8 Honest Revelations From Someone Who Lost 100 Pounds, Gained It Back, Then Lost It Again

Images courtesy of Rachel Batista; Graphic by Valerie Fischel

Hitting your weight-loss goal can fill you with a sense of pride and accomplishment, but doing it twice? That journey can be confusing, encouraging, frustrating, disheartening, and everything in between. Rachel Batista, 39, a professional Olympic weightlifter and CrossFit coach from Coconut Creek, Florida, knows the complexity of this experience—she gained 100 pounds during a complicated pregnancy, lost it in six months and decided to enter a bikini competition, then gained that 100 pounds back with her second son. The second time around, she found a healthy way to lose the extra weight, and has kept it off for nearly 10 years. Through her process of gaining and losing, then gaining and losing again, Batista has learned some pretty life-changing lessons—and she’s using her experience to help inspire her clients and herself.

“I look at so much in my life and it all appears to have put me where I was supposed to be,” says Batista. “I love feeling like I am a strong and powerful woman. I love that my sons are proud of me. It makes me feel like I have found my purpose.”

Now Batista is at about the same weight she was before she had her first son, but with a more muscular body composition and a totally new outlook on her health. Here, she shares what she’s learned about her journey as well as the tips that have helped her feel her best.

Related: Why We Reach Weight-Loss Plateaus—And How To Get Past Them

1. Unhealthy habits catch up with you eventually.

A former gymnast and gymnastics coach, Batista’s early twenties included a lot of late nights, cocktails, and some not-so-healthy habits. At 4’11’’, she maintained about a 125-pound weight but admits that her lifestyle wasn’t healthy or sustainable. “You think you’re invincible. I might have been light, but there was nothing healthy about it. I was either not eating or eating a lot, and I always felt controlled by food.”

When she was pregnant at age 27, though, her usual weight-maintenance tactics weren’t an option. Not only was she gaining weight from carrying her son, but her usual diet of unhealthy foods caused even more weight gain once she wasn’t able to work off the excess calories—plus, she couldn’t resort to her former unhealthy habit of skipping meals to counteract other high-calorie indulgences. “I was always nauseous, and the only thing that would help would be to eat something, suck on a candy, or drink a ginger ale—all high-calorie, high-sugar stuff. That was my excuse, and that excuse made me gain 100 pounds. I over-ate myself into high blood pressure, and with a high-risk pregnancy, I couldn’t work out to expend the calories.”

Of course, weight gain during pregnancy is totally normal and part of the process, but Batista credits an unhealthy relationship with food as a big part of the extreme jump on the scale. “I allowed food to be a crutch,” she says. 

2. Quick fixes just don’t stick long term.

The last time Batista saw her weight during her first pregnancy was at the eight-month mark—220 pounds. (She estimates she gained a lot more during the last month of her pregnancy.) But after her son was born in 2003, she dove straight into work mode and decided to train for her first bikini competition in just six months. “[As a former gymnast], I like performing and I like to show off, and my long-term goal was that I didn’t want to be somebody’s overweight mom or be embarrassed about my weight. But, I needed something more than that to motivate me. I needed to dig into my competitive side.” Through a combination of extreme exercise and calorie restriction, she hit her goal weight for the competition and dipped below 10 percent body fat.

Within a couple of days after the competition, though, Batista estimates she put 20 pounds back on. “Most of it was water weight, so I ballooned out. Obviously, you can’t gain that amount of fat in that time, but it just goes to show you what you can do to your body.”

“I wanted it all at once, but that doesn’t last,” says Batista. “So when you take shortcuts and you try to look for the easy way out, it’s like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. It’s not going to do anything.” After trying (and struggling) to get back on another weight-loss plan, she realized she needed a competitive goal to stay on track, so she went on to do five more competitions, steadily gaining and then losing weight.

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