Welcome to Start TODAY. Sign up for our Start TODAY newsletter to receive daily inspiration sent to your inbox — and join us on Instagram!
Ashley (Aevie) Vielma, 35, comes from a large family with gatherings centered around food and taking it easy. So, she’s been considered overweight for as long as she can remember.
“Throughout my adolescent years, doctors would make comments about my weight. That was sort of my norm,” she tells TODAY.com. “When I was around 10 years old, I can remember being self-conscious about my weight and thinking about diets. That seems crazy now, looking back, because I was so young.”
When she was in college she tried to be more active and get fit. But she focused on deprivation and high-intensity workouts, which wasn’t sustainable for her once she was an adult with a desk job.
Her weight increased to 205 pounds, and she had issues with her thyroid and blood pressure. Plus, she saw family members with high cholesterol and diabetes, and she expected the same future for herself. “That was the norm,” she says.
Working out at a gym where she says she didn’t have a lot of support, she tore her ACL and her meniscus. She needed surgery in February 2018 and couldn’t put any weight on her leg for two months.
“I was more sedentary, I put on more weight and that brought me down,” she says. “It was really difficult emotionally and mentally for me to wrap my head around what my mobility would look like in the future.”
In September 2019, she needed a physical for work, and she discovered that she was borderline diabetic. Even though she thought health issues were a normal part of getting older, she had a hard time accepting that she was on the path to diabetes.
Since then, she’s found ways to eat mindfully, build her strength, improve her blood-sugar levels and lose 70 pounds. Here’s how she did it.
Read the full article here
