Amanda on a Kauai beach at sunset, as well as with her husband and sons

“She Believed She Could?” A Postcard from Kauai

She believed she could and so she did.”

I am going to be straight-up about this motivational saying: I’d love to say that I lost 140lbs because of this attitude.

Yes, I believed in myself and I handled it: I just grabbed life right by the knackers, by the giggle berry brass clankers, and just got it done.

That would be such a great story and there may even be truth in it in some parts of the story, but that’s not what happened at all.

I never expected to succeed. I had no hope for success. My life-long struggle with pounds was just a series of failures. No reasonable person would stand at that point in history, all ready to face another round of failure, and declare to herself:

“I believe I can and so I will!!!! Watch me!!!”

“Yayyyyy!!!!!!!”

A photo of Amanda Rose in a Kauai sunset with the caption "She believed she could and so she did."
How completely irrational, unreasonable, and insane.
No actual evidence on the planet would have supported that kind of an attitude.

It is the main reason I was actually approved to have bariatric surgery (surgery that I would not end up getting and obviously no longer qualify for).

Surgery was my last hope that maybe there was a tool out there I had not tried that would actually work. I am so philosophically against changing up your natural body that it was a desperate moment in time that I went through the process to be approved for bariatric surgery but it was, in fact, the most rational decision I might have made since, again, all of the previous efforts I had made had ended in failure.

And so I went on to lose over 140lb and never did have the surgery and I could claim to be such a complete badass who believed in herself so much that I just did it.

Amanda and sons, social media photos hiking in spring 2018

Should some sort of Broadway musical be made of my life, I do hope that is how I am portrayed because I would love to be mistakenly thought of in that way but the reality is I started down this path with bariatric surgery on my calendar because after nearly 40 years of dieting, at nearly 49 years old, there was something I knew for sure from my own personal experience:

  • Dieting advice is a pile of crap.
  • Yes, I could fight for 20lbs or 40lbs and I’d have to fight not to hit some higher century marks, but trim I would never be.
  • *bless*their*hearts* : The handsome personal trainers on YouTube telling me that the big difference between them and me was they they have disciple, sure are know-it-alls. *bless*their*hearts*
And so did I believe that I’d end up here, half my size and all that?
Not one stinkin little bit.

Not one.
Not an iota.
Zippo.
Nada.
Nope.
Noparoni.
Zet.

Had a “Ghost of Christmas Future” come into my living room on Christmas Eve of 2016 when I was a week out from a debilitating knee injury and had that ghost brought this very Facebook meme and declared:
“This is YOUUUUUU in 2018!!! You will lose half of YOUUUURSELFFFFF!!!”
I would have screamed a colorful collection of choice guttural expressions and I would have run that ghost out of my house.

Of course, I couldn’t get off the couch, much less run across the house at a ghost, due to the knee injury and all of the extra pounds, so this too will have to be part of the Broadway musical left to my own imagination.

But my main point is this: This particular meme of me would have made me angry because I would not have believed it. I would not have found a picture of my future self as “inspirational” at all.

My blood would have boiled.

Amanda Rose and family on adventures in Kauai.

I can almost feel it now, in fact. I had no evidence whatsoever that I would take this picture in less than two years. Really, I had no evidence I would ever take such a picture. Physically in this meme, I weigh 30 pounds less than I have ever weighed as an adult. No evidence on the planet would have supported the Ghost of Christmas Future.

And so here we are on Facebook in 2019 and I am portrayed in an inspirational meme, that I made myself for you to see and here you go: the meme is half true and half bull crap.
A photo of Amanda Rose in a Kauai sunset with the caption "She believed she could and so she did."

The bull crap part is that at 40, 50, 60 years old that we’re just going to prance up one day, believing in ourselves, suddenly getting all chipper and excited, and that we’re going to just get it done.

Bull crap.

The true part of the meme is that silhouette in the photo is my real actual flippin’ self in Kauai in November of 2018, weighing 140lbs.

Damn.
Bring on the team of doctors to verify that I am not an internet troll making crap up on the internet about my story.

Frankly, I almost need all of this verified myself to make me believe it.

As I post these pictures, I really do still have a lot of the remaining mindset from Christmas Past of 2016, from the ME who would have run out the Ghost of Christmas Future, screaming colorful expletives, being all ticked off at the overly-handsome weight loss gurus.

Amanda Rose and family in Kauai via Instagram posts

What’s the take-away here?

My guess is that you are like me in 2016, that you don’t believe you can do it.
Guess what: Good for you.

That’s completely rational. That makes you sane because that’s what life has taught you.

I don’t judge you for it.

In fact, I would think you were lying if you gushed about how much you believe in yourself and how you’re going to propel that self-belief into a big life change in mid-life, a change you haven’t been successful with for decades.

How ON EARTH can we believe in ourselves with such a history?

We can’t and so let’s not worry about that point right now.

Contrary to all of the self-help works out there, you don’t have to believe you’ll end up at a life-changing maintenance weight to succeed on this current mission. You do have to value yourself enough to make it a priority and to give yourself one big push.

Just take a big old flipping blind leap if that’s what it takes to test this one.

(Because I know better than anyone else that you are highly skeptical that this is going to work for you and so you are just going to need to jump like a beast and see where you land.)

A Blind Leap of Faith?

I originally wrote this article in 2018 and I asked people to take a blind leap of faith:

“You don’t need to believe in yourself!!! Just jump!!!”

The crazy thing is that enough people did that we have learned so much about ourselves and about reaching our long-term goals.

I set a goal in leading this community that we would build a trail of evidence of its effectiveness.

Have you noticed all of the success stories on this website?

Have you caught that one key way we measure the community’s success is in 100+ pound loss “century cases”?

Have you seen any other weight loss community do that? (We haven’t but we’d like to meet others who do.)

It still may be a leap, but it is my full-time job now (quite literally) to collect the evidence for you that the leap is no longer blind.
The Eat Like a Bear leadership team with our 100th Century Bear Sondra Jones

Jump in at this very moment

Absolutely nothing stands in the way of your immediate implementation.

I have created the Three-Day Challenge here on this website to teach you our core food framework (CLICK!).

Take it and run.

Lean into it, all the way to the finish line. It can be done on food stamps (and comes to you from one of California’s most obese and impoverished regions).

Yes, I sell books and all that, but they contain no deep secret, they are simply additional resources. We had success before these books even existed because, like you, even our earliest success cases already had everything they needed before they even found my story.

Do these things:

  • Step on a scale and take note of the number because you will need this for Step 5. If you want to wait a week or two until you’re started and start feeling that power, then wait just a bit. You don’t need to share the number with anyone. You may need to shout back at the scale in colorful expletives. You may cry your eyes out. I did all of these and took months before I told anyone my starting weight.
  • Cut all of the carbs out of your diet unless they come from the leafy part of a plant. (I know, you’ve already done this and I’m about to tick you off that this is the same old bull crap but this part is necessary. It’s just not sufficient. We’re getting to that.
  • Eat just one meal a day for more aggressive results. Eat nothing else all day long. Drink nothing the rest of the day that will spike your blood sugar in any way, not even a “diet soda” with junk artificial sweeteners. Don’t drink them. Drink a black coffee if you have to — it won’t spike your blood sugar. Drink water.
  • Weigh yourself in two weeks. If you are just a regular person without a complicated situation — on steroids or other cocktails of medications or under an extreme amount of stress — and you are not dumbfounded by the number on the scale staring back at you in two weeks, then you can find our group (here) and post what you ate. We’ll pick it apart for you. Maybe it just doesn’t work for you and you can then move on with your life. Honestly, I haven’t met anyone in my demographic that it does not work for, so I urge every middle-aged chunky woman I meet to try it.

By and large, if you are 40+ and have a story like mine, you really need to try this.

Don’t wait until you’ve lined up all of the ducks.

  • You don’t need ducks.
  • You don’t need belief in yourself.

You are positioned to start this very minute.

(Start right here with the Three-Day Challenge – CLICK!).

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *