Woman Reveals How She Lost 80 Pounds in a Year Without Counting Calories
This two-step plan was her "secret sauce" for weight loss.
Dramatic weight loss transformations don't just happen overnight—it takes time and consistency to make real and lasting change. However, Liza Marie Pasquale, a daycare worker turned fitness coach who lost over 140 pounds naturally, says the recipe for weight loss success is still simpler than you might think.
Pasquale recently revealed to her 733,000 TikTok followers that she lost her first 80 pounds before ever stepping foot in a gym or counting calories. In fact, she credits just two simple, at-home strategies for kickstarting her total body transformation.
"When I started this journey, I didn't know that it was going to be my journey—that I was going to completely change my life and my body, my mindset and my freaking career. It just so happens that I did all of those things along the way," Pasquale, who now owns the coaching business Liza Marie Fit, said in a recent TikTok post.
Wondering how she did this? Here's her "secret sauce for weight loss"—and why it might just change your life.
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1
Pasquale tried "everything" before finding what works.
Pasquale opened up in a separate TikTok post about having struggled for many years with a serious fast food addiction. "Binge eating, emotional eating, bored eating—I was doing all the things," she says.
The fitness coach recalls that every weekday after working at the daycare, she would stop at a fast food restaurant, ordering "enough food for three or four people." She would then eat that food in her car, "hide the evidence," and return home to eat dinner with her roommates—a cycle she now recognizes as both physically and emotionally unhealthy.
Before finding a system that worked for her, the fitness coach made countless attempts to lose weight through dieting. "I've tried everything in my life to lose weight—every single diet," Pasquale says. "I tried and I failed because I tried to be perfect with everything. I expected immediate results. I over-complicated everything. I held myself to such a high standard that it was unrealistic."
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2
Walking was her main weight loss tool.
Pasquale says that the one thing that finally did break the cycle was that she started taking daily walks. For two months, she committed to walking a minimum of 20 to 30 minutes per night, sometimes walking up to an hour with a friend.
"I started my journey because I wanted to walk up my steps and not be out of breath," she says, noting that she never set a specific weight loss goal during that time. "I want you to know the power of walking is so strong, and I want you to know that walking is the number one thing that helped me lose the weight," she said in the post.
After three months of consistent walking, Pasquale had lost somewhere between 30 and 40 pounds, marking the first time in her life that she saw such a major change on the scale. At that point, she bought herself an Apple watch, and set a goal of walking 10,000 steps per day.
3
Next, she cut out fast food.
Her next step was to change her diet. Pasquale refrained from strict calorie counting but instead committed to cutting out fast food and cooking a minimum of 80 percent of her meals at home.
"That is all I was doing. I was eating the majority of my meals at home and I was walking every single day," she explains. "I want you to know the power of a calorie deficit and the power of walking—it's the secret sauce for weight loss."
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4
She then built an exercise routine.
Only after Pasquale had lost that first 40 pounds did she begin working out in earnest, though she still didn't get herself a gym membership just yet. For the next several months, she worked out at home two to three times per week, she recalls.
"You don't need a crazy gym membership. You don't need to do the craziest workouts. You don't need to be lifting the heaviest weights in order to see results. Consistency and nutrition—those are going to show you the results you want to see," she says.
Pasquale had lost 80 pounds before she finally joined a gym and began tracking her calories and the macronutrient contents of her food, practices that she says ultimately helped her achieve her triple-digit weight loss.
The coach now leads her clients through this incremental, habit-stacking approach to weight loss, which she says quite literally starts with a single step. "You don't have to do everything—you just have to do something," she says.
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