It seemed to go one of two ways, you either lost 20 pounds or more likely, gained 20 pounds. I work for a winery with a successful wine club, at least we thought it was successful before Covid. During the spring and summer of 2020 we had never seen that kind of growth and it kept going through to early 2021. I know our club members were drinking more wine and I know I was drinking more wine. We had our local brewery deliver cases of beer during the initial shut down of 2020 and that was not without additional calories. My kids instituted a daily 4pm happy hour so I would stop working. As I, along with many workers worldwide, was working from home, the biggest challenge I found was when to stop. When you are at work, hopefully, you are excited to head home to see your family or move on to the next phase of your day. When I was working from home, they were there in the living room with me and we had lunch together and went for a walk together everyday. There was not the same sense of needing to finish work to head home and see them when I saw them all day. There was daily happy hour and daily drinking. We also had a local deli start creating beautiful heat and serve family meals that we participated in at least weekly in those early months. With all these indulgences, we should have been gaining weight.

But we didn’t.

I didn’t realize there was any change as we didn’t have a scale and during those 3+ months being at home, I just lived in leggings and runners so there was no tell-tale sign of size. There was also very little interaction with any humans outside our household, so no one was there to notice. I headed back to work in early July and put on my summer work pants from the previous summer and was shocked that they were too large. In all my challenges with digestion and discomfort, weight loss was never a thought in the equation. But it sure is a great benefit.

When I got back to work, many of my colleagues were shocked at my size as I’d worked with these great humans for a decade and they were familiar with the way I normally look. It took another 6 months, but I finally purchased a scale and when I stepped on it I was a full 30 pounds lighter than I was the last time I’d weighed myself, about 2 years prior. During this time, my husband, who was following my food plan softly was also down over 20 pounds.

With the combination of an anti-inflammatory meal plan and daily walking I was able to eliminate my digestive challenges and by-proxy, remove 30 pounds. Here’s the crazy part, if you had told me years earlier that I would loose 30 pounds if I changed these things, I can guarantee you I would not have done it. This change did not come about from looking in the mirror, it came about because it was clear that my relationship with food was not positive, it was hurting me.