Lisa Lost 50kg at 50 – and Came Off the Medication She’d Been on for 20 Years

Lisa’s life had become a cycle of late-night takeaways, chronic anxiety, and mounting health issues.

By the time she reached 49, she was on long-term OCD and anxiety medication, barely sleeping, and constantly panicked about her risk of aneurysm – a fear fuelled by a family history of cancer, diabetes, and heart problems.

Doctors had all but written her off. Even her life insurance came with a “high risk” premium.

But with a U.P. trainer behind her, Lisa has lost 50kg (110lbs), came off all medication for the first time in nearly two decades, and finally feels like herself again – physically, mentally, and emotionally.

In her words, “U.P. saved my life.”

Here’s how she did it…

What was life like before you started your transformation? 

Growing up, we didn’t have any home cooked meals. Everything was microwaveable, and that was basically how I learned to eat going into adulthood. So when I moved out on my own at 18, that just became fast food. I never really learned how to cook or make healthy food, I didn’t even think about it. I just did all the diet fads of the 80s. 

And then that just continued… I worked lots and lots of hours, and food was just what I could eat, when I could eat. A lot of the time, it was really late at night, so it was always fast food, whatever was available on delivery. 

As I got older and had more money, eating fast food became eating out which became drinking too. So it was a lot of drinking and a lot of eating. Often very late at night… I would go all day, often with almost no food, and then eat a whole bunch right at the very end of the day before I go to bed. 

Did your health start to suffer from that lifestyle? 

In my early 30s I had a pretty bad mental breakdown, that I actually ended up hospitalised for. From that point, I was put on a whole bunch of medication, and then really started gaining a lot of weight. In part because of the medications, but in larger part, just because mentally I was in a bad place. 

So from my early 30s on, I just really started packing on weight. And the more and more weight I had, the more and more physical and mental issues I had. 

Every three, to six, months I felt like there was some new physical issue… back pain or migraines … I had a whole bunch more anxiety around that too, because I knew I was overweight. I knew I was highly stressed, and I was drinking too. 

I thought an aneurysm was likely. I had migraines all the time, all the time. For decades I had gone to neurologists and had been on drugs for them. I had all kinds of testing done and worried that I would have a heart attack. I worried that I would have diabetes.

Was there a specific turning point where you realised things had to change? 

When I first started here, I had been keeping a spreadsheet of all the different issues that I had, physically and mentally. And I was just like, ‘at what point is it going to be enough?’ 

I would just keep getting used to one more thing, one more thing, one more thing. 

And I was 48-49, and physically like a 70 year old. I couldn’t move around. I didn’t sleep for more than two hours at a time, no matter what. And I would always wake up, in a panic, with anxiety. 

Bad all around.

Were you on medication when you started, and did that change during the programme? 

Yeah. I stopped the day I started here. 

I’d tried multiple times. I was on medication for OCD, which had gone back to that hospitalisation in my early 30s. I’d been on that medicine for close to 20 years… At different points I had tried to get off like I would have a period of even a year where I thought, okay, I think ‘I don’t really need this anymore’… 

And then that would last maybe, a month. And I would then have massive, anxiety and panic and again, severe to the point that that was like needing hospitalisation. Again. I didn’t go, but I was bad enough that I should have, probably more than once. 

And so when I started here, it wasn’t really an active decision. I actually ran out and I was like, well, ‘I’m starting this new programme. Maybe I’ll just not fill it and see how it goes’, since I’d already  weaned myself off at this point… I didn’t think it would last a month. But I also didn’t think I would last a year. 

And now…  I’m off and I’ve been off it the whole time. It’s the longest I’ve ever been off it. So it’s been almost a year now.

What improvements have you seen in your blood pressure and physical capacity? 

My heart rate is generally 52 or something like that… my blood pressure is just way down. That was one of the things I started tracking when I just started. For well over a year before coming here, every single time I got my blood pressure taken, I just made a note… and now it’s way down. 

In fact, when I moved to the Netherlands, I tried to get life insurance and I had to get a medical exam and they were basically not going to approve me because my health was so bad… I did ultimately get approved, but I had to pay an extra high premium basically because they expected me to die.

What was your physical ability like before starting – and how is it now? 

When I first started here, I couldn’t walk more than a thousand steps before I’d have to really stop for a good while. Up to 15 minutes of chill because my back would lock up really bad. My heels would hurt. I just didn’t have the ability to do it. 

And when we first started the programme and I had needed to do the 10,000 steps, I thought ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do this’. 

I remember my trainer told me every time I eat, to just walk around the block once. And that’s what I did. 

That was honestly the unlock for me, because I don’t think I ever would have figured out how to do 10,000 steps in the beginning without that… And now, 10,000 steps are so easy to me. I don’t even think about it… I feel like I could walk all day now, honestly.” 

What kind of transformation have you experienced in your daily life? 

It’s not an overstatement to say, my entire life has changed… First of all, mobility wise, night and day… I am for sure the strongest I’ve been in my life. 

Just in general, I’m the most mobile, most healthy, physically and mentally. I think the mental change has been crazy. 

I’m off all the meds… I’m mentally much better, in a much happier place than I was even when I was on the meds. 

Not only do I notice it, but like, a lot of people have mentioned to me… people have said, ‘oh, you just seem so much happier’.

Can you tell us how this has changed your confidence? 

I’m actually a pretty confident person. I’m confident in my abilities from a work perspective. But when I got really overweight, I was really insecure about that… I kind of just wanted to be invisible. I really did. 

I worked for Nike for ten years… I was embarrassed all the time because I was always the fattest person in the room everywhere I went. And not only can I not do it, I couldn’t even wear Nike clothes because I couldn’t fit in any of the clothes, so it was doubly embarrassing. 

Now I definitely feel like I have my confidence back in terms of my appearance… I used to walk by store windows and I would see my reflection and I was just appalled. 

And now I look in the mirror and/or the windows and I’m like ‘yeah, this is who I am. This is who I’m becoming and I’m happy with it’. 

What kind of support did you receive from your trainer? 

My trainer saved my life. Really. And continues to… 

So much more has come out of this than I ever expected. And so much actually has come up, that I’ve had to confront about myself, my life, and the choices I made. Things that I hadn’t dealt with… And I have probably never felt more vulnerable in my life. 

I don’t like being dependent on other people. So it was really hard for me to accept help and be vulnerable and just tell my trainer what was going on. He was always there, supporting me and everything. Not just in the programme, but in my life that was happening outside of this. 

People ask me all the time, ‘how did you do it?’ And I it was my trainer, because I don’t think if I would be here, if it wasn’t for training with him. 

When I was struggling, I wanted to do it for him as much as I wanted to, for me. And that helped me pull through and stay focussed when I was really struggling at times.

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