Sustainable Weight Loss: How a Mother of 3 Maintains Her Goal Despite All of Life’s Curveballs
Americans spend billions of dollars a year looking for weight loss solutions. We are in constant search for the next “quick fix.” As anyone who has ever struggled with obesity can attest, it’s one thing to lose weight. It is quite another to keep it off, especially through the twists and turns of life.
Managing weight is difficult because weight is governed by numerous levers. The diet that worked for us in 2019 may have not been enough to keep weight off when a pandemic altered our cortisol pathways in 2020. Managing weight is a dynamic effort that often requires changing your strategy and focus toward total-body wellbeing.
Lindsey Fisher, a mother of three, can attest to the challenges that life can pose to maintaining a healthy diet and lifestyle. She started her journey with Enara 3 years ago and, over that time, has lost an impressive 85 pounds. There was no winning formula, fad diet, or magic pill involved. Every year has brought different challenges and required a different approach. Her story shows that weight loss and maintenance is anything but a “quick fix.” It’s all about finding balance.
The Moment
After struggling with unwanted pounds for most of her life, Lindsey came to Enara Health in 2018, when her twin boys were 5 and her daughter was 2. Following the birth of her daughter, she’d found it harder than ever to keep her weight under control, given her husband’s busy work schedule and the fact that her family lived 2,500 miles from any family members who might lend a hand. “I didn’t have much help when we were living in California, and I didn’t focus on myself for nearly five years,” Lindsey says. “During that time, I just ate whatever was easy. But when I ate like crap, I felt like crap. There’s a reason McDonald’s Happy meals are $3 when a salad costs $7.”
At the time Lindsey came to Enara, on a referral from her doctor, she weighed 240 pounds and was pre-diabetic. “My husband told me he loved me no matter my size, but I didn’t love me anymore,” she says. Lindsey says she tried changing certain behaviors on her own — including beginning to walk three to four miles every day — but the needle on the scale simply wasn’t moving. She knew she needed help.
Getting on the Right Path
During her initial Enara consultation, Lindsey was given several plan options to consider, all designed to meet her weight loss goals, but via different methods and on different timelines. Ultimately, she decided to go with a very-low-calorie diet (VLCD) as a means of jump-starting her weight loss journey.
“The VLCD was a struggle, given that I had young children and still a lot of junk food in the house, but I made it work,” Lindsey says. “This was my moment to take care of myself, and with the support of my dietician and the rest of the Enara team, I was able to lose about 40 pounds in my first 90 days.”
Following her initial success, Lindsey slowly added some calories back into her diet and was still able to continue to lose weight. “There were plenty of fluctuations in my weight as I went,” Lindsey says. “One day, I might be up five pounds just because I ate something salty. But the weight did continue to come off. I just had to remind myself that the goal was not to be perfect, but just to have progress.”
By the end of her first year at Enara, Lindsey had lost 60 pounds. But, she notes, that was really just the beginning of her journey.
When Health Gets in the Way of Wellness
As Lindsey can attest, life never stands still. Since she began the Enara program in 2018, change has been a constant factor at play within her weight loss journey. Her family has moved three times in the past three years, including a cross-country relocation to Michigan that brought her closer to family but took her away from the friends and support network she had come to know in California.
After that move, Lindsey continued to work with Enara via their mobile and tele-health application — a shift that she says has worked well and served as a lifeline throughout a number of challenging times. Immediately after her move, Lindsey faced a number of health challenges.
“I’ve had my gallbladder removed, and I underwent open-back kidney surgery,” she says. “Following surgery, I spent a lot of time lying down, and I gained some weight as a result.”
A cross-country move followed by two back-to-back surgeries is usually a recipe for weight gain. After spending a year getting healthy, it can be pretty disheartening to have some health setbacks. That kind of frustration generally makes it easier to give into cravings and old habits.
Working with Enara, Lindsey changed her goals to focus more on maintenance, exercise, and general wellbeing. “I knew I had the tools to get back to where I needed to be. With every move and every health setback, I’d get out of sync with my weight, and I’d need to reestablish my new normal.”
By the end of 2019, despite the health setbacks, Lindsey’s continued work paid off, and she had lost an additional 6 pounds. She was much more active, finally settled in, and feeling great again. She was entering the new year in stride.
Grief and Resilience
2020 did indeed start off as a great year. Working with the Enara staff, Lindsey lost another 25 pounds in the first 3 months of the year. Feeling great as ever.
Then in late March, she contracted COVID-19 and was laid out for the better part of a month. Then, in July, her father died unexpectedly — a devastating loss that left her reeling.
“There have been a lot of highs and lows over the past year, and my father’s death was the hardest,” she says. “I struggled with depression, and it was hard to want to do anything, much less check in with my weight management team.”
Weight crept up, and she had regained 10 pounds. It was not the time, however, to be fixated on weight or health, as she was struggling with grief and depression. Working with her team at Enara, they quickly changed her goals. They looked beyond scale and focused more on emotional wellbeing. Her check-ins were more about self care and the healing process. That shift made all the difference.
Slowly, Lindsey says she moved forward, again focusing on progress rather than perfection. She started talking about her experiences with depression and, to her surprise, found a tremendous amount of support within her community of friends and family. She says her dietician at Enara, Rebecca, is as much a therapist and life coach to her as she is a nutritional consultant, and that being able to share her experiences and hear others’ experiences within the Enara patient community has been both inspiring and educational. The weight she gained following the onset of her father’s death began to come off again, but that was not part of the plan. It was simply a byproduct of correctly managing her grief and depression.
“This journey has given me constant reminders that I can’t do this on my own,” she says. “I’ve always had a team — both the team at Enara and my family, my team at home — and they help me get back on track when things get hard.”
Embracing the Lifelong Journey
All told, Lindsey has lost 85 pounds through the Enara program, and she works on a daily basis to maintain her success. She’s no longer pre-diabetic, her blood pressure is optimal, and she says she’s no longer ashamed to go to doctor appointments.
“Obesity is an illness — it’s a lifelong struggle,” she says. “The stresses of life won’t end, and for that reason, those last 5 to 10 pounds tend to go back and forth on a regular basis. But I have the toolbox I need now to handle it, and I know my team at Enara is always there for me, like a family.”
Lindsey says that she’s proud of the habits she’s developed for herself through Enara, and she hopes that her children will see the healthy choices she makes and emulate those in their own lives as they get older. “A lot of what I’ve learned at Enara is now second nature for me — like grocery-shopping on the outside aisles of the store, where the healthier foods are,” she says.
These days, Lindsey says she’s trying not to look too far ahead. “Things change,” she says. “What’s important is how you adapt. Physically, I’ve bypassed the goals I set out for myself. Now, it’s about finding the balance of being everything to everybody — my husband and my children — while also being who I want to be for myself.”
Rami Bailony, MD, co-founded Enara Health, which has developed a platform that empowers individuals to take control of their health with confidence and “ get surgical weight loss results without the surgery.”
