Woman Drops 76 Pounds After Doctors Said Her Conditions Made Weight Loss Impossible

Denise Sheets (@heywigsister) is a YouTuber famous for sharing insight about wigs and hair loss, which she suffered as a result of multiple health conditions. She also lost a whopping 76 pounds and improved her health all around on the keto diet. In a new video, she discusses her experience with the diet and offers some tips on how to make it work for you.

"I've lost 76 pounds in the past three years. Much of that was lost this year," she says. "It does not require drugs. It does not require supplements, and it does not require memberships to something. All the information is available to you for free. And I will share with you what I've used to help me on this journey," she continued. "It truly has changed my entire life following the keto diet."

She Suffers From Arthritis, Graves, and Hashimoto's Disease

"I'm not an expert. I'm not a doctor. I'm just a regular person who has struggled with health issues since I was two years old. I was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis when I was two, and I struggled. I've struggled my whole life with arthritis flares from having had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. In my mid-twenties, I was diagnosed with Graves disease. That's a thyroid, an autoimmune thyroid disease that causes thyroidism. And I fought that for a long, long time. In my early thirties, my Graves disease morphed into Hashimoto's Disease, and that is what I live with to this day," she says in her post.

She Could "Barely Get Out of Bed"

"Hashimoto's disease, that's a hypo thyroid autoimmune disease, and it's rare for people to have both. In the past five years, my health has deteriorated to the point where I had to quit a job that I had been at for 10 years because of the stress of the job, and I couldn't function. I have had incredible joint issues to the point where there are some days I can barely get out of bed. I couldn't even walk a year ago; I couldn't even walk two blocks. My joint issues were so severe," she says.

Keto Helps with Inflammation

She adds that "one of the benefits of the keto diet, aside from the weight loss, which for me is 76 pounds to date, is health improvement." In fact, she claims her "inflammation decreased to the point where I am practically unrecognizable," sharing a before and after photo.

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She Topped the Scales at 244

Her weight in August of 2020, the "highest weight that I've ever hit," she says, was 244 pounds." Between August and January, she lost 7 pounds, "so I weighed 237 pounds January 30th, 2021." between then and January 2022 she lost 25 pounds "by just making some basic lifestyle changes," and then the following year, just two pounds.

She Hit Bottom

"At that point, I couldn't live like this anymore. I was barely functioning. I was struggling with day-to-day activities," she says. "I decided I needed to do something with my diet, that it was a diet that was gonna fix this for me. I decided to do more of an elimination diet. And that's when I started to do tons of research on keto and carnivore."

She Didn't Think Keto Would Work But Was Willing to Try Anything

"I did not think keto was gonna work for me. I tried every diet under the sun except for keto and Atkins and things like that. But I just thought it was an unhealthy diet that wasn't gonna help me. And there are so many naysayers about this way of eating that I was buying into some of it. But you guys, you know what? You get to a point where you're willing to do just about anything to feel better. The one thing I wasn't willing to do was take drugs," she says. "I just don't wanna put toxic things into my body. Even if they have a benefit, there's always a consequence. And so I wasn't willing to take diet pills or take drugs or anything."

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She Listened to Two Audiobooks About Keto

She listened to Any Way You Can by  Dr. Annette Bosworth on Audible. "It's the story of how she used keto, which she calls keto chemistry, to help her mom while she was battling cancer," she says.  She also listened to Keto Continuum. "It is so incredibly valuable and packed full of information and data and science. It's really, really good. If you are convinced that keto is good and that it will work, you are just not sure if you can do it or how to do it. You can skip any way you can and go straight to this book. I just think that's such a wonderful, heartwarming story."

She explains that it offers steps on how to do the diet. "Then you go to Keto Continuum Two once you've mastered that for a few weeks, you go to Keto Continuum Three and so on and so forth," she says.

Ketone Strips and a Glucose Monitor Are Key

She says that she got ketone strips, "and you basically put them in your stream when you're going to the bathroom. And then, you match the color on the strip with this chart to see if you're producing ketones. I never got beyond small levels of ketones. I graduated from the pee strips to a monitor. So this is like a glucose monitor," she continues. She said that it is helpful for measuring blood glucose and ketones.

She Was Able to Monitor When She Was in Ketosis

"I found this super valuable, especially for the blood glucose. I am technically considered pre-diabetic based on my morning fasting blood glucose. It is always in the pre-diabetic range, even after all this weight loss, even after eating keto all this time, because I haven't followed it strictly, and I really don't get into ketosis. I'm usually at a very low level of ketosis. Even when I don't cheat, I find it very hard for my body to produce ketones. That's why I need to go back to basics with the Keto Continuum. But so far, what I've done has worked for me," she says.

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Do the Best You Can, She Encourages

"Here's your takeaway," she concludes the video. "Do the best that you can. If you can follow Dr. B's plan, do it. Measure your ketones. Try to get into consistent ketosis. I struggled with that part of it. And as long as I was still improving, as long as the weight was still coming off, as long as my ankles weren't swollen at night, I had huge ankles every night forever because of my inflammation, and then I was happy with my results." And if you enjoyed this article, take advantage of these 15 Quick Ways to Lose Body Fat Percentage in a Week.