My Journey

Like any good journey, mine has not been smooth sailing by any means. I have been battling my weight from a young age and because of these battles, it has changed me into the person I am today. I can clearly remember going on my first diet, The Zone, at the tender age of 12 because I was so self conscious of my pudgy, growing body. It was a short lived diet but it was the beginning of my struggling relationship with food and my ever increasing weight. When I turned 14 in 2003, I decided that I wanted to try out the Atkins lifestyle which was fairly new to the dieting world at that time. I LOVED this lifestyle and it actually allowed me to lose 30 lbs as a young teen and maintain it off for 2 years. I was so inspired by this lifestyle that I actually wrote a 9th grade paper in my nutrition class about how a Low-carb diet was better for you than a Low-fat one. Of course my nutrition teacher was horrified and even though I received an “A” on the paper, she was very quick to tell me how very wrong I was and that my supporting articles and medical journals couldn’t be correct. I had even considered for a brief time becoming a nurse and specializing as a nutritionist so that I could spread my love of this Low-carb lifestyle to everyone. But my mother wisely counseled me that I would never be able to educate as a dietitian with a low-carb lifestyle and that I would have to teach what they told me was acceptable. Well, I’m not the type to blindly follow the pack so I quickly decided it wasn’t for me.

My battle with weight started again in my later years in high school when I got my first after-school job at the local fast-food joint. We got a free meal every shift so I was constantly eating processed, junk food and I became addicted fast! It wasn’t long before I hit 210 lbs right before I graduated high school in 2007. That summer didn’t make anything better either and right before going away to college, I was the heaviest I had ever been as a teenager at 220 lbs. I kept trying to lose weight but unfortunately working in the fast-food industry was too much for my self control. I ended up leaving that job once I went off to college and I thought that finally I was going to break my cycle of binge eating junk food. I tried working out at the gym on campus and trialed Weight Watchers and the Biggest Loser diet, some of the popular weight loss trends at that time. I did have some success but nothing sustainable or long term. I was constantly hungry with crazy carb cravings which lead me to fall off the wagon over and over again with my horrible carb binge eating. By the time I was 26 years old, I was the biggest I had ever been at 282 lbs and I was miserable. I might have actually been heavier than that but I had refused to verify it on the scale so I will never know for sure.

My breaking point for making the biggest change in my life was when I wanted to go look at wedding dresses with my fiancée (now husband). I was so excited to try them all on with this perfect vision of what I would look like as a glowing happy bride that when it actually happened I was anything but glowing and definitely not happy. When I started trying on all these gorgeous white dresses on my fat miserable body, all I wanted to do was breakdown sobbing in the dressing room because what I saw in the mirror was not at all what I envisioned. My fiancée was so sweet and supportive, telling me how beautiful I was, how he loved the dresses on me, and that I was going to be a beautiful bride on our wedding day. My mind was frozen with terror and all I could think of was how I was going to be fat and miserable on my wedding day and how I couldn’t stand the idea of starting our lives together with all this weight hanging over us. My fiancee was not an overweight man and in my opinion extremely good looking (obviously mine is the only one that matters). I felt ashamed to be next to him, feeling like I was not attractive enough to be with him even though he would deny all day long that it was not true. I was fortunate enough to find an amazing man who saw my heart and soul and loved me no matter how I looked. Regardless of my fiancee’s high opinions, I went home from the bridal shop that day defeated and broken from the stress that being overweight does to you. But God works in mysterious ways and something came into my life that month that changed my life forever.

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Someone I knew had recently decided to have weight loss surgery and I got a thought in my head “If she can do it then maybe I should see if I would qualify for the surgery myself?” Within 2 months of my consultation, I received the Gastric Sleeve surgery to help me lose my ever mounting weight. I won’t get too much into the surgery (but if you have questions, please ask, I’m an open book) but it went wonderfully and I started having immediate results. I was eating a low-carb/ low-calorie lifestyle (Not Keto at this time) and I was starting to drop weight like crazy! I was lightly exercising but nothing very consistent and my weight-loss was mostly all diet related. I knew that I only had 13 months until I walked down the aisle and I was on a mission to get to a size 12 (which I had never ever been) from a tight size 26. Not only did I hit this goal, but I crushed it! I ended up in a size 4/6 and I lost a total of 135 lbs! That’s basically an entire person! On my wedding day, the dress that I bought in a hopeful size 14, had to be altered down to a bridal size 8 and I felt like the most beautiful, luckiest woman in the world.

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I was able to maintain the weight off for over 2 years until my husband and I decided it was time to try and have a child together. We were extremely blessed with our beautiful daughter, Juliana Grace, who is now our crazy all over the place toddler. With that pregnancy I gained 55-60 lbs and of course I felt like I was a failure all over again because I was heavy and miserable. Thankfully I discovered Keto and decided that it sounded like the perfect lifestyle for me! I ended up losing almost all of my first baby weight before I got pregnant again with my second (and please Good Lord the last?!) baby, Liam Reid, who I just had in April 2020. Yes, I just had my son in the middle of the craziest pandemic and boy was that not easy, especially with me being a nurse. But we aren’t going to get into that here. With my last pregnancy, I gained another 55-60 lbs and so I had to start all over again losing my baby weight…. ughhhhhhh.

Which brings me to today, here with you, writing out my journey for the whole world to see (No pressure!). Still fighting my weight loss battles but the difference now is I’m usually on the winning side of them. My journey is still not over and I still have a lot of weight left to lose again, but I am more motivated than ever before to be the healthy successful person I have always strived to be. Everyday I work at trying to be a great mother, wife, co-worker, friend, etc. and some days I feel accomplished and others I’m lucky that I kept my daughter from destroying the house let alone making dinner. I’m every bit that namesake of “Exhausted Keto Momma” and I want to show you that if I can do it, then you can too. I’m a normal person with a normal life, but if my story can change just one person’s life for the better then all of this work is worth it.

Weight loss doesn’t begin in the gym with a dumb bell; it starts in your head with a decision.

– Toni Sorenson