She was seeing a personal trainer twice a week. Pilates twice a week. A tennis lesson. A HIIT class. Some kind of run or walk most days. By any measure, Kate was one of the most active people in the room.

“If you saw me on the street, you would never say, oh, she clearly works out.”

That was the part that ate at her. She had the discipline. She just wasn’t channelling it anywhere. The textbook definition of skinny fat: active on paper, no change in the mirror.

The Split Identity

Kate is an entrepreneur living in the Cayman Islands, a mom of three with five kids in the house most weeks, and someone who has always liked exercise, never sport, but exercise. For years, that showed up as two different people living in the same body.

“I was living the identity of the high performer, loves exercise, and loves healthy eating, all of the things. But then, you only live once, life’s short. Enjoy the summer. One more glass of wine, it’s not gonna hurt anyone.”

She was a “pro user” of MyFitnessPal, tracking calories without ever weighing food. A cup of rice here, a chicken breast there, estimated, then quietly revised downward at the end of the day if the numbers didn’t add up.

“You’re just trying to play MyFitnessPal stupid.”

She knew roughly what she should be eating. She just wasn’t ready to be the person who weighed it out to check.

The Podcast That Changed Everything

Kate’s mom spent years cycling through fad diets, cottage cheese, rice cakes, the lot. Kate had absorbed both sides of diet culture: restriction, then the backlash against restriction, intuitive eating, “don’t weigh your food, that’s Weight Watchers behaviour.” She’d been stuck between the two for years, never landing anywhere that worked.

She found RNT through a podcast, Akash as a guest on the Angela Foster show, talking about the identity gap: great Monday to Friday, completely derailed at the weekend, never getting the results to match the effort. It’s the only podcast episode Kate has ever gone back and listened to more than once.

“This really resonated with me because you spoke about identity shift. It made me realise that I wasn’t actually going deeper to changing the mindsets and the behaviours. I was just kind of looking for some kind of fast way to trick myself into being the way I wanted it to look.”

That was the moment something shifted. Not the promise of a faster diet, but the idea that the problem had never been the diet at all.

Learning to Weigh the Rice

Once Kate started RNT’s Clean The Plate approach, the gap between what she thought she was eating and what she was actually eating became obvious fast.

“That is 50g of rice. Oh my God. Like, what?”

Her portion sizes had been off for years, and she’d never known it. Weighing food, the exact thing she’d resisted as “a step too far,” as going back to Weight Watchers, turned out to be the piece that finally made the numbers add up.

She was self-conscious about it, too. When her in-laws came to stay mid-programme, she worried about looking “fanatical” for weighing her plate at dinner. She said nothing, just did it quietly.

“Every so often my father-in-law would say, ‘oh, what are you eating there?’ And I’d just explain, this is my protein rice.”

By the end of the visit, her in-laws, in their seventies, were messaging her asking about high-protein diets, muscle loss with age, and creatine.

“I’ve actually now inspired them. Where I was so self-conscious before and thought I was gonna come across as looking crazy, it’s actually kind of inspired people.”

The System That Runs the Household

With five kids across the week and a company to run, Kate’s food had to stop being a daily decision. So she built the same meals into every day, on repeat, on purpose.

Breakfast is egg whites with spinach, three and a half minutes in the microwave, the same three ingredients every morning, whether she’s home in Cayman or travelling. Lunch is a Caesar salad, the one dish she found on almost every menu, in almost every country, at almost every takeaway spot. She weighed out her three go-to versions once, logged them as saved meals, and never had to think about lunch again.

“I have so much more brain capacity to think about other things… It’s just one less thing to think about, especially when you have this kind of decision fatigue that happens in life.”

Dinner flexes around the family, a lean protein, a carb, and vegetables for everyone, with her own portions adjusted to fit. Her husband, once carb-heavy and vegetarian-leaning out of a concern for heart health, has since followed her lead into higher protein himself.

Chasing a Different High

Kate used to chase the buzz of a hard F45 class, the sweat, the feedback, the high of finishing. What she didn’t get was the physical change to go with it.

“I think now, like going to the gym, lifting weights, it’s hilarious. The gym I’m using here in Majorca is like a bodybuilder’s gym… but I’m so proud to be in there lifting my super heavy weights against these other guys that I’m lifting heavier than them.”

She trains four times a week now, one session with her personal trainer, one with a different focus, two on her own, using a programme she now knows well enough to adapt herself. Her husband, who Kate describes as naturally slim and inconsistent with training, has started showing up to every session with her.

“He wants to spend time with me doing it. This is what I love to do… he thinks it’s awesome.”

Saying No to Ozempic

Nine months in, frustrated that the process felt slower than she wanted, Kate got as far as having an Ozempic script written by her doctor, a friend of hers.

“I really had to sit with this decision. I know that there was fat covering [my muscle] and that I needed fat loss, and that the fat loss would unlock all the other benefits of weight training. And it’s a quick fix, and everybody’s doing it, right?”

She didn’t fill it. She’d watched a friend lose most of her muscle tone on the same drug, and it stuck with her.

“It really is something that is difficult to get. It’s very, very difficult… I wanted to change my composition. That’s what I wanted to do.”

She tracked her body composition on the same cycle day every month, under the same conditions, to make sure the number moving was fat, not muscle. When she moved into consolidation and her weight jumped a few pounds almost overnight from glycogen refilling on higher carbs, the fear was real.

“You just don’t want to slip back to the old person.”

The Anchor

Kate weighs herself every morning. She brought her own bathroom scale to Majorca for the summer, packed in her son’s carry-on because her own case was already overweight.

“Weighing myself in the morning is an anchor point for me because that also defines my identity… I would go away for the summer, or I’d go away for a holiday, and by day 3 or 4 I suddenly see myself completely differently… and then you start thinking, ‘oh, do you know what, I’ve probably put on like 4 or 5 pounds. I’m definitely gonna have to restrict myself when I get back.’”

One line from a podcast has stuck with her since: “Today is a data point, 7 days is a trend, 4 weeks is evidence.” It’s how she now reads her own weight, one point on a longer graph, not a verdict on the day.

The clearest proof of how far the identity shift had gone came a week into the programme, on a family trip to Disney World.

“That whole trip, I didn’t have one glass of wine. I didn’t have one mega turkey drumstick or whatever you do at Disney. It was very structured… I was like, well, if I can do this in Disney World, I can do this anywhere.”

The Numbers, and Everything Beneath Them

Kate lost 22 pounds. Her body fat went from 28.9% to 19.9%, a nine-point drop, while she held onto almost all of her muscle. Her blood pressure, which had been creeping upward as she moved through her forties, came back at 119/79.

“My doctor says it’s like a 16-year-old virgin’s blood pressure, which is unbelievable for me.”

But the bigger shift was quieter than the numbers. Kate no longer plans dinner around what she’s “owed” after a hard day, and she no longer treats a bad meal as a reason to spiral into a worse one.

“I had a crisp. Do you know what? It’s a crisp. Straight back on. Don’t think about it. It’s done. It’s happened. I don’t need to compensate for it.”

Her twelve-year-old son has started doing hollow holds and press-ups alongside her, proud that his mom lifts heavy. Her seventy-something in-laws changed how they eat. Her husband now trains alongside her every week because he wants to spend that time with her.

“When you can believe in yourself and trust yourself like that, I think it’s incredibly powerful… I’ve become actually more reliable and dependable as a mom and as a spouse because of that.”

She’s since told her mom she’ll always have to keep checking her portions properly, even now. It’s not that the vigilance disappears. It stopped being a fight, which is what sustainable fat loss actually looks like for a busy professional running a company and a household of five: less restriction, not more.

“It’s unbelievably freeing when you can actually achieve it. There’s so much more that can come with that. It just makes life simpler.”

What’s Next

Kate isn’t finished. She wants to test how her body responds to another round of fat loss once she’s ready psychologically, chase her heavy lifts harder with her personal trainer pushing her further than she’d push herself, and finally nail a proper pull-up.

“My goal is always to like to do dumbbell presses heavier than the dude next to me… even at the bodybuilding gym, I’ll crack that nut.”

Want results like Kate’s? Book a call with our team to start your journey.

🎧 Listen to Kate’s full story on RNT Fitness Radio: Ep 499 - Hall of Fame | Kate Bell: Entrepreneur & Mother Of Three 22 lbs Down in the Best Shape of Her Life