting various diets, workout out endlessly or overall just not loving the shape or size of their bodies.
That being said, I know there are some people who won’t agree or like me saying that you can use mindset and spirituality to approach weight loss. And that’s ok! If this isn’t for you, that’s awesome. We’re all different.
I still want to share it, because I know how amazing it’s been in my life. And if it helps even one person find some sort of ease and flow in their weight, it’s worth it to me.
Here’s What I Do When I Feel Myself Gaining Weight
Ever since I tapped into this magic weight loss method, I’ve stayed around the same weight for 10+ years.
But even still…
If I’m in a busy period of life (like when I was writing my Austin Food Crawls book and dining out 10x a week!), or I wake up feeling not-great — puffy from too much Halloween candy, travel, hosting friends, or a long holiday weekend with cocktails — and my favorite clothes feel a little snug or my stomach doesn’t feel lean and strong, and I feel myself heading in the downward spiral of starting to freak out, wondering if I should restrict food, thinking “this is the beginning of the end and I bet I’ll start gaining weight now,” here’s what I always, always do instead:
I focus on feeling the way my body will feel once it’s already at its ideal size.
I go through my tried-and-true meditation method that I’ve done literally thousands of times in the last 10 years and tap into the physical sensation of what my body feels like after the weight is gone.
My brain decides the feeling, and then my body matches it.
It’s one of my favorite sneaky little life hacks.
I’ve practiced it so much, it’s now my default way that I see my body. My brain is constantly sending signals to my body that’s it’s lean and slim, and my body responds by naturally desiring to do the things that keep it lean and slim. I mean, I eat whatever feels fun and I do whatever workout feels fun, and most of the time those things align with what I “should” do (if I were approaching this in a “hustle toward weight loss” method.)
It’s who I am. In really simple terms, it has become a habit to believe that I will remain at this weight.
I know that some people are natural pros at intuitive eating.
I was not.
It felt too hard for me and I just honestly wasn’t good at stopping when I was full, eating the right foods that my body needed for nourishment, and staying at my favorite body weight.
Figuring out this secret of convincing my body that it’s at its ideal size ahead of time, cementing it into my brain, aligning all my emotions with that, and then just watching my body – like magic – make all the right choices to become that size, has been a very fun part of this human experience.
Want To Try This?
When I asked y’all if you’re interested in knowing more about this weird, magical way I’ve manifested easy weight loss in my life it was a resounding YES!
And I’m so glad you’re interested, but I’m going to be totally transparent and tell you that when I got all those messages through instagram I was a bit like, “oh, crap. Now I have to figure out exactly how I do this!”
I’m created a FREE 5-day guide to learning how to align with your ideal body weight.
If you want it, just drop your email below and I’ll send it over. No pressure. Just something that’s supported me more than anything else, and I hope it supports you too.