“The Pioneer Woman," aka Ree Drummond, is sharing some of the secrets behind her recent weight loss after revealing that she has lost 38 pounds over the past few months.
“I can’t get away from food, and I love to eat. Of course, it crept up on me through the years, especially during COVID,” she said in a recent TikTok video. “Starting in January, I decided to get busy and lose some weight.”
“I just cut calories, exercised more and lifted a lot of weights,” she said in the video. “I look better, but I feel so much better, and that’s what really counts. I’m still a goofball, I just have a lot more energy.”
The Food Network star added in a caption that moving more and building muscle have been the key for her. (“I still love fries, though,” she reassured her fans.) She also shared that she's been trying to build muscle in her arms, glutes and legs.
Related
She told TODAY that she sees this approach as "basically (hitting) it from all angles."
“I didn’t do anything like keto or intermittent fasting," Drummond continued. "Those things work for people, but I knew I just had to tackle it scientifically: calories in, calories out. So I just started paying attention to what I was eating and the calories of what I was eating. I still ate the same things. I just really tried to eat smaller quantities."
Her husband, Ladd Drummond, also helped her in the wake of his head-on crash in March while working on the family's ranch, which left his neck broken in two places.
"After Ladd's accident, he couldn’t exercise and lift, which was hard for him, so he turned it around and sort of became my trainer," she said.
Initially, the weight loss process was frustrating.
“I ... couldn’t figure it out," she recalled. "I finally got through it by eating more protein and building more muscle lifting weights."
Related
"You just have to start," she stressed. "You just have to make the decision, and it’s always harder the first week, a little less hard the second week. But then when you see results, it gets exciting. I did it the old-fashioned way. There’s no tricks or gimmicks. I just worked hard. I’m still working hard.”
Drummond has been candid with her followers about her physical transformations over the years.
In 2019, she shared that she went down a pants size, which she attributed partly to working out regularly on a rowing machine while watching TV. The same year, she also shared that she tried out the ketogenic diet, which focuses on high-fat, low-carb foods.
Related
Through it all, Drummond has said in the past that there's one food she could never live without.
“One thing I eat every day would have to be cheese,” she told TODAY Food in 2019. “Cheese of any kind. I will take it any way I can get it. I love melted Swiss. I love cubes of white cheddar. I love goat cheese, feta cheese on a salad. The list goes on. I never met a cheese I didn’t like.”
