There have been two moments in Katie Zornes’ life that have felt like the flip of a switch. When it happens, she gets the impulse to change, to test her limits. The first time the flip switched, Zornes was 368 pounds and suddenly felt determined to lose weight. The second time it happened, she’d regained 100 of those pounds. But the urge this time prompted healthier lifestyle choices that weren’t tied to her weight.
She’s happier this time around.
“I’m a person that has struggled with weight for my entire life,” Zornes tells TODAY.com. “I had tried things over the years and had not really seen much success.” For most of her life, food was a comfort. “I’m an emotional eater, I struggled with depression,” she says, and food filled the emptiness. Zornes had no idea what her body “needed to feel good” back then, she says.
While she’d eventually learn about the connection between her mind and body, she wasn’t quite there yet.
The first turning point
“One day in 2011, I just woke up and felt like I wasn’t living life to its fullest capacity,” Zornes recalls. “At that time, I had decided that my weight was 100% responsible for my entire life, and so I became just very serious about it.”
Zornes was determined to lose weight and started by tracking her calories and walking. “I started with indoor workouts — indoor walking videos — because I was embarrassed to go walk around other people.” As her confidence grew, Zornes started running outdoors. And when she lost the first 40 pounds, she says she got “hyper-aggressive about it.”
Zornes’ motivation soared. “I saw I could eat less and less calories and go run 8 miles, and I could continue to see extreme weight loss very quickly. And I did. I was very successful at losing the weight,” Zornes says.
Routinely skipping rest days, Zornes lifted weights and ran the track at the local high school daily. She started first with one lap and then worked her way up to longer distances. “As a child, running was very much punishment, and very much made me feel bad about myself,” says Zornes. Now, she was committed to it. “I was like, ‘I want to see if I can do this,’” she adds.
By 2013, Zornes had lost 183 pounds, bringing her down to half of her starting weight, and she’d completed four half marathons, 5K races and multiple short-distance triathlons.
When it came to her eating habits, Zornes admits they weren’t much improved. She was counting calories but wasn’t prioritizing nourishment.
“At that time, I still knew very little about food,” she says. “And so, I was very focused on just the calories, not nutrients or anything like that. So, I might still go have a McDonald’s cheeseburger or something, and then be like, ‘Oh, I can’t eat for the rest of the day.’” As long as she was eating within her calorie window, Zornes wasn’t concerned with how she was fueling her body.
At the time, she felt it was worth it. As her body changed, Zornes grew happier with her appearance, and the reactions she received helped too. “The feedback was very much congratulatory,” Zornes says. “My interactions also changed over that time. And I started dating for the first time in my life and going out for the first time in my life, so my social life changed a great deal during that time as well.”
Zornes maintained this routine until 2015, when she began having depressive thoughts. Because she wasn’t resting, she’d injured her knee and neck, which prevented her from running. Though she had no choice, she was reluctant to slow down. What would quitting say about her, she wondered. Her identity was tied to her weight loss journey and she didn’t know who she’d be without it.
Once the COVID pandemic began in 2020, she felt even more disconnected from herself. “I think things just kind of spiraled downhill from there, and I had a really hard time getting back into exercise habits,” says Zornes.
The second turning point
As Zornes fell deeper into her depression, chores and tasks she once handled with ease depleted her. “I was very much in a place (where) I could not see the light,” she recalls. In an attempt to counteract it, she’d make what she calls “grand goals,” such as telling herself she’d run a mile the next day. “I would show up and I couldn’t even walk it, and I would think, ‘Oh, OK, well, this is just proof that I’m worthless,’” she recalls.
She needed a new mindset. So, she decided to set smaller goals for herself and ease her way toward her larger accomplishments. The first was brushing her hair. “I made a goal to brush my hair every day. And from there, I started 10 minutes of intentional movement every day,” says Zornes.
Achieving these small wins reinvigorated her, and then another switch flipped. “I think doing these little things gave me the confidence to start pursuing the bigger things, the hard things, right?” So, she made a list — a list of 22 hard things she’d accomplish in 2022.
“I wanted to step away from the I-need-to-lose-100-pounds-this-year mentality,” says Zornes. “And so, I had everything on there from ‘make a perfect loaf of sourdough bread’ to ‘do a 5k again’. And I think that that kind of helped me remind myself that I am a dynamic human and helped me kind of take a look at what health overall means to me.”
Though there were physical goals Zornes wanted to meet, non-scale victories, such as getting her mental health in check and moving and fueling her body in ways that made her feel good, were her priorities. “I knew that just focusing on weight loss was not going to bring me the comprehensive health that I was looking for,” she says. “I did not want to follow the same exact route that I had done in 2011 and then be right back where I was in 2020, just a few short years later.”
Doing hard things
Zornes is taking things more slowly these days. She’s focused on “living a very full and joyous life and doing things that I want to do now and not as a reward for weight loss,” she says. “That has helped me treat myself better and has helped me with my health in a lot of ways."
Once she accomplished her 22 things, she started another list for 2023, but then she and her husband were surprised with a foster baby and plans changed. “I think all the confidence I gained in 2022 made it possible for that to not derail me,” says Zornes, having abandoned an all-or-nothing mindset.
2024 was dedicated to accomplishing four hard things, and her new goal is training for a full marathon. “I’m really excited about it, to have a really big, physical goal again. I’ve been careful to not make that the top priority the past few years because I just didn’t think I was ready for it,” she says. “I’m in a place where it’s really exciting to me and does not feel like punishment or something that I have to do just to reach a certain size.”
Weight loss isn’t completely off the table, says Zornes, but it’s no longer what drives her. “It just doesn’t control my life anymore,” she says. “It is something that I hope is a part of my story again at some point.” When the time comes, it will be on Zornes’ terms.
