Jennifer Reichow


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Originally published at: https://ketowomanpodcast.com/jennifer-reichow/

Daisy's latest extraordinary woman, Jennifer, talks about her experience with weight loss surgery and how keto fits into the picture.

Jennifer was born and raised in Ontario Canada and is married with two kids. She has worked as an RN for the past 20 years.

She started gaining weight at around 9 years old when her parents split up. She started her first diet age 11 and subsequently tried every diet under the sun.  When she finished high school she was probably only about 20 lbs overweight but it felt like it might as well have been 100.  

Over the next 20 years with working full time, getting married, going to college while still working and having 2 children she continued to gain weight despite diet and exercise. She finally considered weight loss surgery but at that time it was not a common surgery done locally and she would have had to travel out of the country for it to be covered by insurance. It was a few years later that Ontario started a fairly extensive program for bariatric patients and she had the sleeve. 

After losing about 70 lbs fairly quickly Jennifer’s weight loss stalled as she struggled with the clinic’s ideal nutrition guidelines which was to eat healthy whole foods in moderation. She got stuck back into that viscous carb addiction cycle and spent several years after surgery regaining and losing the same 20 lbs.  At one point she even spoke to her surgeon requesting another weight loss surgery but was denied because her weight was too low.  

In February 2018 she stumbled across Jason Fung’s book Complete Guide to Fasting. It was a revelation that being unable to lose weight was not her fault but rather the failure of a system that still clings to beliefs about nutrition that are out of date and just plain wrong.  She quickly fell down the rabbit hole devouring books, podcasts and YouTube videos.  

She lost 20 lbs very quickly on keto but unfortunately regained when her addictive tendency to smother stress with carbs reasserted itself.  As she has continued to learn more about herself it’s become easier to manage and she has now lost 10 lbs of that regain. More importantly she feels great -  body, mind and spirit.  

Jennifer's Top Tip

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