A woman named Kristen McLaughlin was very active during her youth days.
She used to play three sports throughout high school, which helped her balance out her eating.
But things changed when she got into a 5-year complicated relationship. Her story originally appeared on PEOPLE.com for the 2019 “How I Lost 100 Lbs.!” feature.
The 31-year-old told PEOPLE Magazine: “I wasn’t mindful at all about what I was eating,”
“If I wanted to eat something, I didn’t really think twice about it. And when I got into my relationship, he was a larger guy, and I was eating whatever he’s eating — which does not make logical sense.”
Kristen who is a New York City-based software specialist said that she and her boyfriend used to go for dinner regularly.
“It was easier for me to eat instead of tackling what was going on,” she says. “It was easier to say, ‘I’ll feel better for 15 minutes while I’m eating a cheeseburger’ and not think about how bad I would feel afterwards.”
For dinner with her boyfriend, “we would order giant pizzas or cheeseburgers and French fries,” and if they went out for drinks, “you deserve to have something when you come back home.”
“I would fall asleep with probably 12,000 calories in me, and then wake up and wonder, ‘Why am I so tired?’ ” she recalls.
Kristen started feeling self-conscious about her body at 270 lbs. She decided to join Jenny Craig in 2016, and it worked as she lost about 60 lbs.
But she felt bad for having ready-made meals and her boyfriend who was doing his M.B.A at that time, had to “fend for himself” in the kitchen.
“I had some guilt about losing the weight while he had school going on, and I wanted us to spend more time together,” she says. “So I lost a bunch of weight but then slid back.”
During the same time, her boyfriend became ‘distant’ and Kristen realized that he loves someone else.
“At that point, I’m like, ‘This is cheating, this is dumb, I can’t do this anymore,’ and I said I was leaving,” she says.
I literally got rid of every excuse that I’ve ever had,” she says. “I never had a better opportunity to just focus on myself and build myself back up.”
“I think I’m more myself now, funnily enough, than I ever was the previous 30 years,” she says. “I say yes to things now, I’m more outgoing, I’m more likely to be social. I think weight loss isn’t just physical or mental — it’s a whole spectrum of your life.”
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