If you’d told 12-year-old me, sitting in a Weight Watchers meeting with my mom, that I’d one day be writing a health and food blog, I probably would’ve laughed. Or cried. Honestly, maybe both.
I’ve struggled with my weight since I was a kid. It’s just always been part of my story. In high school and college, I stayed pretty active, so I managed to keep things in check (for the most part, I was still “overweight”). But life has a way of changing that. I got married, started nursing school, and somewhere in the chaos of working night shifts as a nurse while going to NP school during the week and working weekends on top of it, my healthy habits completely fell apart. Fast food became my best friend. I told myself I “never had time to cook” — which, looking back now (pre-twins, mind you), is honestly kind of funny. I had no idea what “no time” would actually look like a few years later.
Somewhere in there, we also started trying to grow our family — and struggled. My doctor believed my weight was directly tied to our infertility. We were told IVF was our best shot at having children in the future. And then, completely naturally, against every odd we’d been given: twins!
I wish I could say the pregnancy was smooth after that kind of miracle, but it wasn’t. I developed severe pre-eclampsia and delivered our twins at 31 weeks. They spent six weeks in the NICU before we finally got to bring them home. It was one of the hardest seasons of my life — and if I’m being honest, it wasn’t exactly followed by a dramatic health transformation. For a few months after they came home, I kept living the same unhealthy way I always had. I was just trying to survive.
But eventually, something shifted. I got so tired of being tired. I looked at my babies and realized I wanted so much more — for myself, and for them. I wanted to set a good example for my girls. That’s the moment I decided I needed to actually get my act together.
Here’s the part I don’t shy away from, because I think honesty matters more than looking like I did it the “right” way: this was right around the time Lilly Direct offered the Mounjaro $25 coupon (y’all remember), and I got started on a GLP-1 medication. It changed my life. I know there’s a lot of opinions out there about this — some people think it’s “cheating.” I don’t see it that way, and I never will. That medication helped quiet the noise in my head around food, but it didn’t do the work for me. I still had to learn how to actually eat well. I still had to figure out how to move my body. I still had to build the habits that stuck. Nobody handed me those; I had to go find them myself.
But if I’m telling the whole truth, the medication was never really the heart of the change. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I felt the Holy Spirit working on me in a way I can’t fully explain — softening the parts of me that had given up, and replacing them with a real desire to steward my body and my health well. It wasn’t just about losing weight anymore. It became about honoring God with the one body He gave me, and being fully present for the two babies He’d blessed us with against every odd we’d been told. That shift — from willpower to something much bigger than me — is what actually made the changes stick.
And that search — for healthy meals that were actually quick, actually easy, and that my family would eat — is where Healthy Busy Mom was born. As the weight started coming off, I got more and more motivated to put in the work myself: cooking real meals, moving my body, being intentional instead of just surviving the day. Over the past several years, I’ve lost 110 pounds, and along the way I built a whole library of recipes that helped me get there — recipes simple enough for a busy mom, but still real, satisfying food. I LOVE food and LOVE to eat, and will always be this way!
Somewhere in that process, this stopped feeling like just a hobby or a side project. I started feeling a real calling to help other people the way I felt helped — the same way Jesus met me in my mess still walks me out of it daily. So if I’m being honest, I don’t just see Healthy Busy Mom as a food blog. I see it as a ministry — one recipe, one small step, one act of encouragement at a time.
I shared my before and after pictures because the difference still catches me off guard sometimes. But more than the number on the scale, what’s changed is how intentional I am now — with my time, my health, my faith, and what I feed my family. I’m not perfect at this, and I don’t want to pretend to be. I still have my treats (you’ve seen the cream cheese and sausage dip — no shame). But there’s no going back to who I was before. This is who I am now, and I built Healthy Busy Mom to help other moms (or anyone on a health journey, really) find their own version of this same shift — one realistic, delicious recipe, and one step of faith at a time.
If any part of my story sounds like yours, I hope you’ll stick around. You don’t have to have it all figured out to start. I definitely didn’t. I just had to be willing to let God start the work in me.
I can’t wait to meet you all!
Lauren
