How’s this for motivation: One professional chef managed to lose over 100 pounds the old fashioned way — that is, without Ozempic — all while building up her own potato chip business.
Keya Wingfield dropped from 245 pounds to 138 pounds since 2021, simply by changing her diet and taking up two key exercises.
In that time, she also launched Keya’s Snacks, a brand specializing in masala-spiced potato chips — and she certainly sampled her fair share.
“I have eaten more potato chips in the last four years than I have in my entire lifetime,” she told The Post.
Wingfield admitted to struggling with weight her whole life.
“I was born overweight,” she said with a laugh. “I always joke that I was a nine-pound baby — I was a pound overweight already. For real, it’s been a lifelong struggle.”
Like so many people unhappy with the number on the scale, she tried everything to shed the pounds in her thirty-something years.
“There isn’t a diet under the sun that I haven’t tried,” she said, including everything from Weight Watchers to the cabbage soup diet. “Some stuck around for a little bit longer and would have some result, but [my weight] kind of bounced right back to base.”
It’s certainly a relatable problem. Life gets in the way, from work stress to hormones — and of course, childbirth. Wingfield’s gone through that twice, first with her daughter, who is now six.
“I saw my daughter’s face, and [thought], ‘She deserves a happy mom, a healthy mom’ — and that just kind of flipped the switch.”
Keya Wingfield
“I put on about 65 pounds in both of my pregnancies. It was the heaviest I had ever been, period,” she said.
At just 5’1″, she topped out at 245 pounds. But it wasn’t until after her second delivery when tragedy struck — Wingfield’s newborn son died at one month old.
“It was a very rough time, and I kind of went down this spiral of doing a lot of damage to my my health,” she recalled.
“One day I woke up, I saw my daughter’s face, and I’m like, ‘I can’t continue down this road.’ She deserves a happy mom, a healthy mom — and that just kind of flipped the switch, essentially,” she said.
“Had I not been through that devastating experience, I don’t know if I would have the strength to have gone through this weight loss. My whole life I could never succeed at it. But something changed after that. It broke me in ways that I couldn’t explain.”
Wingfield wasn’t just overweight — she was also diabetic. But it was 2021 and GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic were still new, so her doctor didn’t offer them to her.
“Had I known about it, 100% I would have taken the help,” she said. “I feel like we all need some kind of help, because this is not just a mental game. This is not a willpower game.”
Instead, she started to monitor her blood sugar and figured out what foods made it spike. She also learned that simply taking a walk after eating cut down her insulin spikes.
Her eating habits shifted. She’s always been a vegetarian, but her diet had been pretty carb-heavy and lacking in protein, with lots of rice, potatoes and pasta.
“People have this perception that if you’re a vegetarian, you eat a lot of veggies — that’s not how that works,” she said.
Newly dedicated, she focused on eating 1,500 to 1,800 calories a day of healthier foods.
Mornings started with coffee and toast within an hour of waking, followed by eggs with cheese and veggies a couple of hours later.
She snacked, too — her go-tos include nuts, yogurt, fruit and popcorn — with a balanced home-cooked meal for dinner — typically two ounces of pasta, vegetables and cheese.
Though she wasn’t inactive before, she now took up weightlifting and boxing — the former “solving” her insulin spikes with more muscle, the latter boosting her mental health.
“Beating a bag by yourself in a loud environment is pretty therapeutic,” she quipped.
With hard work, she lost a whopping 107 pounds, getting down to a low weight of 138 pounds.
But perhaps the most impressive part of her success is that she managed to slim down so dramatically all while building her brand, Keya’s Snacks — which actually happened by accident.
She’d started making her masala-spice Bombay chips chips to get her white American husband — who wasn’t a fan of Indian food when they met — to get more used to Indian spices.
“It literally opened his world up to all these flavors. And that was a massive ‘aha moment’ for me. I’m like, this is the way to build the bridge to make what feels unfamiliar and out of reach within reach,” she said.
A chef who owns a custom dessert studio that mainly worked in events, she watched her business crash during the pandemic and pivoted to selling modern Indian-American to-go meals. She’d package those meals with her homemade chips and watched demand grow and grow.
Now she sells them in about 1,400 stores and has added a second flavor, black salt — and you don’t grow a business like that without sampling your own wares.
“I found little hacks,” she admitted. “For example, whenever I eat chips, I dip them in a cup of yogurt. It’s the perfect combination.”
The added protein makes them a bit healthier — and helps with insulin spikes. But she also just refuses to feel guilty about treating herself.
“People ask me, ‘What are the call outs?’ Like, are they protein? Do they have fiber? Do they have this?” she said. “They have nothing. They have joy in them. They have 36 grams of pure joy in a small bag.
“I think the stigma around snacking — the stigma around eating something you enjoy — really needs to go away. Not everything has to be functional. Not everything has to serve a purpose. Besides making you happy, it is okay to enjoy that.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
