“A crazy thing happened in a little Facebook group I started on July 9, 2018, with about 500 people … A bunch of us got skinny.”
So reads the intro to the website Eat Like a Bear, an online community and company started by Amanda Rose, a political scientist from California, after she halved her weight from 280 pounds to 140 in a single year.
In the seven years since, she has maintained that weight loss and publicized her methods in a Facebook group, a YouTube channel and the website. Two hundred adherents in her community have lost more than 100 pounds each. Scores of others have lost lesser amounts, and many in the group have had their lives completely transformed.
Focusing on a Vision
Rose’s transformation was sparked by a yearning to live life to the fullest. She lives in the Giant Sequoia National Monument surrounded by forestland, but painful walking due to obesity kept her from hiking. Instead, she would drive her son, an avid hiker, to the trailhead and wait for him to come back.
She realized her deepest desire was to hike with him. She knew how to lose weight — and had done so many times — but it always came back. When she was approved for bariatric surgery in the summer of 2017, she understood that the only way she could hike without going under the knife was to permanently transform her approach to food.
Rose realized her mindset was just as important as what she ate in achieving permanent weight loss. She needed deep internal motivation and self-accountability to become the person she envisioned — not so much a thin person as a person who could hike.
“What we really need to do is focus in a positive, visual way on our bright future,” she says. For her, this means “focusing on visions of hiking, of being out in the world and moving in a way I had never been able to before.”
Inspiring Others
Rose combined this positive mindset with two strategies she had not previously paired: intermittent fasting and low-carb eating. Her method was simple. She ate one large meal per day, primarily vegetables and healthy protein and consumed it in a single hour.
By January 2018, she was down to 190 pounds, and her surgery was canceled. A few months later, she says, her primary care doctor told her, “No one else would ever implement what I did.”
To her, that sounded like a challenge.