Lynn's Story

At the age of 42, I got remarried. At that time I was thin and energetic. I’ve never had a weight problem.

But somewhere along the way, I woke up 34 pounds heavier! I could have asked, “How did this happen?”, but I’m not stupid. It was all those nights sitting on the couch watching TV and eating Doritos. The surprising part is how did I not notice? I still don’t have a clear answer to that.

You’d think it would have been a gradual process and I would become aware that things were changing. I never noticed until I had gained four pant sizes!

Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I was heavy. I’d see pants hanging in the back of my closet, really pretty, stylish pants that I could no longer wear. When I walked I couldn’t help but feel like a duck waddling, there was no grace in my movements.

This was a real blow to my ego. I was always thin and I liked to dress nice. I no longer felt pretty. Up until that point, I could always turn heads went I entered a room. Now no one noticed! It was a tough adjustment.

Looking back, I can see the mistake I made. In fact, it’s one a lot of women make. When I remarried, I took on my husband’s lifestyle habits. He’s a big TV watcher and snacker, so that’s what I became.

The real turnaround for me was coming to that realization and deciding that it did not serve me. But deciding to honor myself by stepping up and into better self-care wasn’t so easy.

The first change I made was to increase my activity. There had been times in my life when I exercised regularly but it had been a while. Weighing more made it more of a challenge.

At one point I decided to start running. It seemed simple enough, walk out the door and put one foot in front of the other. Not so! Running is hard! After just a couple attempts I figured I must not be cut out for it and let it go.

A short time later I ran across a program called the Couch-to-5k. This re-ignited my interest in running. The program fit me to a “T”! After all, I was a couch potato.

The program made it so easy to slowly become a runner. I had no problem being regular with it. In fact, before I even finished the 9-week program, I had scheduled myself for a 5k event taking place just after I finished the program. I was so proud of me when I crossed that finish line!

Once I started running regularly, I started feeling better about myself and that made it easier to change other habits that were no longer serving me. I started focusing more on fresh fruits and vegetables. That step led to another big one for me: snacking while watching TV.

My husband is a snacker and it was so easy to fall into that. I developed a love affair with Cool Ranch Doritos. I still love them, which means I have to be very careful about bringing them into the house.

You see, to me, a bag is a single serving, regardless of its size! Once I open them I eat my way to the bottom. Oh, sure, I’ll share some with my husband, but most of the bag is mine!

One day I took a look at the label. There’s about 1,820 calories per 13 oz bag. If I ate 2/3 of the bag, that’s around 1,200 calories per sitting. Doing that three times a week is about 3,600 extra calories. Multiply that by 52 weeks and that translates into a weight gain of about 50 pounds.

Just eliminating that one habit had a huge impact on my waistline!

The whole experience was a real life lesson for me. I need to step up and take care of myself regardless of what’s going on around me.

But I learned something else, too.  Something interesting happened to me.

I had been losing the weight and it was just about gone. But I was still transforming; my confidence was still growing. We were out with a group of my husband’s friends, a group we had been out with about three months earlier. But something happened during that three months.  There was some kind of magic now that the weight was off. This time that we got together I was confident, poised, and gregarious; there was a bounce in my step.  The change was so dramatic that one of my husband’s friends leaned over and in a joking kind of way asked him, “Is this same woman you brought last time?”

The fact is I was not.  This was the different me.  This was a new person that had been buried deep down inside that I could not tap into because of my physical state.  Who is lying inside you?  Who could you be?  And what kind of opportunities would you be attracting into your life if you were confident and poised and had a bounce in you step?

It is now my passion to empower women to step into the greatness that is inside of them. Every woman who’s life I touch can now turn around and touch the lives of others.

When I first started Health Coach Team I looked at helping women with the standard ordinary things that you think about when you think about losing weight: how many calories are you eating, what are you eating, what is you exercise activity, and we start making shifts on that just like everybody else.

What was really interesting to me is I started to see some common things that women were bumping up against as they were trying to lose weight and once I recognized these things it made a huge impact on me, so much so that over the last year and a half or so, I made a complete shift in the way that I work with women. I found that there are three key inner pieces that need to come together for a woman for her to be successful at losing weight and they have nothing to do with counting calories or getting up off the couch.

What are those three key inner pieces?

Limiting beliefs, how you feel about yourself, and guilt, and yes, they are completely unrelated to having that Big Mac for lunch.

The reason so many people get caught up in yo-yo dieting is they start a diet program that looks at just the outer pieces but if you do not change what it is going on in the inside, everything that you are looking to change on the outside is temporary because once you stop that program you go back to the way that you were before.

What I have found?

I am to the point now that when I work with a client we start with the beliefs because if we can start shifting how that woman feels about herself; if we can get her to start letting go of the guilt; if we can start changing her limiting beliefs, which are actually the cause of the problem to begin with, these other things like needing candy every day or going for the fast-food or the late night snacking, which are a symptom of what is going on inside, start to take care of themselves. It is really very fascinating.

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