Why I’m Changing My Life With Idaho Fat Loss

"Why are you dieting?! You're not fat!" I've gotten that question I get asked when I tell people that I'm doing Idaho Fat Loss's NutriMost system.  For me it's about more than losing weight.

Dr. Sterling came to visit the station a few weeks ago and tell us about some results outside of weight loss that people saw doing the program.  During his presentation he talked about the extreme knee pain he was suffering as he traveled to his other clinics across the country. Shortly after he completed his own program, his son noticed how easily Dr. Sterling was moving up and down the bleachers at a basketball game.  He'd never seen his dad move like that.  The program resolved the doc's knee pain.

If you know me outside of 103.5 KISS FM you know that my life revolves around sports. Watching them and participating in them. Even though I'm taking a crack at playing indoor soccer now, the truth was and remains that I'm too uncoordinated to be good at any sports...with the exception of running.  Track and cross country were my life in high school and after a brief hiatus in college, I found myself training for endurance races like marathons and half marathons.  But as it always happens, life gets in the way and I haven't successfully trained for one since 2012.  I've been too busy, too tired after a long day of work, too hungry...etc to motivate myself to get out and run.  I let my excuses pile up and here I am 20 pounds later experiencing some pretty severe joint/leg pain not just while I'm attempting to do training runs again, but doing day to day things like sitting at my desk or seeing a movie.  I can only attribute it to the extra weight on me that I've never deal with training in the past.  My hopes are that I'll see similar results to Dr. Sterling and see that pain resolved.

But, it is about losing weight too.  Over the last few years, I packed on the pounds without realizing how much I was gaining.  I could tell I looked a little bigger in the mirror and had to buy some larger pants/shirts (damn second button battle.)  If you're thinking "Well, if you could tell you were putting on weight, why didn't you get on the scale and see how much?"  It's very simple.  I fought a quiet battle with anorexia in high school.  I was picked on quite a bit by the kids in my neighborhood growing up.  They were pretty.  They were popular.  I wasn't.  I had huge round glasses, a bad haircut and just didn't seem to fit in.  The popular kids picked on me because I was smart, because my parent's garage door opener looked like a pack of cigarettes, because I played it safe in most things...you name a flaw I had?  They found it.  But the thing that stuck with me and really ate me inside was a girl saying the words "you're fat."  I couldn't shake those words and somehow things got twisted in my mind that if I was skinny I'd be popular, wanted by the boys I had crushes on that were out of my league and just fit-in with everyone else.

So the summer between 8th grade and freshman year, it started.  Starting weight?  120 (I'm 5' 3") by the way.  The entire summer I found a way to just squeak by eating a cup of Lipton noodle soup for lunch.  I'd conveniently not be home for dinner or say I was eating at a friend's house.  I didn't.  And I was trying to make varsity cross country, so I was running a ton of miles in the hot, humid Ohio summers and sweating a lot out. By the start of the next school year I weighed 95 pounds.  Did it solve my problems? Was I popular when we went back to class?  No.  The kids were just as cruel as ever.  I was just an unpopular string bean now but I hung onto my eating disorder. It felt like it was the only thing in my life I had complete control over.  My new weight brought issues though.  I wasn't strong enough to handle the miles I was running so I ended up with a stress fracture in my foot.  Then my other foot.  Then my ankle.  Then I started passing out in meets.  Something definitely wasn't right.

Luckily my best friend and teammate caught on to what was going on and said something to one of my coaches.  With their support I was able to shake my eating disorder, put on weight and finish my senior year with no injuries during track or cross country.  I also decided that from there on out, I was avoiding scales as much as humanly possible...and have done that for the past 10 years.  So, it's no surprise that I'm tipping the scale 20 pounds heavier.

For me, Idaho Fat Loss is about losing weight and doing it in a healthy way.  I want to feel good just as much as look good.  Losing the weight through anorexia was destructive and I never want to fixate on something as much as an eating disorder as I did then ever again.  So here's to the next 40 days and doing it right!  I'll be sharing my journey with you on a video diary every Tuesday.

Follow along and keep listening for details about how you can get on board and make this life changing transformation yourself!