I was devastated when I figured out that despite owning my own home working for myself
driving the car of my dreams and my daughter being in a top school I was still considered a
failure because I was overweight I had always been taught that if you put the hard work in
you would get the outcome that you were looking for and maybe that created a situation in me where
I had goals that were so big but I was able to accomplish them I'm not going to say that it was
easy because it wasn't I dedicated 10 Years After High School to education that meant that when all
my friends were going out and partying and doing all the fun stuff that young people do I wasn't
living that typical teens through 20s life and it hit me every once in a while that I wasn't having
fun and I questioned whether all of what I was doing was really worth it I was banking on the
fact that when I started working and started my real life that this effort would pay itself off
and then I started to work for myself and guess what it was worth it I can buy whatever I want I
can give my daughter the things that I didn't have growing up she had things that I couldn't even
have dreamed of having and I was proud to give her that my parents were proud of me I was proud
of myself and it created the situation financially where I didn't have to rely on anybody but myself
that was super cool one of the frustrations that I lived was that despite being financially
successful Society doesn't seem to care about that for women what seemed to be of utmost
importance was how I looked not what I could do for myself or what I could do for others
that was frustrating but what was even more frustrating was that people didn't have any
hesitation to let me know that no your weight your weight's a bigger problem than whether or
not you're able to afford something that hurt and that forced me to put a lot of
my mental energy on how can I be healthier and get my weight under control so of course
having gone through the educational process and knowing that there's a way to do things
I looked into how would I lose the weight and obviously eat less move more this is the way
you lose weight everybody knows it wasn't that difficult to find that answer I tried to apply
it I I really felt that this was a no-brainer I can be successful in my career and I can be
successful in managing this weight issue the problem was that unlike School unlike work
trying to follow the proven or the supposedly proven path for weight loss
only led to frustration because it wasn't working weeks of eating healthy weeks of running around
and playing and trying to be active not only with my daughter but doing activities outside
of the home and just trying to do things to make sure that I wasn't sitting still all the time
would result in maybe I'd lose 10 pounds but as soon as there was a family event any kind of
holiday situation at work where there was cake on offer or I could put back on five pounds in
a few days and it was really frustrating that one event could cause such quick weight gain
and it took weeks to take it off the frustration over gaining and losing and gaining and losing the
same five to ten pounds over and over really put me in the position where I had to take a decision
and what I decided to do was ignore what people had to say because that wasn't helping me like
mentally it was just making me frustrated and it wasn't helping me to enjoy the time that I
was playing with my daughter it wasn't helping me to enjoy my life I decided to accept that maybe
this was the weight that I was gonna weigh but then how would I have fun in my life and so not
listening to what they had to say and just doing the things that made me happy became the focus
for me the problem was that by the time I came to that realization I had lived years
of physical pain so from about the age of 23 I had knee issues I had my daughter in my 30s so
I had lived 10 plus years already of knee pain elbow pain back pain like the pain just started
to come everywhere so although I was no longer worrying about people seeing me as overweight
the new problem was the pains that I was living meant that when I tried to play with my daughter
and when I tried to do the activities that I wanted to do I didn't feel great
I was in a little bit of a a dilemma here because all of these negatives were helping me to see that
I needed to have fun now right I lived 10 years delaying the fun thinking I'm gonna have it later
on in life and then now here we are later on in life and my fun is being interrupted by people
commenting and focusing on my weight and by my body not behaving properly and having giving
me pain every time I try to do fun things and the Dilemma was if I let the people and the pain stop
me from doing what I think is fun then Not only was putting off the fund for 10 years a mistake
but then I'm saying I'm not going to have any fun ever going forward what I ended up doing
was a combination of a accepting this is the body you have violet and then B figuring out how do I
do fun things in this body while managing the pain and the outcome that I came to was this
I would do fun activities and then the next two or three days recover from whatever fun
activity that I did so for example I always wanted to learn to ski and I learned to ski in my mid-20s
and after my daughter was old enough I took her skiing every Saturday and then I had Sunday and
Monday to recover and the rest of my work week was fine I want to point out that none of my
friends ever wanted to go skiing with me so even when I learned to ski I'm the only black lady on
the ski hill because we don't do that and so one of the struggles that I had from a very early
age is that the things that I found interesting the people in my life didn't find interesting
the other thing that I love to do is longboarding and I picked that up when I was in my 30s again
all the people in my family and all of my friends think that oh you're crazy why are you doing
that at this age so now my age is the limiting factor so I'm the old lady out on the longboard
and nobody else wants to come do these things with me because the people in my life didn't want
to do the things that I wanted to do I did them on my own and now I had to apply the same idea
for this situation now I'm the overweight lady doing these activities that black people or old
people don't do so I've got triple whammy now that I needed to overcome and I decided
to do it anyways I decided to do the thing that would make me happy I wish I could say
that was the end of my struggles but it wasn't because these aches and pains that I was living
you have the basic information that you need to eat healthy and improve your health what you're
missing is the mindset and support to eat healthy every day in the wellness Squad you're going to
learn how I've been able to stay keto since April 2018 solve my joint pain and I lost 70 pounds in
five months and kept it off we go deep in our meetings talking about real world solutions to
Everyday problems because we know how hard it is to eat healthy in a world that's constantly
pushing cake go to wellnessquad.org to get started these aches and pains that I was living
kept getting worse and worse and worse until finally I woke up one morning my hip just didn't
want to cooperate with me anymore and now I was barely able to walk and the worst moment that I
ever lived was the winter where my hip hurt and I couldn't go snowboarding or skiing with the family
too much pain couldn't do it
and that moment where I realized I'm not buying a season pass this year because I cannot go
pushed me to really look at what's happening to my body why can I not be healthy why am I
constantly in pain and I have to really stop and evaluate what's happening I wanted to be healthy
I wanted to be pain-free and I wasn't and I realized that what I had been doing was putting
a Band-Aid on the problem by Trading some fun for days of recovery but that wasn't the answer
I needed a real solution and that meant I had to look for a real answer so I need to figure out
what the real problem was and so here's the thing all this time I'd been living my life
following this idea that weight was calories and calories out and health was about eating
three servings of fruits and three servings of vegetables and you need to have a healthy starch
and you need to and I never questioned any of this information and when my body
started to show me that Violet this is the end of the road you're not walking anymore
I had no choice now but to look and see is this really the end of the road
and what I found was something really weird it turned out that I had inflammation in my hip it
turned out that inflammation in the hip was caused by inflammatory things that you eat and there were
two main inflammatory things that I could have been eating sugar and poor quality oils I was
having both what I learned was that if I wanted to feel better I had to take these out of my life now
the problem was to get these two simple things out of my life meant reducing and dramatically
the amount of vegetables fruits grains that I was nuts any vegetation that I was eating had to be
reduced greatly and what was even scarier was it meant that I needed to start eating more Meats
with their accompanying fat this was everything that I had been taught would cause weight gain and
potentially a heart attack and now the solution was to do this was it pure desperation that got
me to try this of course not I did a lot more research and a lot more research and a lot more
research I was researching this for about two months before I finally said okay it looks like
this is really the answer what I found was a lot of information that suggested that popular ideas
that we have about food and how we should feed ourselves for health our minimally misguided
but maximally blatant lies that are pushed by food companies to get us to eat food so that they can
profit and learning that information for the first time I looked at what I was eating and decided
I'm actually gonna cut my carbohydrate intake down to 20 grams of carbs or less which was the advice
given in the keto community that I was trying to follow I wasn't successful I definitely ate
more than 20 grams of carbs but I got it down low enough that I went through withdrawal I
got it down low enough that I was able to over the course of several months about three but
eliminate the pain from my hip and once again I'm the lady doing the thing that nobody else
does once again I'm the lady being criticized for the way that I eat once again I'm the lady that
everyone is predicted is going to gain weight have a heart attack or both but here's a weird thing
I wasn't looking for weight loss I was looking for pain relief and I was fully aware that any
medication that the doctors were offering me one of the number one side effects was weight gain
so in my mind I could take a medication that's gonna cause me to gain weight or I could eat
food that might cause me to gain weight to me I didn't see the difference with the exception of
what I was learning on the diet side was that they were saying it's not just going to make the
pain go away it's going to heal the problem and really what I wanted was to heal the problem and
so when I got my results and my pain subsided I did something that I had never done in my history
of eating I kept eating the diet past the point of getting my results I stayed eating keto and
why did I do that because these Foods allowed me to live pain-free and two to three months later
my joint pains were gone I had I had accomplished the goal of managing my pain and not just managing
my pain I mean my joints feel good I was still a pain in the ass to go out to eat with
going out to restaurants with me means that I'm scrutinizing the menu and making the
waiter make adjustments and everybody finds it so uncomfortable I don't care and five months after
I started eating this keto diet the other thing that happened was I ended up being 10 pounds under
the goal weight that I had had for myself every time I ever tried to diet so being
my annoying and do what makes me happy act like nobody else self
led to me being in the best health I've ever been in we fail because we spend so much time
doing what's expected whether it's related to school work vacation like this and eat like
that save this much now so that you can retire like this that we actually don't know what true
success looks like because we've never tried to be successful in the way that would make us
as an individual happy and we only really figure out what success really looks like really feels
like when we break away from the pack and do what feels right we all know people who
their lives seem to have improved after something devastating happened right they get divorced or
they overcome some kind of illness or they lose their job and all of a sudden they're doing the
thing they always wanted to do the same way that living that horrible hip pain put me in
the position where I actually for the first time ever fed my body properly so that it could give
me back in return health and a pain-free existence the pain that I had lived with for 23 plus years
gone so when people ask me oh but don't you miss eating chocolate oh don't you miss eating cake or
don't you miss going out to dinner not having to think about what's on the menu I'm so quick to say
no I don't miss it because along with all of those things that you're talking to me about came pain
came wait I was not aware that I was failing I was failing my body
I was failing my daughter because she had to interact with the mummy that couldn't play
with her properly that couldn't do the things that I can do with her today and
it's sad because I missed a lot of years of being able to run around more than I
then I was able to like now I can do things and she's older now we still do things but it's not
the same I would have loved when she was two years old to be able to be on the floor crawling around
and not have felt that negative that I was feeling that meant that I was only down there for five ten
minutes and I had to get up because it was too much I look back on these things it I was failing
my clients because when you don't feel good you're you're not able to give the best of yourself to
the people you're trying to help as when you do feel good we fail because we aren't really
being true to ourselves and in order to succeed we need to really listen to ourselves and get to
the root of the problem all those years that I thought my problem was weight when in fact the
problem was that I was eating inflammatory foods and I wasn't listening to my body because it was
trying to tell me to stop pain is your body's way of speaking to you extra weight is your body's way
of speaking to you changes in your stool changes in your energy levels changes in your skin these
are all the ways that your body is trying to speak to you are you listening I want you to listen so
watch this video here where I go over why what you eat matters so much talk to you again next
week if you're still listening one of the hardest things that I had to do was accept that fun and
food if I put them together my body screams at me I want you to consider if maybe your body is
screaming at you but you keep trying to force it to accept to eat for fun do better than me