The chick who didn’t need gimmicks to nix half her body weight

June 7, 2017 Ashley 0 Comments

Hey, you.

Yeah, you, gorgeous.

There’s nada wrong with what you’ve got going on there, shawty.

But, if you wanna trim a li’l bit’ve excess flesh for the sake of better health, have I got a transformation story for you. It’s pretty inspiring. See, the girl we’re spotlighting today, Carli Jay, jettisoned half her weight in just a couple’ve years. And, what’d she say was her secret? Well, that’s what I love most about this story – the outright rebelliousness of it. With all these gimmicky “fixes” that claim to help you reclaim your waistline (but just waste your time), we finally get some honesty. It didn’t take a sucking in with tummy trainers or sucking down chlorophyll elixirs. It didn’t take hiring Gunnar Peterson (trainer to the stars, who charges eleventy-hundred dollars per sweat sesh). It didn’t even take taking out carbs. All it required was enough of a change of heart to change toward heart healthy lifestyle choices:

(Exercise and clean eats. Simple rules we tend to complicate…)

As if her DIY regimen wasn’t enough, even her motivation wasn’t born from societal or aesthetic expectations.

Homegirl was already loving life and living it to the fullest at her full size. Being big didn’t keep her from bikini’ing it up. It didn’t stop her from holidaying and having a blast the whole time. Whatever her “aha!” moment was, it caused her to realize she could still be doing all of this – but appreciating it even better, if she were in better health. So she set out on a hero’s journey to save herself from her own less than stellar lifestyle choices. And she emerged victorious.

I know it doesn’t sound that sexy. I don’t have anything to sell you – but yourself.

Really, that’s all there is to it. All you hafta do is educate yourself on what clean eating and well-rounded workouts are – and then do it. (Obvi.) I think that might be the toughest part about it. It’s not that most of us don’t know how. It’s that we’re less willing when it comes to the action facet of fitness. It’s that we justify something’s healthy, even though we know it’s covered in too much refined sugar or we’re overindulging on it. We say certain calories don’t count. (See: kitchen and car snacking.) We conveniently “forget” that we already had a cheat day (or two?) this week. We pretend not to know that those blobs of bread at dinner are doused in butter. Why? Because eff da diet police! And… I get that. Truly, I do. But, ultimately, what it comes down to isn’t the perceived hideousness of cellulite or looking like you just stumbled off the runway. Nope. It’s about health. It’s about thriving. So, lemme ask ya this: what if we were each legitimately have-an-inflated-face-and-can’t-breathe level allergic to constantly overeating – or eating bad food? Then, would we have a little more caution – be a bit more proactive – about monitoring how our bodies were being filled? Or how much food was going in there? In a way, it’s kinda true. Too much fat does cause inflammation in our bodies. From achy joints to general malaise, there’s a whole list of symptoms we experience when overweight that can simply disappear by eating cleaner, greener, and training meaner. You can look better, yes. But, better than that, you can feel better. Not fleetingly, as when you’re indulging a vice, but all the time.

That’s the epiphany Carli had before transforming.

And – also like Carli – that’s a transformation you won’t pay a cent for; just some common sense.