Although she’d been dealing with stomach issues off and on for years, Lauren Council remembers the exact moment her pain changed everything.
她在痛苦回忆一天晚上醒来, feeling a horrible stabbing pain in her abdomen. When she went to urgent care, they suggested it was a virus, but that diagnosis seemed off to her. After seeing a gastroenterologist for a second opinion, she got a better idea of what she was facing: irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). As soon as Council heard that, it felt like a wake-up call.
“那是两年前，所以我只有25岁，感觉就像我一生都在生病，”加利福尼亚州里彭市的本地人说。“我以为，我可以走那条路，或者我终于可以对此做些事情。”
At that point, she was at her heaviest weight of 270 and had struggled with binge eating since she was a child. Constant bullying while she was growing up made the problem worse, and then, heartbreakingly, she lost her mother to breast cancer just a week before her high school graduation.
“I’m definitely an emotional eater, and I was good at hiding my binge eating so no one would know,” she says. “I got to the point where I expected this would be my life; it would be how I coped with everything.”
A few years later, in college, she decided to start eating healthier after a mortifying experience at an amusement park, where she was asked to get off a roller coaster due to her weight. But the effort was short-lived, and Council soon returned to her more destructive eating habits.
“It really took me getting very sick to see that I needed a change,” she says. “I just didn’t want to feel like this forever. And I didn’t want to have to structure my life around my IBS.”
Council experimented with giving up dairy and gluten, which seemed to aggravate her symptoms, and she lost 20 pounds. She began integrating more fruits and vegetables into her meals and using MyFitnessPal to track her food — not just for weight loss, but also as a way to understand which foods might trigger IBS symptoms more than others.
Her consistency paid off in reduced IBS problems and no more ER visits. After a month and a half of food tracking, her improved energy levels inspired Council to take the next step, one she’d always found incredibly terrifying: going to the gym.
她说：“我讨厌锻炼，甚至讨厌锻炼的想法。”“但是我立即签署了个人培训课程，所以我不会立即放弃。现在甚至想到这种心态，这很有趣，因为现在这是我的激情。”
Today, Council is down 103 pounds and has been honest about her struggles, both in therapy and on社交媒体. She says admitting that binge eating will always be a challenge has helped her deal with the mental battle that comes with food addiction.
“It’s been hard sometimes, I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” she notes. “I’ve had a few relapse binge episodes and it’s the worst feeling, but as soon as it stops, I get my mind back to where it needs to be. We are truly capable of so much more than we think.”
myfitnesspalhas also helped her stay accountable, she adds. Seeing the numbers involved with her food and activity helps Council make decisions about what she’s eating on a daily basis. And now her IBS symptoms are minimal to non-existent, which has been a huge relief.
她说：“继续激励我的是我的妈妈。”“她推动我努力工作并保持积极性，她将永远是我所做的一切的巨大灵感。万博彩票下载苹果我也希望对他人也是如此。我不是一个曾经运动能力并体重增加的人 - 我一生中的大部分时间都在挣扎。但是我从零开始，我做到了……我真的相信，如果我能做到，任何人都可以。”
