I got off the thirty-day fast, and I immediately made the food I’d been craving the whole time: macaroni and cheese. Out of the box. My favorite.
I sat down, took a bite, took another bite, ate two more bites — and thought, this tastes terrible. I don’t like this. And I tossed it out.
The food I’d craved for thirty days
Two days later, mac & cheese sounded good again. I made another batch, sat down, took a bite or three or four, and threw the whole batch out. Two days later I made it again. Sat down. Ate it again. Four bites. Threw it out.
After the third or fourth time, I decided: I do not like mac & cheese anymore. I don’t want to ever eat it again.
For the first time, my tastes weren’t just tolerating a diet. Something in my cravings had actually changed.
And that began to break one of the hardest things in the whole weight-loss journey — emotional eating. The food I’d used for comfort couldn’t even fool me anymore.
Three months — and the roommate who wouldn’t back down
I felt so good that I decided the next October I was going to come back and do another thirty-day fast. The next year came around, and I was sitting with a buddy of mine who was my roommate at the time. I said, “Hey — can you do this with me? If you’re gonna do it, I’ll do it.”
He said, “What about if we do two months instead of one?”
I said, “How about three?”
He wasn’t going to be outdone — he wasn’t willing to be the one to back down — so he said, “Yeah.”
So we started what became our three-month juice, smoothie, vegetable, and popcorn fast. October into November. We made it through Thanksgiving. It was hard. We got to the middle of December, looked ahead to Christmas and all our favorite foods, and said, “That’s good enough.” We stopped at two and a half months.
The on-and-off that kept me losing
But about a month later, I was missing it — missing how good I felt. So I went back on for another month. Went off. A few weeks later, I missed it again. So I went back on for another month. One, two, three, four — maybe five months — I did that fast on and off. And it kept me slowly losing weight.
I was doing aerobics in the pool. I was walking my dog four times a day. In fact, it was those little twenty-minute dog walks that I really attribute it to. Somewhere along the line, it felt like something in my metabolism switched, and I started slowly losing weight. The biggest challenge was buying a new set of clothes every six to nine months because the old ones were so big on me.
More than two hundred pounds, gone. Slowly. No surgery.
What it was really about
So the process of healthy self-love — it was so big for me. So important. My doctors have said I’d be dead today if it weren’t for that. I’m so grateful for finding that balance. For the people who were part of my life. For Rich being my sponsor and my coach. For Rich being flexible as I was working to make progress.
I love to cook, and I had made some good, fattening food. I had to relearn how to cook all the stuff I didn’t like — all the vegetables — so that I loved them. Relearning was the whole game. Not a diet. A direction.
Perhaps some of my story here is something you’re familiar with. The emotional eating. Reaching thresholds. Moving through plateaus. Relearning how to live in your own body. If you’re stuck in any of that — I’d love to help you find your true north.