- Alaias Bertrand tried to lose weight with restrictive diets, which left her feeling like a failure.
- Attitudes around weight loss are shifting away from fad diets toward an overall healthy lifestyle.
- Bertrand made simple lifestyle changes that she actively enjoyed, which resulted in weight loss.
Before Alaias Bertrand lost 75 pounds and kept it off for six years, she had cycled through a series of restrictive diets that didn’t work long-term and left her feeling like a failure.
“I was trying to do quick fixes, bad diets, just like anything that I thought would work,” Bertrand, 25, a marketer and content creator based in Florida, told Business Insider. “It felt so difficult. It didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere.”
It was only when she started prioritizing her health over her appearance and implemented some healthy lifestyle changes that she was able to lose weight sustainably.
Her story chimes with changing attitudes toward weight loss, as people increasingly reject fad diets and work toward making lifestyle choices that will support their long-term health and happiness. Weight loss drugs including Ozempic have also helped dispel the myth that willpower alone is enough to achieve a healthy weight.
Bertrand’s journey started in 2014 when she was a freshman in high school and a doctor told her she qualified as obese, which led her to rethink her daily habits. “I started taking analysis of where I was, where my family was, where my friends were at, and started to calculate, is this how I want to live?” she said.
She decided that it wasn’t, and she would try to lose weight.
The restrictive diets like keto and intermittent fasting she tried made her fixate on what she was eating, and counting calories led her to undereat. “Tracking what I ate almost caused me to go down such a negative spiral of just overthinking and analyzing my entire life and food that it took the fun away from life,” she said.
Bertrand shared the two simple changes she made that led her to lose 75 pounds and keep it off without giving up her favorite foods.
Alaias Bertrand
1) Joining a sprint team
Growing up, Bertrand always played sports — she was on the track and field team at the time of that doctor’s appointment.
She was a thrower but decided to join the sprint team because she wanted to lose weight and had always been interested in trying it. She started to split her time between the two teams, doing half thrower practices and half sprint ones.
Both involved a pretty rigorous schedule with daily workouts, but the sprint workouts involved running, while throwing practice did not. The first year was tough, both physically and socially. Changing teams was out of the norm, and people on both teams whispered to each other and gave her the side eye, she said. But it gave Bertrand a real sense of purpose and self-respect, which made it rewarding.
By the spring of 2017, she had lost 75 pounds without actively trying. She said that running two to three times a week caused her to burn way more calories than before and become a faster runner.
“I felt so proud of myself for finding something that I actually liked doing that was starting to work,” she said.
When Bertrand returned to her healthcare provider in 2017, the doctor was surprised she had lost so much weight. “I recall the doctor asking me what I did. It was such a drastically different reaction,” she said.
She went on to join the Michigan State University track and field team as a hammer thrower, and now that she’s out of college, she still works out every day. In a typical week, she does a combination of lifting, running, kickboxing, gymnastics, and hot yoga.
While exercise is hugely beneficial for overall health and longevity, research suggests it plays a smaller role in weight loss than we might think, as working out makes up about 5% of the energy we burn in a day. A person must be in a calorie deficit — when they burn more calories than they consume— to lose weight, which means diet is the most important component.
Alaias Bertrand
2) Eating from a smaller plate and adding some healthier items to her grocery order
Before starting her weight loss journey, Bertrand ate a lot of processed foods. She would eat two packets of ramen noodles a day and lots of hot Cheetos. Her family would often order pizza for dinner and eat it late in the evening.
When she decided to lose weight, she began to notice how other people ate. One of her best friends was Lebanese, and both of her parents were doctors. She noticed that their family had really different eating habits from hers, such as eating together at 6 p.m. and eating smaller portions off of smaller plates than Bertrand’s family did.
They also mainly ate a Mediterranean-style diet, which consisted of beans, fresh vegetables, fish, and grains. “Some days they would have Greek food, or they would have Mediterranean food, or they would do burgers, but again, their portion size would be really reasonable,” she said.
Bertrand asked her mom, who was buying the groceries at the time, to stock up on some more fresh produce. And she started thinking more about portion control. “That was something that was very doable for me. It was very actionable because all I have to do is grab a smaller plate,” she said. That meant she wouldn’t overload her plate and would naturally eat less without tracking her food.
“Over time, my adjustments became less about needing to look a certain way and more so about wanting to feel a certain way. I want to feel good in my body. I want to feel confident,” she said.
“I think what made the journey so successful is I stopped caring about what I looked like, what I looked like became a byproduct of me falling in love with the journey.”
