Atkins Success Stories
Lisa Pelaez
Lisa Pelaez - New York
I lost 46 lbs.
My Story
In July of 2006 I took a trip to Florida. I was excited about the trip and I wanted to look nice to meet my husband’s family. I had a cute little outfit on – a white blouse with blue cargo pants and a kerchief in my hair – very summery looking. We had a great time.
Sometime in August I found I could no longer zip up the Florida pants I had worn only a month before! Somehow I had gained 20 pounds in about four to six weeks. This was a full-blown crisis!
I was always heavy. I learned poor eating habits early on and I always had a sweet tooth. There were many times in my life I felt my appetite was in control – not me.
But when I put on these last 20 pounds, seemingly overnight – I was dumbfounded! I never imagined weight could come on so quickly! Plus, I was eating less than I ever had!
I knew something was going on – something that had never happened before. I got serious with the dieting. I took myself down to 1000 calories a day. I started going to the gym a few nights a week. Several weeks went by with no result. I didn’t lose an ounce! I thought, at my weight, losing the first few pounds would be easy. I thought, I’m not trying to go from 125 to 120. I’ve got 75 or 80 pounds to lose. Five pounds should come off easily. Yet nothing was happening.
I am no stranger to dieting. I have been on and off diets my whole life. Hold up any piece of food in front of me – I know the fat content. Generally the type of dieting I had done in the past was low fat dieting. The so-called healthy type of dieting.
After I had no luck on 1000 calories a day, I went to 1200, thinking that maybe my body shut down in starvation mode. When that failed I went to 1500 calories a day. After that I tried 800. Nothing was working. I couldn’t stand to look in a mirror. I was over 200 pounds and no matter what I did, I could not change that person looking back at me.
I got scared. I thought there is no way I can live inside this body. People stopped sitting next to me on the subway. Okay so there was an upside! But I hated the way I looked and I hated the way people looked at me.
Finally I went to the doctor. I told the doctor I was sick. He said to eat less and exercise. When I told him what I was eating, he said “you must be eating more than that.” I went to four doctors – my general practitioner, my gynecologist, a heart doctor and finally an endocrinologist. They all said the same thing. They all basically said I was lying about what I had been eating. They all tried to put me on the same diets I had already tried and failed at – low fat diets. I was at the end of my rope.
MY GOALS:
Finally a woman that I met at a party told me she was counting her carbs and had lost six pounds in a week.
That sounded encouraging. At this point I would try ANYTHING to take off a few pounds. I remembered that I had tried the Atkins diet before and I still had the book around somewhere.
HOW ATKINS HELPED ME GET THERE:
I started reading the Atkins book and I started the “diet.” Within two weeks I lost eight pounds! After a full year of starving myself and not losing an ounce, I lost eight pounds in two weeks! I was ecstatic! And it gets better – I had an incredible burst of energy! I was going to the gym not three nights a week but every night!
I felt so happy and so relieved! At this point I knew I could get myself back to a weight that I could live with.
To date I have lost over 46 pounds and gone from a size twenty to a size fourteen by following the Atkins Nutritional Approach. It is a Nutritional Approach – not a diet. A diet is something you get off of – this is a way of eating that I have adopted and will follow for life. There may be changes to the level of carbohydrates I will consume, but I will always be following Dr. Atkin’s nutritional approach.
Dr. Atkins has changed my life and I am truly grateful for his program.
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