Just who is fat girl skinny?  Well, it’s me!  My name’s Kat... here’s my story.

In 2005 I was at a really low point in my life.  I was fat, really fat, and felt terrible.  I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know what.  I had been to doctors before who told me that gaining weight was normal for women in their 20s.  As I grew to be 315 pounds, unable to lose the weight I was frustrated and confused.  One night I ended up in the ER because I wasn’t breathing properly and it was then that my life changed.

The hospital couldn’t find anything wrong with me so they told me to see a family doctor.  I decided to see my dad’s doctor, Dr. Mac & it was the best decision ever.  He asked me questions that no one else had and managed to diagnose me with PCOS.  A disease often ignored & misdiagnosed.  The disease was causing me to suffer with insulin resistance, making me fatigued, irritable and causing me to balloon up.  He told me that I was morbidly obese and that I would most likely have a heart attack and die within 6 months.  I was 23.

Basically insulin resistance triggers something called the “caveman gene”.  Back in the day when we had to hunt & gather it used to come in handy through times of famine by allowing our bodies to hold on to all the food we ate as storage for later.  In the age of refined foods, however, something has happened to confuse our systems.  While we’re eating more, it’s nutritionally less, and our body thinks that we’re starving so it clings to everything we eat. 

My doctor challenged me to change the way that I think about food.  That I should eat things that can be found in nature and cut out my refined food intake.  So I cut out white flour, refined sugars & starches.  I also took up daily exercise to rev my metabolism.

The biggest key was that I never thought about it as being on a diet to lose weight.  For me, it was changing what I put in my body to make sure that I could stay healthy.  In the first year I lost 120+ pounds, and I’m happy to say that I’ve kept it off.  Every day continues to challenge me, and I haven’t reached my goal yet.  I did, however, manage to get healthy and cure my PCOS.  I’ve never been happier.

I’ve always loved cooking, and I come from a family of foodies.  When I was told that I had to change the way I eat I was determined to stick to it.  I wasn’t, however, willing to give up food tasting good.  Thankfully I’d been cooking since I was a child, so altering & creating recipes was pretty easy!

Over the years I started to get up quite the collection of recipes & shared photos and tips with my friends.  Everyone kept telling me that my photos were making them hungry and wanted me to make them dinner.  Admittedly, I am a professional photographer by trade so I have a bit of an advantage making things look good.  

In the last 4 years I’ve had quite a few people come to me asking for advice on how to eat better, many of whom had developed similar health problems.  Most recently, though, something hit a little closer to home.  When my Dad was told he needed to reduce his sodium & start watching his sugar intake he turned to me for advice.  I of course put him into health-food-bootcamp.  I promised him that if he could commit to no sugar, flour or starch for 3 weeks it would change everything.  You see, 3 weeks is how long it takes for your tastebuds to change.  Of course, I intended that he would change his eating habits permanently (and he has), but it was the 3-week hump that he needed to get by first.  The first 3 weeks were very grumpy, but I’m happy to say that since then he’s had tons of energy and dropped about 20 pounds. 

It was then that I decided that I wanted to share my lifestyle with everyone.  There are a lot of people out there with health problems that are directly related to their diet.  When I was first dealing with it, there was no one that I could talk to.  Changing the way you live, especially in a fast-paced-fast-food world, can be really challenging.  So I’m here to share what I’ve learned about healthy eating with the rest of you!

enjoy!

~kat

to see what else I'm up to check out my photography website at www.katarnett.com or my photography blog at http://photoka.tumblr.com/