Kelly McIntosh talks transformative 60-lbs weight loss

For Kelly McIntosh, weight loss has always been challenging.

“I have struggled with weight ever since I’ve known myself. I’ve been on every conceivable diet trying to lose weight, some have been successful but keeping it off has always been the challenge, and I did not want to be fat.” Near 20 years ago, however, after the birth of her son, McIntosh discovered a method of weight loss that, for a time, helped her shed the pounds she had so loathed.

When she fell off the wagon, McIntosh resigned herself to whatever size she would find herself in. “I went through my closet and I tossed out all my slim clothes because I just gave up. Three weeks later, I was at the beach, which is my happy place, and my daughter, who is a photographer, took pictures. When she shared the images with me I was horrified. When I looked at it I said ‘No sah, no Kelly. You’ve always been fat but at least you did cute, you are no longer cute’.

That being the wakeup call she needed, McIntosh said with her then 14-year-old son as her accountability partner, she rededicated herself to a fully Keto diet, cutting out carbs and processed sugars

Five and a half years into that journey McIntosh is now is enjoying what she considers “the smallest she has been in her adult life”.

As a fabulous 55-year-old, McIntosh says she has never been happier in her body.

“I move around with such ease in my physical body. I’m on zero medications, my asthma has cleared up, my acid reflux has disappeared. I no longer snore when I sleep, according to my husband. I feel fantastic! And what this has done for me, apart from the weight loss, which is tremendous because I’ve moved from wearing a size 20 pants; I’m now in size 12.”

Her diet consists of meat, vegetables, fish, eggs, dairy and other low-carb foods.

She explained, “An important part of my journey when I started, I said ‘Kelly you have two rules, you cannot go hungry and you mustn’t feel deprived’ and I set that as a challenge.”

Compelled by her daughter and close friends to share her method of success, McIntosh became a certified group facilitator and food addiction recovery advocate, helping others to identify ways that they can change their relationship with food.

“I started sharing my experience with people, and then they were willing to pay for my time. I do not position myself as a dietician, that’s not what I am. I am what you call peer support. I share my story with you, I share my thoughts, I share what has worked for me and if you want to try it for yourself you go right ahead.”

Her years of work reaching a crescendo, McIntosh is writing a cookbook that will both explain her years-long battle with food and weight loss while providing Keto-friendly recipes for the Jamaican pallet.

“The emphasis is on real food. The emphasis is on food that we are familiar with and how to put together meals that are Keto or low carb. So curried goat, for example, I eat curried goat, I love curried goat but it wouldn’t be curried goat with rice or curried goat with potato salad. It’d be curried goat with cauliflower rice and a salad with a lovely vinaigrette, for example. That’s familiar food. It has all the flavour and colour that we are used to, without the starchy carbs and sugars that cause the problems for us in the first place.”

She continued, “We can still honour our traditions, we can still get together with friends and family and we can lose weight, stave off diabetes, stave of hypertension, deal with PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome), feel good, while honouring our traditions and our natural proclivities for certain flavours.”

“What I want to do is communicate and convey hope and a possible way out of a state of being that has you feeling stuck. For me it has been about much more thant weight loss. I get to help people, I get to learn about my body, I get to understand about addiction and work with people who are in recovery from food addiction and it has been the most, up until now, thrilling, purposeful part of my 55 years on the planet.”

With the final draft already submitted to McIntosh’s publisher, she says she is hoping to have her pseudo-manual hit the bookshelves in a few months.

shanel.lemmie@gleanerjm.com