Do you struggle with weightloss? What does losing weight mean to you? Does it mean that you will eat nothing but SALADS and raw vegetables like celery and carrot sticks maybe with a serving of a DRY chicken breast? What about exercise? Does losing weight mean that you will need to spend hours and hours at the gym each week, away from your family and friends and doing what you love?

Weightloss and proper weight maintenance is one of life’s greatest struggles. In fact, according to stateofobesity.org’s September 2016 survey, nearly 38 percent of adults are obese in the nation. Nearly 8 percent are extremely obese. The highest obesity rates are among middle-age adults (41 percent, 40- to 59-year-olds). To put this into perspective, with over 320 million people living in America, that equates to 121,600,000 people are obese and 25,600,000 are extremely obese. Where do you fit into this category? These rates are in line with how my weight had been progressing since having children in my late 20’s.

Disclaimer: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. See full Affiliate Disclosure for more details.

How A Stick of Butter Changed My Life Forever

So how did it all turn around for me (and my family)? It all started by listening to a podcast about Dave Asprey, the founder of the Bulletproof Diet. He not only lost 100 lbs by eating lots of butter, but he was also able to lose weight while adding muscle with very little exercise. He went on to talk about starting your day with a rich, creamy, delicious cup of coffee made with BUTTER. Hmm…The wheels started turning. This sounded like something we could do at our house. I LOVED butter. I disliked (or lacked the motivation for) exercise. My husband had a love for COFFEE. And just like most men, had a desire to gain more muscle.

How Did I Get All of This Weight In The First Place?

I’ll come back to what steps we took to lose the weight in a moment, but I want to reflect back on how I got here. I am a busy, working professional mom of two boys. And sometimes I had a long commute of about an hour and a half to my demanding IT career. Between life and work stress, my body suffered. I didn’t have time to exercise and I surely didn’t have time to cook every meal.

Before that, I was rather thin growing up and was an average weight in college. Then I had BABIES. During my first pregnancy, I gained a whopping 80lbs. Yup! That’s right. 80 POUNDS! I probably would have gained even more weight, but I delivered him a month early, premature. Over the next four years, I cut back on what I ate and walked with coworkers during lunch and lost most of that weight just in time to have baby number TWO. This time, I watched what I ate more closely and ONLY gained 60lbs. After this pregnancy, I found myself struggling. Really, really struggling. I couldn’t lose the 30+ pounds that were left behind post-pregnancy. I was in my early 30’s. No matter what I tried, the scale went in the other direction. Nine years later, I still had that “baby weight,” plus some.

What Have I Done To Try And Lose Weight?

Like most people, the better question here is, What Haven’t I Tried to Lose Weight? I have had so many failed attempts at weight loss throughout my life. Always searching, seeking the perfect plan that will click and resolve my issues, as effortlessly as possible.

I counted points; then I stopped counting.
I tried the South Beach Diet. This one wasn’t so bad. I lost 10 pounds, but it came back.
I even tracked all of my meals in an app with an attempt to control my calorie intake. (Ugh! What a chore!)
I (embarrassingly) purchased a blue-print program from a weekend infomercial that promised to give me the exact plan (food and exercise) for my body type. Ehh…This one never took off but I liked the premise and the charts.
I even attempted exercise programs like Bowfles, P90X and T25, but all that I got were pulled muscles and doctor visits.

My quest went on for YEARS. Other than a few pounds lost here and there, nothing resulted in anything significant.

So What Finally Clicked?

We all know that we should be “healthy”. It’s preached in schools, our doctor offices, on commercials. We know this, but we don’t act on it…at least not for long. So why the endless struggle? I struggled. My husband struggled. Close family and friends struggled. One coworker who was in her early 50’s told me to brace myself for my 50’s, as I was just approaching 40. With her foreshadowing, I knew that I had to do something well in advance of being 50, but I just didn’t know what or how to do it.

So what clicked? How did I begin to lose the majority of my weight in a relatively small amount of time? My biggest secret is that I had a WHY, an undeniable reason to stick to something no matter what. The year was 2015. Up to this point, I had lost my mother to breast cancer 15 years prior. My brother had beaten Hodgkin’s Lymphoma a few years after her passing. AND to top it off, my husband overcame Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2013.

These were all really good reasons as to why I should have focused on living better…but I didn’t, really. We did – somewhat. Small changes here and there. Nothing big or notable. It wasn’t until I had my OWN personal WHY in June 2015 did things start to change. Let’s face it, when the MOM of the house says that things are going to change, they ARE going to change.

My Visit To The Doctor

During an annual doctor’s visit, I discussed my increasing issues of fatigue and my inability to tolerate my children and stressful situations. He suggested that I should do some tests to find out what underlying problems I may have. I took the three-hour Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (OGTT). If you have ever had children, you are familiar with the nasty, thick, orange hummingbird-food-like drink that is used to measure your blood sugar. Blood samples are collected at timed intervals from as soon as 30 minutes to more than 3 hours after drinking the glucose. Several days after the test, my results came back with Pre-Diabetes. Well, that was it. I found MY why.

In the graph below of my weight loss history, you can see that I was going on for months and not really losing any weight. But after that fateful trip to the doctor, I lost over 33 pounds in six months and continued to lose more over the next few months. What’s more important than how much weight I lost is that both my husband and I have kept our weight off, two years later…

Both my husband and I have been able to achieve these results by simply choosing the right foods, eaten at the right times. We didn’t exercise in order to lose the weight. (I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t exercise; you should. I just didn’t NEED to exercise in order to lose weight.) I didn’t count calories. In fact, the one time that I did, I found out that I was eating over 2000 calories and my husband was eating over 3000. And we LOST weight!

My Diagnosis

I was diagnosed with pre-diabetes. My dear father has diabetes. I had feared that my ever-increasing weight gain may result in diabetes just like him. Over the years, he transitioned from a functioning, mobile person who loved to do archery and be outdoors with his friends to a man who found that leaving the house was more and more difficult to now being confined to a nursing home.

During my diagnosis at the doctor’s office, my well-meaning doctor told me that I needed to lose weight. In order to do that, he suggested that I go on a low-carb diet and take some commonly-prescribed medication. When I asked him if I could achieve results with just a really good diet and no meds, he said, “No, You need to take the medication.”

Hmmm…By this point in 2015, I had started to open my eyes to the possibilities of becoming healthier through cleaner foods and the right fats. I had read about people taking coconut oil before eating to lower blood sugar. I knew that it could be done. It was time to go back to that podcast with Dave Asprey about eating and drinking butter and really look into what to do.

Implementing The Plan

Game On! By the time we had everything that we needed to start the Bulletproof Diet, I discovered more WHYs:

To prove to my doctor that this mom had the willpower to succeed. I could prevail without medication. I was going to let FOOD be my medicine.
To show my children that there is a better, healthier way to live. I wanted to be there for them in a healthier form than what I was living.
To prove to my family and friends that life doesn’t have to get the best of you as you age.
To give my husband a piece of mind … prove that with a healthier lifestyle, his fears of his cancer returning would be reduced and hopefully diminish over time.

But now it was on my shoulders to figure out the plan. We dove right in and were determined to success. But we had reservations…Was it going to be easy or difficult to pull off? Were we going to like? Were we going to make our health issues worse by consuming a bunch of butter? Was it going to be successful? Was it going to last?

About the Bulletproof Diet

I downloaded both the Bulletproof Diet’s electronic book and audio book versions (I recommend both to everyone) and we were off to the races and haven’t looked back.

Some of the many factors of the diet that really worked for us are:

Understanding what cleaner and wiser food choices are and why they are better choices
Doing Bulletproof Intermittent Fasting, almost daily
Consuming the right kind of fats
Properly timing when to eat carbs

That was it. Fairly simple. Sort of…

ROCK the Bulletproof Diet To Finally Achieve Weightloss

If you were wondering, it wasn’t always as smooth sailing as I had hoped. Making a lifestyle change is HARD. Fast food is everywhere. It’s deeply embedded in our lives. It’s on every corner. It’s all over the TV. Pizza, burgers, fried chicken, Chinese take-out. Your “WHY” HAS to be strong. You are going to need something HUGE in order to keep you motivated and focused. To pull you through the days that you want to pull into the fast food drive-thru. And for the days when everyone and everything stresses you out!

I had meltdowns. I questioned why all of this work was necessary. But what I came to learn was that the way that we approached the real food lifestyle was causing my problems, not the food itself. I devised a plan of attack. I had to rethink dinners and to plan wisely.

We have learned so much as a family. Real Food has brought us closer. We are more confident that our current food choices FAR exceed what we were doing in the past. We’ve all seen changes in ourselves for the better. We’ve changed our view on food and why we eat the things that we do. This lifestyle has led us to open our eyes and our mind to new ideas and greater possibilities. We even look at cancer differently, with a greater peace of mind.

I would love to take the opportunity to share some of my tips/tricks with you so that you can more easily transition to living with real food and for you and your family to be happier and healthier. With a strong WHY, a plan of easy-to-cook recipes and products/tips to enhance your goals, you too, can achieve what has seemed to be unachievable for us all these years.

No matter your age, you can be successful. If this 40-something busy, working mom of two boys can lose weight effortlessly, you can too. I’m not special. I don’t have super powers. I just had really powerful WHYs. It’s amazing how powerful a simple stick of butter can be.

Take the next step to change your life today, for yourself and your family with these helpful resources…

My Favorite Bulletproof Products

Here are my favorite products that my family uses daily or regularly and routinely. In the early months of starting the Bulletproof Diet, once we ran out of the following products, we quickly learned that they are absolutely necessary to improve our health. Needless to say, we don’t run out of Bulletproof products any longer…

Ground Bulletproof Coffee
5lb Bulletproof Coffee Beans
- Quick note about Bulletproof Coffee: We started with small bags of ground coffee and graduated to the 5lb bound of Bulletproof Coffee Beans which results in greater savings.)
Brain Octane Oil
Collagen Protein

This post contains affiliate links. See full Affiliate Disclosure for more details.