A 420-pound (190 kg) woman who couldn’t fit on rides in amusement parks and struggled to put on her shoes underwent an amazing transformation losing more than half her body weight in 17 months. Now, as an accountability coach, she has created a community called Loving Myself to Better Health and is helping others unlock the secrets to success.
Meghan See, 31, from Broadway, Virginia, comes from a family who struggled with obesity. In her high school days, she played American football and weighed over 300 pounds (136 kg).
“I was used to the normal societal challenges of being overweight but when my health started really declining, I could barely bend over to put my shoes on. Stairs and short walks left me out of breath,” Meghan told the Epoch Times via email. “I was chronically exhausted from untreated sleep apnea and pain keeping me up at night.”
By 2017, her weight spiraled out of control. The single full-time working mother weighed 420 pounds and wore a U.S. dress size 28. At her heaviest, Meghan was eating most of her meals from a restaurant or a fast-food joint.
“I’d often order multiple meals for myself to eat. Many times eating one in the car and then one at work at home along with dessert,” Meghan said.
She resorted to buying meals from McDonald’s and Burger King and in between meals would snack on pop tarts, cookies, and other junk food.
“I kept making bad choices and excuses all the time. I blamed stress from work, I blamed bad relationships, I blamed being a single mom, I blamed everything and everyone else for my choice to use food as an emotional crutch,” Meghan told The Daily Mail.
The mother of one admits that by the end of the day, food became her addiction, and it didn’t matter if she’d had a “good day” or a “bad day,” she just ate to comfort herself as she experienced varied amounts of emotion.
During this time, the young mother was sitting at work with heating pads as she suffered from arthritis pain.
Meghan told The Epoch Times, “I didn’t enjoy living and suffered from severe back pain that often would leave me with limited mobility.”
However, things took a 180-degree turn when, one day, Meghan decided that “she was tired of waiting to die.”
“I actually had gone to a bridge to daydream about ending my life and no longer being in pain,” Meghan said. “I never intended to act on it as taking care of my daughter was my primary concern. I knew she needed me in her life. I knew my food addiction was killing me but up until then I hadn’t made an effort in a long time to try to turn my life around.”
After a holiday train ride with her sister who had lost 40 pounds and was loving her life, Meghan was encouraged to do the same for herself. She was invited by her sister on a better health journey and thus Meghan began her own journey toward losing weight.
As Meghan kick-started her weight-loss journey, she swapped to healthier food options and began consuming eggs, fruits, and peanut butter for breakfast. For lunch, she would opt to eat meat and vegetables or a salad, and for dinner, more meat and vegetables.
Meghan told The Epoch Times: “I don’t diet, I eat according to my goals. Focusing more on whole foods and being more mindful of the negative effects of the highly processed.”
As for an exercise routine, in the first year, she mainly focused on yoga for the most part and walking or playing with her daughter. She admits that working out with her young daughter was actually the most exhausting “workout.”
Then as time passed, she said, she decided not to “stick to the same thing every day.”
“I made a commitment of 10 minutes of purposeful activity a day. Could be cleaning dancing or yoga,” Meghan explained. “Over time I increased the time and have changed what I did and have trained for marathons as well obstacle courses. Sometimes I design my own workout routines and other [times] I’ll borrow someone else’s.”
Reflecting back on the challenges she encountered while losing 240 pounds (108 kg) in 17 months, her biggest one was “mental work.”
“The time it takes to build up emotional intelligence and work the tools you’ve learned to healthily manage stress. It’s easy to read a tip, it’s much harder to actively work at that tip consistently.”
But shedding those extra pounds, Megan said, felt “so much better.”
“It was amazing how taking weight off your body can greatly impact your quality of living,” she said.
After her successful transformation, Meghan is now helping others with their own journey. As an accountability coach, her advice to all those who are trying to lose those extra pounds is: “Don’t force yourself into a box you don’t fit in. If you don’t love your lifestyle it’s not likely you are going to stick with it. Take the time to create the life you love and truly deserve.”
Through her community, Meghan is helping others love themselves in the journey to better health.
“If you’re not making your choices out of self-love you’re doing it wrong,” Meghan said. “You can’t hate yourself to better health.”
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