Hello! My name is Katherine. I am on a mission to share the insights I’ve learned through my weight loss journey!

It all started about 11 years ago. At that time, I weighed 280 lbs. And since I stand only 5’5” tall, that was clearly very heavy! Compare that to today. I now weigh less than half my original weight and take a size 2. I daily stand in amazement at how different and BETTER my life is!

Weight Loss for Women Over 40: What’s “The Secret”?

When I started my weight loss journey, I was in my early 40’s, and now I am in my early 50’s. A whole lifetime of unhealthy habits was standing against me. The notorious metabolic slowdown that strikes women during middle age wasn’t helping much, either.

It took me about a year to lose a little over 140 pounds. I did it in a quiet way, without announcing it to my friends or family. But, boy, they sure noticed. I was losing weight so rapidly that I would buy new clothes but only be able to wear them for about two months before they were too big. I felt like I was renting clothes rather than buying them.

My friends and colleagues starting approaching me to ask “What’s your secret?” Some thought that I must have had weight loss surgery. But I hadn’t. Some thought I had discovered some amazing new supplement. But I wasn’t taking any supplements.

At first, I enthusiastically told them about “my secret.” I talked about the “old-fashioned” lifestyle changes I had made. Like the calorie-counter app I had on my phone. Like the method I used to figure out how much to eat and how much to walk. I was a bit taken aback when, time after time, people responded with, “No, I mean tell me your REAL secret!” I was telling them my secret, but they wouldn’t believe me.

The REAL Weight Loss Secret

I was a soooo frustrated with the dynamic I was experiencing. I was more than ready to share information. In fact, I felt a true calling to share my knowledge with others. I had spent a lot of my life being heavy and knew first-hand the emotional pain that goes along with that. I definitely wanted to be on the side of light and help others.

Except nobody would seem to listen to the advice I was giving about how to eat healthy and how to get more exercise. I mentioned all this to a friend, which finally led me to a breakthrough insight. She told me, “Yeah, but everyone tries exercise and eating right. It doesn’t usually work. How come it works for you?”

That’s when I made a key discovery. The success of my weight loss journey was not due to the eating plan or the workout schedule I had followed. It had to be something else. I resolved to not rest until I had figured out what the “something else” was.

Weight Loss for Women: My Epiphany

It didn’t take long before I figured out an important synchronicity in my life. When I started my weight loss journey, it wasn’t the only new thing going on in my life. In fact, it was just one component in what I endearingly refer to as “ The Turn Katherine’s Life Around 180 Degrees Plan.”

One part of the plan was losing weight. But the other parts were more in the self-development arena. I participated in self-development groups through my church, participated in a detailed six-month discipleship program, read a lot of wholesome self-help books, and got therapy. A lot of this centered around healing unresolved emotional trauma from various situations in my life. Some of that included my thoughts and attitudes towards my body, my weight, and basically my whole self.

Looking back now, I can remember so many times I came up against a weight loss challenge, obstacle, or setback… yet faced it in a way that was substantially different from how I faced those types of things in previous, unsuccessful bids to lose weight. This allowed me to develop my core belief about weight loss. Rule #1: Weight loss is not primarily about exercise or nutrition. Weight loss is primarily about your brain and your psychology.

Weight Maintenance: A Life Lesson

My belief in “My Secret” became even stronger when I thought back to a previous time in my life when I had also lost a great deal of weight. It was right when I left home and went to college.

When I was young and living at home, I experienced a lot of stress centered around having an emotionally abusive father. I also experienced a lot of bullying at school due to my weight and my nerdy “science girl” persona.. Reading and eating were two of the few things I could do at home without getting into trouble with my dad, and they became my go-to emotional coping strategies. Especially the eating part, apparently..

When I went off to college, I bought a nutrition and exercise book. Boy, did the weight come off! But sadly, not for long. I kept it off for a couple years. As soon as I got married and started to once again experience relationship-based stress, I ran right back to food as my best and most familiar coping strategy.

Remembering this story allowed me to formulate another key insight – Rule #2: Anyone can temporarily lose weight using obvious and widely-known skills, but keeping it off requires completely different skills that are neither obvious nor widely-known.

Mindfulness and Weight Loss

Let me give you an example of one of the things I learned. Towards the beginning of my weight loss journey, I was a chaperone for a field trip for my daughter’s youth group. We were staying in a motel. I diligently continued my exercise program by going to the exercise room every morning. I would between running and walking on a treadmill. Running the whole time would’ve been better, but I was still too out of shape for that.

In fact, I was still very pudgy and weak in general. At that moment there in the exercise room, I was out of breath, drenched in sweat, full of aching muscles, and feeling pretty down on myself. It’s like every step on that treadmill was an indictment, an accusation: If I hadn’t let myself get so out of shape, this wouldn’t be such a horrible, painful experience. Seeing my reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirrored walls didn’t help much either.

And what REALLY didn’t help was the slender young mother who was also working out. I did not appreciate the sidelong glances she made in my direction. I was positive that she could run on that treadmill at twice the speed I was going without even breaking a sweat. But I stubbornly continued on.

An Attitude Change

At the end of my workout, that young mother approached me. I’ll never forget her words. She said, “I just wanted to let you know that you’re killing it. I’m a personal trainer, and not many people go at it the way you are. If you keep working out like that, you’ll soon be a champion.” 

Her kind words changed my outlook forever. Now, all the sweat drenching my body was not an accusation about how out of shape I was. It was a testimony to how hard I was working and what a good job I was doing. That mindset shift was a game-changer and led to Rule #3: Your willingness to exercise or work out is not mainly due to willpower. It is mainly due to the emotions you experience while you are exercising.

Weight Loss Motivation: Hacking My Emotions

That story started the era in which I began “hacking” my emotions. I had just finished a self-development class at my church on emotional health. I had also been reading a lot about limiting beliefs and how to overcome them.

After the incident with the young mother at the motel, I started to see how the theoretical ideas from my classes and books could “play out” on the front lines of my life. Just a few words had fundamentally changed the way I saw myself. How else could I get that same effect?

I decided to adopt a new identity – the identity of “someone who was becoming a champion.” Whenever I ran up against a challenge or obstacle, I stopped to ask myself: “How would someone who is becoming a champion deal with this?” I wound up devising a number of tips and tricks that really helped me. 

Some were positive affirmations that I would tell myself. Others were visualization techniques. Yet others were more subtle changes in the way I exercise self-care and self-compassion. The end result is that I started enjoying my weight loss efforts. And that meant all the things I was doing became easy. Because I actually wanted to do them and enjoyed doing them.

Vanquish Victim Mentality

Another way to explain this is as the intentional demolition of victim mentality concerning my weight. Unintentionally, I had been viewing myself as the victim of a bad situation. Being out of shape was an example of me casting myself in a victim role. And, what is worse is that I was simultaneously casting myself in the felon’s role: I blamed myself because I had “made” myself be out of shape! That’s a lot of shame and guilt to carry.

Another example concerns my thinking around food and eating. Having to cut back, eat healthy, change the foods and ingredients I was using… I was unintentionally seeing it all as some sort of punishment that I was inflicting on myself. Like I had to punish myself for having gotten heavy. Like I had to buckle down, straighten up, and fly right if I wanted to get out of my fat life.

I started a new habit based on this new insight: Rule #4: Any time I am unhappy with my weight loss process, it is because I am having the wrong attitude about it. I started training myself to key in to those feelings of unhappiness and use them as a trigger for self-reflection and reframing.

Becoming Solution-Oriented

As I became better at recognizing my negative beliefs and attitudes, I also noticed myself shifting into more of a solution-oriented weight loss journey. Instead of wallowing in excuses, my brain started seeking solutions. 

One example was getting out of bed in the morning to go exercise. It had become a lot easier once I started hacking the emotions I had during exercise. But there were still occasional days when it was hard. I kept asking myself, “What would a person who is becoming a champion do about this?” I came up with two specific and helpful strategies that I still use to this day, ones that “the old me” never would have dreamed up.

Over the years, I’ve acquired a number of these “life hacks.” One of the reasons I decided to start this blog was to help spread them around to other people. I want to help you jump-start your own weight loss success. It took me years to discover them – how much easier it would have been if someone had told them to me to begin with.

If any of this resonates with you, please leave a comment. I’d love to hear about your experiences. If any of my ideas seem helpful to you, please let me know. I also welcome your questions and requests for information. Thanks for reading!