How the hell are there so many “perfect’ diets? Which one am I supposed to do? 

This was a thought constantly ran through my head when I started my journey. My goal was simple – to lose 50 pounds within 3 months and reclaim my life before it was too late.

And I did it.

I’m Kimmy G.

I talked a little bit about the start of my weight loss journey earlier… but like I said – I was coming from a DARK place when I started this. My husband had just left me (after cheating for MONTHS) and I wasn’t coping well with the break up at all.

Comfort food became my only food, the couch became my bed, and my life became a mess.

It wasn’t until I realized that my own children were ashamed to have their friends even LOOK at me when they came to visit that I realized that I needed to do something. I started looking into a lot of methods and weight loss programs, and I’ve detailed my experience with many of them on here – including the ones that I’ve come to swear by.

Intermittent Fasting and Keto.

Why Intermittent Fasting?

Well, I was never an athlete. When I was young, “fun” was  curling up and reading fiction until it was time to watch some sitcoms or game-shows with my older brother and parents.  I took a few health courses while I was in college, but outside of that..fitness and me didn’t click.

So, I hit the drawing board. I started to Google and research more, up until I learned of a program called Eat Stop Eat – a diet plan that was focused specifically on one thing – Intermittent Fasting.

It appealed to me, since it didn’t involve any dietary changes. All I had to do was eat one less meal a day.

Simple right?

Oh, if only I knew…

I purchased the book and read it all in one day, and quickly got started down the route that would lead me to lose 50 pounds in two months.

Don’t get me wrong, I still had some failures to go. But learning about intermittent fasting played a pivotal role in my journey.

But I needed something else, too.

Why Intermittent Fasting DIDN’T Work For Me (At First)…

Like I said, I was partially attracted to Eat Stop Eat and Intermittent Fasting because of how easy it sounded. I could lose weight without changing my diet? Yes, sign me up NOW!

And at first, it worked. I would say for about 2 weeks, I saw a steady weight loss… and then it stalled. My weight maintained. I was down 4 lbs, which was nice, but it wasn’t exactly the “transformation” I had expected. The next week and the week after that, the scale no longer moved.

I was floored. And almost snapped back to my unhealthy eating habits immediately.

My thought was, “If this can’t work for me, what could? Was I supposed to just struggle through a hundred different diets?

I don’t know what happened. But somehow, subconsciously, I think my brain was trying to figure out a solution. Because one day I had an epiphany the moment I woke up.

If my diet was fine, I wouldn’t be trying to lose weight in the first place.

People who have good diets aren’t looking into fasting. They don’t need to keep up with the latest eating trends or the latest workouts. In fact, they don’t even know what’s going on in that realm at all.

Because they’ve already got it down. Whether they eat healthy or regularly exercise, they’re bodies are exactly where they need to be.

But that wasn’t for me.

And that’s okay.

I know that feeling, I lived that feeling, and I managed to beat that feeling – losing 50 pounds in a little under 3 months. But my first step was admitting it to myself.

There are some concessions I needed to make with me diet, some foods I needed to cut out. But the idea of “revamping my diet” was a tough pill to swallow. It wasn’t simple to go about doing, and I frankly struggled a LOT with it until I found out about a specific diet:

Keto.

One thing I had never known was that bread today is “engineered”.

In the 1960s, modern wheat was gradually changed to a higher yield variety. It shared some similarities with previous strains that occurred naturally, but this modern wheat had lower nutrient content and an entirely different protein structure. We altered the makeup of wheat on a microscopic, chemical level. Just to try and get more of it.

That is the DEFINITION of corporate greed.

Now this modern bread is many times more inflammatory than it once used to be.

But the modifications don’t stop there!

Bread used to be simple: flour, water, yeast, salt, then maybe herbs and spices. The biggest epiphany I had was when someone told me to Grab a loaf of bread from my kitchen and look at the ingredients list.

So I did it. And what on earth?!

How much more than just five ingredients does it have? How many times can I multiply five to get the number of ingredients it has?

Here’s a picture of traditional bread:

Looks different, sure. But far from inedible.

So, what exactly was being added to bread then? All of these added preservatives, the artificial flavors, the stabilizers, the enhancers. If bread was fine back then, what was the reason to add this?

To sell more bread and keep it “good” longer.

But if all these added chemicals can have so much impact, that they change the structure of proteins in bread, and yet they provide no additional nutritional value…

How could they possibly have a positive impact in my body?

All of this made sense to me. It completely changed how I thought about what I was putting in my diet.

I NEEDED TO TRY Keto. I needed to be aware of what I was putting into my body, and I needed to be aware of the alternatives. Not to mention, Keto taught me so much in general about how to make healthy food choices long term.

Once I started learning about Keto, I was able to start making more informed choices. I can go out to a restaurant and guesstimate how many calories are in a meal just by looking at the composition of it. I knew what items I could pick up at the grocery store to experiment with meal ideas (I’ve even made a guide for beginners to keto on what to pick up while shopping).

I never used to be able to do that. Nor would I have even wanted to.

So, the solution that ultimately worked for me – was to combine Intermittent Fasting WITH Keto. I started simple. I follow the Intermittent Fasting Eating Schedule, then broke my fast with keto approved foods.

I gave Keto an honest shot. I looked at as many as five different keto cookbooks and meal plans and figured out which ones were the most useful for me (I still use them daily). I recommend them to my friends now – some of which go for all three and see excellent results. Starting a pinterest was a surprisingly huge part of my journey as well – seeing all those Pinterest-ready Keto pictures made the diet a lot more bearable.

Because HERE IS THE SECRET TO MY WEIGHT LOSS. HERE is what all of those other fake diets, fake workouts, fake fads didnt tell me:

I HAD to LIVE the healthy lifestyle that worked for me! This means making changes and diving in, JUST to test them out. I had to get a feel for them. It’s like driving a car, except instead of getting into a sleek, modern vehicle, I was transforming into a sleek, modern body. It took me time and experimentation to find the fit for me.

And it started with the meals and the ingredients.

I needed to see, smell, touch, and taste what “healthy eating” is like.

Keto is the perfect diet for this, because it made me conscious of what whole foods are, what type of foods have additive sugars, and I could see the effect of inflammation on my body. Trying keto for 2-3 days, then snapping back to eating carbs, was an easy test to see how quickly I bloated up.

So that’s the process I went through to lose 50 pounds in 3 months. It was far from easy. But it was worth it. I feel and look better than ever – even my mental health has improved. My mood is GREAT. And best of all – my son is not at all embarrassed to bring his little friends around to meet mommy :).

It is was not easy to change my lifestyle. But it was worth it.

It was 1000% worth it.

Stick Around

If you want to, you’re welcome to read about other things I wrote down and catalogued about my journey. I’ve written plenty about my experiences with Intermittent Fasting and Keto. For example, if you need a good meal plan or cookbooks, I’ve recommended some of the best ones I found. I can’t say if it would be good for you to try or not, but I know that for ME, it was exactly what I needed to get my life and diet back under control.

Happy Reading!