Portion Sizes, Pregnancy, and Progress with Katie Eastgate

Katie has dropped 185 pounds from a peak weight of 359 pounds (163 kg)! She is a self-described picky eater who redefined her idea of hunger, learned how to manage her food and reduce portion sizes, and maintained a positive attitude throughout.

Also: surprise! She had two children right in the middle of her weight-loss progress.

“I had to learn from the mistakes that I’d made previously with my failures with dieting and exercising and things like that. I had to look at things not as a short-term quick fix. I really had to find something that I could live with the rest of my life.”

One of Katie’s early strategies was tracking food every day, even if not precise.

“I need to understand what I was truly doing to myself… lot of days that I would mindlessly sit in front of the TV, eat an entire bag of chips, a container of ice cream… seeing it in black and white made me realize just what I was doing to my body.”

She also reduced portion sizes by sticking to a personal rule of “leave something on the plate!” that helped transition smoothly to eating much smaller portion sizes.

A job in fast food immersed her into days around fast food for hours at a time. Katie found that this actually helped put her off of eating it as much, which worked in her favor.

Over time, she normalized her daily meals into a routine.

“I made myself very familiar with the calorie counts in the nutrition box as well.”

Katie recommends taking photos, now, and continuing to take photos as you make progress. She regrets not taking more, and says:

“One of these days you’re going to look back and you’re going to see how far you’ve come. Without that visual representation of how far you’ve come, it’s sometimes easy to get down on yourself if you hit a plateau.”