I have been fighting for this body my whole life.

It started when I was five years old. A doctor told my mom I needed to lose weight. I wasn't obese. I was a chubby little girl with bouncy blonde hair that people said reminded them of Shirley Temple. But from that moment on skim milk and prune juice became my normal. And a quiet voice began that told me something was wrong with my body.

That voice followed me for decades.

At my heaviest I was around 350 pounds. There are no pictures from that time. Shame has a way of making you hide the evidence — and so does the desperate need to leave a version of yourself behind and never look back.

I lost over 130 pounds in 1999. No program. No magic pill. My first marriage was a lonely one — twenty years, two kids, and more than 18 moves. Food was what I turned to when the pain got too loud. It was at the end of that marriage that I finally decided to fight back. Grilled chicken breasts on a Foreman grill, chef salads, and walking — at night, in the dark, so nobody could see me. Fifteen minutes at first. Then thirty. Then forty-five. I still prefer to walk in the dark. Some days I still have to talk myself into the daylight.

Ten years in the second marriage — and it was during that marriage that I had the surgery, because the woman who worked that hard deserved to see herself. That marriage taught me what it feels like to dim your own light for someone else's insecurity. They never asked me to. I just slowly stopped shining.

Four years later I met Dennis — and everything changed. Read his About Me to hear more about that. We built a life together. I cooked again for the first time in about 16 years. He loved it. And the weight came back. Quietly at first. Then what felt like overnight.

The moment everything changed started with a YouTube rabbit hole. Dennis had been watching health videos and came to me with a question — did I know my glucose numbers? I ordered a meter from Amazon that same day. When it arrived we tested together. Mine read 400. We were shocked. I did not feel sick. But the number did not lie.

What happened next is what PrimeTime Wellness is built on. I did not just try to lose weight. I went deep. I researched insulin resistance and finally understood why nothing had worked the way it should. I would barely eat. I would do everything right. I would step on the scale and somehow gain five pounds overnight. I was not crazy. I was not weak. I was not broken. My body was insulin resistant — and until I understood that and healed it from the inside out the scale was never going to cooperate no matter what I did.

So I got to work. Juicing. Fasting. OMAD. Extended water fasts up to 30 days. Keto. Carnivore. Metformin. Liraglutide. Years of grinding it down. My A1C started to come down but the scale kept bouncing and I could not break through. It became very clear that insulin resistance was real and was running the show — and that I had to keep healing it, not just manage around it.

Then I found tirzepatide. And peptides. And everything changed.

The food noise went quiet for the first time in my life. The appetite that had controlled me for six decades finally loosened its grip. The weight started moving. I have now lost 70 pounds. At the time of writing this, the chart says I have 11 pounds to go before I am out of the overweight category. I will get there. I still fast daily — anywhere from 16 to 23 hours, with the occasional 36 or 48-hour fast woven in. I eat full fat everything. Yes — the little girl who was handed skim milk at five years old is 65, down 70 pounds, and eating full fat everything.

When I lost that first 130 pounds in 1999, peptides did not exist in my world. If they were out there, nobody was talking about them — not to people like me anyway. That has changed. They are available now. And if you are in your 40s reading this — you have something I did not have.

Some mornings I get dressed and think — yaaay girl!!!! And then I look in the mirror and the loose skin tells a different story. I want to cover it up. It is embarrassing. It is vulnerable. It is also a trophy of every single pound I fought for and I know that. Both things are true at the same time. I hope to have surgery one day to address it and when that journey happens I will document every part of it — including the parts that are hard to show.

The prison is not abstract. It is the moment you walk into a restaurant and scan the room hoping for a table instead of a booth — because you are not sure you will fit. It is the folding chair at the party and the lawn chair at the backyard gathering and the plastic chair anywhere — and the quiet math you do before you sit down. It is the airplane seat and the armrest and the person next to you and the shame of taking up space you felt you were not supposed to take. It is every event you skipped, every invitation you declined, every moment you made yourself invisible because being seen felt more dangerous than being absent.

That is the prison. And most people looking in from the outside have no idea it exists.

Not long ago I came across a podcast — a man with a platform, with followers, with influence — speaking about obese people with disgust. Lazy, he said. Just diet and exercise. As if it were that simple. As if every person carrying extra weight had simply chosen it. I was furious. Because I know what it actually is. I know the insulin resistance that makes you gain weight while barely eating. I know the hormones and the history and the heartbreak that lives inside a body that has been fighting for decades. Lazy is almost never the truth. It is usually so much more than that. And that voice — that judgment — is exactly why PrimeTime Wellness exists.

Whether this is your first time deciding to make a change or you have been fighting this fight for decades like I have — you belong here.

Dennis — my husband, my co-founder, and my number one fan — has been beside me through every fast, every setback, every breakthrough, and every pound. He was the one who asked the question that changed everything. He has learned more about the way a woman's mind works around her body than he ever expected to. And he showed up anyway. Together we are building PrimeTime Wellness for you.

Because you have been in that prison long enough. The prison of the number on the scale. The prison of doing everything right and still failing. The prison of shrinking yourself — in your body, in your relationships, in your life — when you were never meant to be small.

We do not have it all figured out. It is a journey — past, present, and still unfolding. We are sharing it because we hope it helps you..

Your PrimeTime is Now