Losing 21 Pounds at 56 After Menopause and Lockdown

Annette: Hi, my name is Annette. I am 56 years old. For the one year immediately prior to joining WarriorBabe, and I joined at the end of March of this year, I had not been doing anything as far as physical activity. When the gyms closed down in March of last year, until they opened up this last year, I just made a conscious decision that I was not going to work out at home. I've never liked working out at home, and I just found that as my excuse to take it easy for a little while.

I've never really done any fad diets. I've been around a long time. I remember when the South Beach Diet came out, and the Atkins Diet. So when keto came out, and then intermittent fasting, to me it was just more of the same. I've never really had food issues. I thought I was eating healthy. My daily nutrition consisted of two healthy meals and about four to five cups of coffee, and I thought I was doing pretty good with that.

I worked out by myself before. I'd been able to lose weight before on my own. I was in a plateau for about five years. Throughout the last two years, menopause really messed up my body. And then there was the last year of lockdowns. Once gyms opened at the end of March of this year, I knew that I had to get some help.

When I saw Nikkiey's video, I had only seen one video of hers when I called in. I knew she had the physique that I always dreamed of having. And the other thing is she wasn't talking about "you're going to eat from this list," which is something I've seen before when somebody was trying to convince me to join a program. She was talking about being able to actually eat carbs to fuel your body. That's something that I'd never heard before. So I just knew that this was something that I needed to do for myself. It was an investment that I needed to make in myself.

Our community and accountability in our Facebook group are just amazing. I've always been a very reserved person. I'm part of other business groups on Facebook, and I'm that person in the background who is just reading the posts and never commenting, never really doing anything but reading through some of the stuff. But there's something different about this group that makes me want to be brave and share and contribute and really be a part of the community. The coaches are just so encouraging, as are the women who have been in the group for a while and even those who are coming in new. It gives you courage to be vulnerable with them, which is really amazing.

Prior to joining WarriorBabe, I had no idea what macronutrients were. No clue whatsoever. I never counted calories. I never did any of that. I never logged food. I never realized that I had to be eating fats, carbs and proteins. Like I said, my thing was two meals a day and I was good to go.

I think I probably had Coach Mo going a little bit crazy at the beginning. She was probably thinking, what is wrong with her? Why isn't she doing this? Why isn't she eating? Because all of a sudden I had to eat all of this food. And I thought if I could just get the right percentages in, right? Thirty percent of this, 32% of this and whatever percentage of the other thing, that I was good. I wasn't thinking that I actually had to eat all of that food to reach all those calories. A lot of times I was leaving 200 to 400 calories on the plate because it was just too much food for me. And just to jack myself up, once I figured out how to do it, I decided to go vegan, which really threw everything off. It was almost like relearning when I had just learned how to do it.

I've lost 21 pounds. I'm averaging about a pound a week. And when we take into consideration how many weeks I've been in the program, and how many weeks there are before the end of the year, that's really exciting to me.

I've now gone into my closet twice. The first time was within two months in. I was able to get rid of all the clothes I had to buy at the end of last year because of all the weight that I gained during the lockdowns. And just this weekend, I'm so excited, I went into my closet and I actually had to get rid of all of my work blouses that I had even prior to the lockdowns, because I'm actually kind of swimming in those button-down blouses that I used to wear for work all the time. So I'm excited to see how many more clothes I'm going to have to get out by the end of the year, and to get to go shopping for some more clothes.

One thing that's been really big for me is that for the first time in I don't know how many years, I feel comfortable wearing form-fitting clothes. I had not been doing that. I'd been wearing clothes to hide things as much as possible, but now I wear form-fitting clothes and I love that. It's just really exciting for me.

Nikkiey is big on mindset, and that's something that I really connected with her on, because that's a big part of my business coaching. We carry into the rest of our lives the way we start thinking about even our nutrition and our fitness and our health. So everything that we're doing, all the paradigm shifts that we're having within the program with respect to our mindset, carries into every other area of our lives. And we start seeing a different kind of success in those areas.

So I absolutely recommend this. It's the best thing I've done for myself, and it's going to be the best thing you can do for yourself as well.