A woman has revealed how following a diet that allows her to eat cheesecake, chicken wings, and crispy bacon cured her binge eating disorder and helped her lose 100 pounds.
After years of struggling with her weight and an endless array of diets, Kellie Foster, 24, from Toronto, decided to adopt a low carbohydrate, ketogenic diet in August 2015 after calorie counting caused her to develop a binge-eating disorder.
At one point, Kellie was scoffing a box of cereal, four slices of bread with Nutella and several granola bars in one sitting, a habit which saw her weight soar to a whopping 230 pounds.
Before and after: Kellie Foster weighed 230lbs at her heaviest (left) but is now 100 pounds lighter (right) thanks to the keto diet
Different person: The chemical engineer says she the weight piled on when she went to college
Out of control: Kellie started a calories controlled diet at first but this led to binge eating
Speaking about her disordered approach to eating on her YouTube channel, the 24-year-old chemical engineer revealed that her problems started in college when she moved out of home and gained more weight.
‘It really hurt me deep inside that I was never able to look like my friends did,’ she revealed.
‘I completely let myself go and ate whatever I wanted. I did not exercise at all and what most people call the “freshman 15” was more like the “freshman 40”. I could not even look at myself in the mirror.’
Keeping to a strict 1,200 calories a day diet combined with a two-hours per day cardio-based exercise program, Kellie successfully dropped 65 pounds.
She says she was eating very low fat and very low carb and was only consuming about 600-800 net calories per day.
At the time she said she felt ‘so happy from feeling hungry all the time’ but had no energy her life was completely consumed by dieting but that once she started to allow herself ‘cheat meals’, her attitude towards food changed.
‘They started as something innocent but it became something very bad. My cheat days became a free for all and I absolutely gorged myself,’ she confessed.
‘After four months, I had lost 65 pounds already and that really fueled me to keep going,’ Kellie admits. ‘But cheat days were a vicious cycle as once a week started to become three and four times a week and they also started to become more secret.’
Seeing double: Kellie says now she loves not having a double chin
Wonder woman: Kellie is now maintaining a healthy weight on the keto diet
Finger licking good: The keto diet allows Kellie to eat chicken wings
The great keto bake off: Kellie can indulge her sweet tooth with adapted cheesecake recipes
After a binge, she says she would feel so physically sick, she would have to lie down and sleep but she says the emotional distress afterwards was harder to live with.
‘It’s very shameful and you wouldn’t want anyone to know what you were doing. It’s not even about the food, you’re not even tasting it or enjoying it. It’s this compulsive action of taking the food and putting it into your body as fast as you can.’
Her light bulb moment came when she contemplating making herself vomit after a particularly bad binge: ‘My mind snapped and I couldn’t believe what I was doing.’
She says she wasn’t able to go through with making herself sick and instead decided to take control of her eating habits.
As she was still in school at McGill University in Montreal, the chemical engineering student was referred to an on-campus eating disorder group after making contact with an eating disorder program.
There she learned about controlling her binge impulses and making better food choices from a nutritionist and other sufferers.
She graduated from the program after six months because she hadn’t had the urge to binge in a few months and found herself ‘back out in the real world and still unhappy with my body’.
She struggled with balancing her diet and not going back to a restrictive diet as her binging tendencies started to come back.
Four years later, Kellie put on almost all of the weight she had lost.
In May 2015, she moved to Toronto to start a 16 month internship and felt she was ready to make a change after joining a Cross Fit gym.
‘My amazing coach Brian Nugent had me eating healthier and that did work for a while. But I stopped losing weight so my coach asked me if I had ever heard of the ketogenic diet. I’d read about it online but I thought I didn’t want to give up fruit or carbs but I challenged myself to 30 days of the diet anyway.
Body confident: Kellie used to keep her figure under wraps
Oodles of zoodles: Kellie substitutes carb heavy foods like pasta with keto alternatives
So fresh and so clean: Oily fish and veggies are also encouraged on the keto diet
The ketogenic diet is a high fat, low carb approach to eating where the body, starved of glucose from carbohydrates, starts to use ketones in the liver for energy.
Advocates of the diet say it stabilizes insulin levels and the diet is popular with diabetics and those who suffer from epilepsy.
‘Because it allowed me to incorporate fattier foods like bacon and butter into my diet, I didn’t feel restricted and had zero binging tendencies so I didn’t stop after 30 days. Now I plan to continue eating this way for the rest of my life.’
Kellie has successfully lost 100 pounds in just over two years, gaining over 20,000 Instagram followers thanks to her candid posts, and says that although she misses cookies, cake and bread, there is a substitute for everything on the keto diet ‘except fruit, and I can live without fruit’.
‘Keto has freed me and changed me. Since starting the keto diet I’ve never had an urge to binge. I’ve finally been able to lose the weight I wanted to lose. It’s also changed the way I treat my body, and now I look the way on the outside I feel on the inside,’ she happily admits.
But she’s quick to point out that the keto diet isn’t a cure-all fix for everyone but that if she ‘went off the keto diet, I know I would go back to where I started’.