A Real Weight Loss Story

Interviewer: Talk about your story for a little bit. It's easy for people to sit here and say, These are the things you should do, but you lived it, and had to experience it. Can you talk about how you got to the point you're at now?

Angela Bruer-Balouch: At the age of 33, the scale ticked about 192 pounds for me. Throughout my adolescence, I battled with my weight here and there. For the most part, I was athletic, I ate nutritiously from the garden. Then, getting into corporate America, more of a sedentary lifestyle, I started packing on the pounds. I had baby number one, baby number two, and baby number three. But really, after my first child I looked at nutrition a whole different way when it came time to feed my child. I breastfed all three of my children, I built a Happy Baby Food grinder and I did as much as possible for my first child with real foods. Of course, with my second and third, I did the same. Again, it was looking at those ingredients and looking at the baby formulas, and what was in there and smelling them. If you look at the baby formulas and you taste them, I'm going to be honest: if you taste breastmilk, it's sweet. It tastes like candy.

A lot of fruits and vegetables, I started to appreciate again how tasty they are. A date, for example, we don't want dates and beets and sweet potatoes as children, but as adults, we realize how tasty and satisfying they are. Those natural sugars metabolize in your body way differently than synthetic sugars do. I was 192 pounds, I saw my mother yo-yo diet all my life. You know, dexetrin, all kinds of different products to curb her appetite. She struggled with food, and I knew I didn't want that for my children. It was innate with me that I didn't want to see them struggle, I wanted to fundamentally learn nutrition and how our bodies can refuel as we go, if you will.

Interviewer: Did you have an a-ha moment? That's it, now I'm going down this route and I'm starting to eat healthier? Is there something that clicked in you? And more importantly, how did you stay on that path?

Angela Bruer-Balouch: I think the a-ha moment was really when it came time to feeding my children, and looking at what I was bringing into the home and what I needed to be eating. Also, with looking at the ingredients and learning more about natural foods and whole foods and how therapeutic and medicinal they really are, and knowing that people can actually heal their body with foods. I'd always been fascinated with gardening and vegetables and alternative types of natural products, if you will. I just looked at all these chemicals and I thought, "Long term effects; this cannot be good."

And then you start reading reputable authors, reputable doctors reporting on what we're doing. You look at the outside of America, at the other countries and their health. I met a gentleman, Dr. Alex Schauss, who wrote a book called "Feed My Brain". He took a group of children who had ADHD and had a 12 week study. He totally revamped their nutrition. He saw an amazing and incredible turnaround in the children's test scores and their behavior and everything. It was fundamentally from their foods. So instead of being filled with sugary cereals, pop tarts, skipping meals, I'm looking at this and thinking our country needs to do differently. When we know better, we can do better. A lot of the turning point has to do with social media; with more knowledge, we can do better. And I just needed more for my three kids.