180-Pound Weight-Loss Transformation
Down 180 Pounds, Tessa Is Half Her Size — and It All Started With Zumba
It all started with a picture. When Tessa peered at a snapshot of herself at her heaviest — 330 pounds, to be exact — she knew that the smile planted on her face didn't represent how she truly felt on the inside. It was time to make a change and take control of her health, so she spent the next five years transforming her body and losing half her body weight along the way.
Tessa's weight-loss journey technically began in August of 2012, although the pounds didn't really start dropping until two years later. In 2012, she added nutritional shakes for weight management to her routine, and while they initially showed minor results, she knew they weren't going to make a long-term difference. After suffering from two miscarriages, one in 2013 and another in 2014, "something clicked," as she described on her Facebook page where she documents her journey. "From there a fire was lit within me," she wrote.
Her first step as she got back on track with shedding the weight didn't involve any gimmicky shakes or smoothies. It was Zumba! In February 2014, Tessa took her first class and fell in love with it, which, in turn, made her love fitness in general. She downloaded the My Fitness Pal app to track calories, started working out five to six days per week (either fitness classes or just hitting the gym), got into running and strength training, and the rest is history.
Now 31 years old and a mother of three, Tessa has dropped about 180 pounds over the course of five years. At roughly 150 pounds currently, she continues to use the My Fitness Pal app and hit the gym five to six times per week. But this is just the beginning. "This journey had a starting point, but there really is no ending point," she wrote in a recent Instagram caption. There's no telling what's possible when a woman sets her mind to something!
