A few months ago, I was asked to speak at an event about the courage and acts of bravery, specifically, about a single act of bravery that shaped my life.

I really struggled with this topic. The audience were fellow entrepreneurs, many of whom had moved to Hong Kong from other countries. That meant that using my leap of faith I made in leaving a stable, full-time job to start my own thing or moving from New York City to Hong Kong were not necessarily courageous decisions in the eyes of this crowd.

The more I thought obsessed about it, the more I struggled with pinpointing a single act of bravery. I almost backed out of the event. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that most of us make small and large courageous decisions every day, without even realizing what they are, at the time.

It got me thinking about the journey that led me to the decision to leave my job at a marketing agency in July of 2017. It wasn’t just a job, but an 11-year career with a company that had supported me in a role that I was fairly happy in. But, it started about two years before that moment and is essentially the story of how I’ve lost 176 pounds and gained an entirely new perspective on what I wanted in life.

I have been overweight my entire life. When I say that, I mean that I am smaller now and weigh less than I did when I was 11 years old. But, before you make snap judgments about my upbringing or diet, I’ll stop you.

Despite climbing to 321 pounds at my highest, I had always been active. In middle school and high school, my favorite subject was gym class and I was actively involved in sports. Through college and my twenties, I consistently worked out 6 days a week and constantly watched what I ate. In fact, many of skinnier friends would ask me for workout or nutrition advice.

But despite all of my hard work,  nothing seemed to change. This isn’t new for anyone who has ever dieted or struggled with weight: I’d seem to lose a pound, then gain 2 or just lose nothing at all.

I’ll spare you the years of details but after going to various doctors over the years – including one who told me I just simply needed to eat salad – I had given up.  It wasn’t the Winter of 2016, when I suffered a miscarriage, that I finally found a doctor, in Hong Kong, that listened and worked with me.  

After about a year of diagnostics and trying out several treatments, I decided to have what’s called gastric sleeve surgery, a form of weight loss surgery, in May of 2017.

Since then, my life has completely changed, but not in the ways that you might think.  I know there are some of you that think all it did was make me eat less which caused the weight to come off, but the mechanics and physical changes are so much more. Weight loss surgery actually changes a lot more than just your size of your stomach, which is why so many people experience so much success.

For the first time, my outside reflected who I’ve been on the inside my entire life. The woman that gets in the boxing ring and spars 6 days a week, the woman who runs 15-20 miles a week and is always training for something. I felt a sense of calm that I didn’t know I existed.  It’s because my mind and body are no longer at odds, but It gave me the confidence to be the woman who is so passionate about helping people in their careers that I finally decided to make a go of it and build it into a full-time business.

Going through this whole journey has given me the courage to tap into my authentic self. A decision that has led me into being in this room.  It wasn’t necessarily one courageous act or one decision but a series that become the catalyst to going after what I really want in life.