- Hey everybody. Today's video is really scary for me. I am scared to talk about
what we're gonna talk about because the fact of the matter
is a lot of you have noticed that I've lost weight. A lot of you have noticed
my body has changed, my habits have changed, and you should notice because they have. The reality is weight is
such a loaded question in the plus-size community. And very rarely is it discussed without some type of judgment. Same with fitness, and same with diet. Those words, weight, diet, and fitness, are probably the heaviest words a plus-size person will
face in their entire life. Because diet culture has taught us that our worth is in our weight, and that our inability to
maintain a certain weight is completely and 100% controlled by our diet and our fitness level. And while diet and fitness level
do affect someone's weight, they are not the end all be all predictor of someone's weight. And so for many people
in the plus community, they just don't talk about it. Or when they do talk about it, it's in response to this diet culture stigma in conversation. Today, I'm gonna talk about it, and I am ooh really scared about it, but I hope this starts
a precedent of talking about these things in a
healthy and productive way, in a way where people don't feel alienated and don't feel hurt. So that is what we're talking about today. We are talking about my weight. We are talking about my diet, and we are talking about my fitness. Whew, okay, who's ready to be murdered by comments on the internet? This girl. Actually, I'm not ready at all. It's good that I'm hiking 'cause hopefully I will just be able to ignore what will probably
be some very strong feedback. You know what, I think
the number one thing that I've realized being out in nature is that you have to pick your battles, and this is a battle
that's important to me, and it's something I need to talk about. So I'm picking this battle
up for better or for worse. So let's start at the beginning. I was diagnosed with a
condition called lipedema, and I don't even remember
exactly when I first found out. I remember how I found out. A doctor who specializes
in treating lipedema reached out to me and said,
"I'm pretty sure you have this." And then from there, a
nurse reached out to me, someone who worked in the
charitable arm of an organization that researches lipedema
reached out to me. Basically, I had a lot of professionals in the area of studying
lipedema reach out to me and tell me that I have this condition. And when I first found
out, I was annoyed and mad that these people had reached out to me. This is true. I was like, "Why are you telling me this? How can you possibly know
that I have this condition?" And I ignored it. And I was just like, "Screw you. I'm gonna do whatever I want." And then eventually after the 300th person
contacted me about it, I still every day get a message from someone with lipedema, encouraging me to research the illness
and find out more about it because I probably have it. And here you go. I do. I have lipedema. Even when I accepted it, I still didn't make
any changes in my life. I was just like, "Whatever, I'm gonna
progressively gain weight forever. I might as well have fun
while that's happening." So I did exactly opposite
of what someone should do when they are diagnosed with a condition, especially a progressive disorder. I just basically said,
"Two sheets to the wind. I'm gonna live my best
life, eat whatever I want, and do whatever I want because I have this condition,
so why shouldn't I?" That was a very immature
response to this diagnosis. And in the beginning, it
really didn't affect my life that much. To be entirely candid,
originally it was like, "Oh, my butt and thighs are bigger than the rest of my body, big whoop." But then things started to change. Things started to change. About a year ago, I started to see things
change a lot, right? The bruises became more frequent. I got varicose veins
that were not only ugly, but just felt weird. I'm constantly afraid I'm gonna break one, which is a weird thing, like I'm gonna pop it, and
blood's gonna spurt everywhere. I know that's not a rational fear, but it's something I
legitimately think about. And I just was like, "Okay, maybe I need to
start doing something." So I started researching about lipedema, and there were just all
these really extreme diets that were suggested. And honestly, a lot of the people who are actively talking about lipedema practice those diets. So I chose keto because
I like meats and cheeses. And I did keto, and I actually developed a
really terrible keto rash all over my body. I was itching and twitching for days, and it was literally the worst. One of the worst experiences of my life was the couple of months I did keto. And I remember crying to
my friend on the phone. Literally calling her up,
and bawling my eyes out, and basically being
like, "I can't do this. I can't keep this crazy diet. I couldn't do it before,
and I can't do it now." And it was weird because
I was doing a crazy diet for the right reasons, but it was still a
crazy, restrictive diet. And it still had all the terrible physical and mental consequences, even though the intention of
doing it might've been pure. Is it pure? I don't know. And I began to get really
anxious because I felt like those were the only solutions
being presented to me. With lipedema, there is no cure. There's no pill you take. You have to either adapt your lifestyle to stop the progression
or limit the progression, or you continue to progress
and eventually lose mobility. I felt very defeated. And for six months, I
probably felt super defeated because I felt like I had
lost control of my own body, and I was not capable of doing the things I needed to do to get in control of it. And I didn't understand why
it behaved the way it did, and during Corona, it got really bad. And I remember I have
this big chair I sit in. I love to sit and edit in that chair. And I remember sitting in it,
and it got so hard to get up, and it was more the pain
in my legs than anything. And I just remember feeling so defeated. I like to think of myself
as superwoman, and I'm not, and now I have this this thing in my life that I can't control. It just makes everything so much harder. It had some things going on
in my life that weren't great. So I cleaned those up, and I said, "I gotta be in a mental place to make changes that can work for me, That can work for me long term." So I started researching
just balancing diet and how to figure out
what you should be eating as a normal human being, not as a I want to lose a
bajillion pounds person, but just like I just wanna be healthier. And I saw this video and honestly, I can't even remember
where it is at this point, but it was a dietician, and she said, "People think
about our diets as restricting, What can I take out of my diet? When they really should
be thinking about food as, what can I put into my diet? What can I add to my diet
for it to be more balanced?" I remember watching that,
and just something clicked. So I got online, I found this company called Snap Kitchen that makes healthy, balanced meals without a lot of preservatives and really focuses on the
concept of providing energy in what we eat. So I bought every meal
for every day of the week, and I started that way, and they would get delivered
to me every other day. And what I said to myself
is I could eat these meals, and if I get hungry at the end of the day and I need more food, that's okay. And I can have whatever I want, but I'm gonna make sure that I start first with all of the nutrients my body needs. And in two weeks, my cravings changed. I began to notice that
sugar makes me feel yucky and causes me to crash a lot. So I significantly cut down
on my consumption of sugar. I also began to notice that
I previously could not tell when I was full or when I needed food. And so there were a lot of
signals that I was ignoring that I was starting to experience again. And it was wild. It was wild how much making
that change changed me, and also how much my eating habits naturally changed as a result. So after I got my food
under control, I was like, "I can't stop here, right? I still feel challenged in movement." So I just said, "I'm gonna walk a mile and
a half, five days a week." It ended up being more
like six days a week 'cause I started to really love it. But no matter what, I'm just gonna get up, and I'm gonna walk a mile and a half, and I don't care how long it takes. I don't care where I walk. I'm just gonna walk a mile and a half. Now, at that point, I was
having severe back pain as well. So I would walk, wow, maybe half a mile? And my back would start to ache, and I would have to bend over. I would have to stretch it out, and then I would have to keep on going. And honestly, those walks in the beginning were so incredibly hard. My legs hurt; they felt bloated and heavy. My back was a mess, and it was hot. So that doesn't help any of this. And I did it anyway. I did it anyway. And in two weeks, my back pain was gone. Just completely gone. I missed this. I missed being outside. I had worked out like occasionally, but I missed the consistency. I missed the progression. I missed being outside. I missed doing it with data. And I started to say, "You know what? This has to be a priority. This can't be something I
do for a couple of weeks. This has to be the number one thing I do every single day is find a way to get
outside and to be outside." And the peace, and the comfort, and the emotional stability that gave me made it so easy to keep doing it. So I started all of this never with the intention of losing weight, but to try to balance my pain. Now, in the beginning, I did weigh myself. I'll be real. I weighed myself because I was trying to reduce my inflammation. When you lose 10 pounds in
two days, that's not fat. That is inflammation. But then I stopped
weighing myself regularly. I also found that I was starting to get a little connected to that in a way that made me uncomfortable, and I think took away from the reasons why I was making these changes. It's so easy with our
culture to get caught up with the number on the scale. Is it going down? Is it going down? Is it going down? And I didn't wanna think
that way in this journey. I wanted to just think like, "Is my health and fitness going up? Is my pain going down? Am I having less symptoms
than I normally have?" So I've kind of done away with
weighing myself regularly. I have made a lot of changes. I don't really drink anymore. I've had alcohol twice in
the last three, I guess, three months now, three and a half months. And I don't feel like
I'm missing out at all. I also feel like it's made
some of my friendships stronger by providing a natural thing that I can invite people to do with me. I've noticed that a lot of people don't want to go on a hike, or a walk, or even just go outside and
do something by themselves. So it's given me a really easy
way to reach out to people and say, "Hey, let's do this thing and enjoy nature together." And so I've seen my life just
completely begin to change, and I've also seen myself
start to see things differently that I was incapable of seeing before. I still believe that
everybody deserves respect. I still believe that you can never judge what someone's going
through based on their body, or even necessarily the
choices they've made, and you can't assume their
diet or their physical activity from their body either. You just can't. You just can't. That said, I do feel like
there are two polarized views on health right now. There is this view of constantly
optimizing for performance in a way that's not maintainable
by the average person, and those on the opposite, which is give up, do nothing, who cares. And I realized that at
every point in my life, I had been playing to one of these poles. I had either been
restrictive, and controlling, and losing the joy of my life solely to maintain a
diet or a physical regime that met some type of ideal standard. Or I was completely ignoring
my fitness and eating habits to maximize supposed joy, right? These two polar opposites
are not solutions. Both are bad. In the middle lies what I
think I want to represent and talk about more, which is health is a lot of really complicated, messy choices. No one can make those
complicated decisions for you. You have to make them for yourself, and it doesn't start by
following a new diet plan or giving up on dieting completely. It starts by listening and
learning from your body. Over the past three months, I have learned so much
about how I operate. I have begun to notice patterns that I had never acknowledged, and I began to notice foods that literally make me feel like crap that I was eating all of the time. And I don't want to demonize those foods, because I honestly don't think that they have the same
effect on every single person. That would be an ignorant statement. But what I have noticed and
what I have become in tune with is my body and what my body needs. And I am scared to talk about this because it is such a loaded conversation. I am scared to talk about it because I am doing really great right now. I'm terrified I'm gonna fail. I'm terrified that I will,
in a couple more months, be seated down with the
same pain I had before, and making it public means that you're gonna see that failure, and that's really hard for me as someone who likes to be a
little bit of a superwoman. I have that superwoman complex
where I can do anything, I can change the world, and this is something
that's really hard for me, and something that I have
screwed up so many times. That's it. To answer the questions I
get asked most frequently. Have I lost weight? Yes. How much weight have I lost? I have absolutely no clue at this point. How much more weight will I lose? I don't know/don't care. Is it easy? No, (laughs) it is not! Has it been painful to
go through everything? Yes. Has it been worth it? Yes. I look at what I'm doing this week, and honestly, I've broken
down five times crying, but I'm doing it. Someone commented on a photo of mine. They said, "Sometimes I don't
know if I say no to something because I don't like it or because I'm afraid I can't do it." And that just hit me so hard because I had been saying no to things because I was afraid I
wouldn't be able to do it. And that stops now. So that is my health, fitness, life. Whatever you wanna call this journey, I understand this might
feel like a betrayal for some of you, especially because
these topics are so hard and uncomfortable to talk about. It's also annoying because I know there's gonna be some
troll out there who's like, "We finally did it. We broke her." And I want you to know
that this has nothing to do with anyone else's opinion of me. I literally do not care if
someone finds me attractive, Literally do not care. The level of cares is so low. So more than anything,
know that I am happy. I am healthier, because I
think obtaining maximum health is an unrealistic standard
we place on ourselves, and I am doing this a
hundred percent for me, and I feel better than
I have felt in years. Just the facts. So with that guys, I hope you have an
amazing rest of your day. I'll check you later, and peace.
