Intimidated by the gym, this simple treadmill workout helped 1 woman lose 105 pounds
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Megan Tjelle, 29, shared the details of her 105-pound weight loss journey in a viral TikTok video that’s racked up 1.8 million views.
Walking played a major role in her weight loss. She also credits getting herself onto a consistent schedule — sleeping for eight hours a night, waking up at the same time every day and eating at regular hours — as what she needed to get her health on track.
And she noticed some things she didn’t expect — like skinny privilege and body dysmorphia — along the way. She shared her story with TODAY.com.
Focusing on her career played a part in her weight gain
Tjelle was fit when she was young — sports and activities like gymnastics, cheerleading, track and cross country kept her active for hours every day.
But when she was in college and nursing school, she had to scale back her exercise. “I was completely focused on school, and I didn’t have any kind of sports keeping me active,” she tells TODAY.com. “I feel like I started to neglect myself because I was putting everything into studying. The stress eating started then.”
Her first job after nursing school had her working 12-hour overnight shifts: “That definitely made things a lot worse. I was eating at weird times and not having a consistent schedule. I was putting everything into my nursing career, but not putting anything back into myself.”
That changed in October 2022, when she got a new nursing job with regular Monday through Friday, 9-to-5 hours. “That completely changed things for me. It was the first time I had ever had that kind of schedule in my adult working life.”
She pushed herself to go to the gym
While Tjelle is a fan of "hot girl walks," living near Chicago means that walking outside in the winter can be tough. So, she started going to the gym every day. “That was really hard for me at first. It took so much to walk into the gym and start doing something when I wasn’t very confident with myself.”
She walked on the treadmill for 30 minutes at 3 miles per hour with an incline of 3-4% and she slowly increased her distance and incline. And, over time, those trips to the gym helped her reconnect with her love of fitness and the mental health benefits of exercise.
“It started slowly with the walking, but as I lost the weight and stayed consistent, instead of turning to food and emotional eating for coping with my stress, fitness became my outlet,” she says. “I turned my focus to the gym, which built my confidence and helped me believe in myself. So many times, I wanted to give up and not go to the gym. Just making myself go every day built my confidence. I honestly believe that I can do anything I put my mind to now.”
She’s expanded her workouts from the treadmill to other forms of cardio like the Stairmaster, running, biking and weightlifting. “I’ve noticed a huge change in my fitness level,” she says. She’s training for her first half marathon.
She’s also come to see the value of rest days. At first, she was going to the gym seven days a week. “I felt guilty any time I missed a day. But I realize now that I need to give myself a couple of rest days every week to let myself recover and to give my body the rest it needs.” Now, she averages five gym days a week.
She cleaned up her diet and aimed for a calorie deficit
“I had been ordering a lot of takeout because I felt like I was always in a rush. But I made it a priority to start planning everything and tracking what I was eating,” she says.
To save time and make the healthy choice the easy choice, she started using a local meal service called Seattle Sutton, which offers meal plans with targeted calorie counts. She would add some protein or snacks to those meals if she needed to, but she stayed in a calorie deficit.
“I stuck with those meals consistently, and I stopped eating junk food. I didn’t completely eliminate sugar, but I stopped getting sugary Starbucks drinks. I just really cleaned everything up,” she says.
Now that she’s reached her weight-loss goals, she’s not as strict about what she eats and she no longer needs to stay in a calorie deficit. She aims to eat in moderation and live by the 80/20 rule.
She turned to weight-loss medication when she hit a plateau
Tjelle lost 55 pounds in the first six months, and then her weight loss slowed down. “I had lost that amount of weight several times before, but I had always gone back and gained the weight because I couldn’t really stay with the calorie deficit and the cravings were bad,” she says.
So, in April, she talked to her primary care doctor, who referred her to a specialist, and she started taking the weight-loss drug Wegovy (semaglutide).
“I continued all of the lifestyle changes that I had made six months earlier, like dieting and exercising,” she says. She has used Wegovy to maintain and continue her weight loss.
She shared her weight-loss journey on TikTok
In the beginning, Tjelle was inspired by a lot of the transformation videos that she saw on TikTok. So, she decided to share her journey as well. “Honestly, it was hard for me to start posting videos, because it’s such a vulnerable thing to post. But I wanted to let other people know that it’s possible. If I could do it, they definitely could do it too.”
The positive feedback on TikTok keeps her posting. She gets a lot of comments from people in a similar situation as she was: “It’s really inspiring to see all of the comments that are supportive and to see that people say I’ve made a difference to them or inspired them to start. That’s really what makes me the happiest.”
She also shared some other aspects of her weight loss journey, both negative and positive:
People comment on her weight. She found that her weight became a central topic of conversation. “As I lost more weight and it became more noticeable, that became the center of almost every conversation with family, friends and coworkers,” she says. “I almost feel like it made me more self-conscious after I lost the weight, compared to before. It’s like they had been observing me all along, and now I’m aware of it.”
She feels confident enough to wear clothes she wouldn’t wear before. “It feels amazing. That’s probably one of the best things about this weight loss for me. It’s not that I couldn’t wear those clothes before, it’s having that confidence now to be able to wear the things that I want to wear,” she says.
She struggles with body dysmorphia. “As I’ve lost the weight and even now, I almost don’t recognize myself. Sometimes, it takes me a minute to process that this really is me. Sometimes I still think of myself as a size extra large, and I go reaching for those clothes. I have to take a minute and remember I’m actually a size small now. It’s taking my brain a while to register that I have lost this amount of weight. It’s a big thing to comprehend.” “Keeping up with my fitness and working on my muscles getting more defined and toned is helping a lot with my confidence and my body image. It’s something that I’m still working on, but it’s improving.”
She has started to experience skinny privilege. “The way people treat you in public is different. You’re noticed more and treated better when you are skinny compared to being overweight. I feel like when you’re overweight, people kind of look over you. People treat you nicer, as sad as that is, when you’re skinny.”
From back pain to PCOS: How losing weight has improved her health
Along with maintaining her weight at 137 pounds for a few months, she’s seen these improvements in her health:
She has polycystic ovary syndrome, and her weight loss has eliminated the symptoms and her periods are back to normal: “I don’t think it ever goes away, but losing the weight has improved every aspect of it. It’s not an issue in my life at all.”
She no longer has back pain, knee pain or plantar fasciitis.
She’s getting her insulin resistance, blood pressure and high cholesterol under control. “Getting that taken care of and losing the weight were important to me because high cholesterol and premature heart disease run in my family,” she says.
She’s reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression, and she no longer binge eats or emotionally eats when she feels anxious or depressed.
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
