Ree Drummond has made her brand The Pioneer Woman. She’s been pushing her form of modern frontier maven for over a decade, and built a small empire on it. She has a blog, a Food Network show and has written many cookbooks (and non-cooking books). I haven’t read or used them so I can’t speak from absolute experience. Leafing through the previews Amazon provides, her recipes are hearty, farm food. CB has seen some of her shows and Ree double fries French fries and leans into the fattening food for flavor. She also feeds her many children, so her quantities are huge. Eating the food she promotes over a sustained amount of time would be a problem if you don’t work it off in a field. Like Ree herself, apparently. She recently posted a video to TikTok in which she admitted her weight had “crept up on” her over time and she found herself wanting to make a change. So she did. In January of this year, she started dieting, exercising and using weights. Ree claims she didn’t use any “gimmicks” just good old-fashioned calorie cutting, and so far, she’s shed 38 pounds.

Ree Drummond is making strides on her weight loss journey and now, she’s sharing her secrets.

The Pioneer Woman star, 52, recently showed off the results of a health journey that she started in January. In a video posted to her TikTok and Instagram story over the weekend, Drummond started by explaining that the COVID-19 pandemic had affected her diet.

“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 told her followers.

“Starting in January, I decided to get busy and lose some weight,” Drummond continued, noting that she’s lost 38 pounds already. “No gimmicks at all. I just cut calories, exercised more, lifted a lot of weights. I look better but I feel so much better and that’s what really counts.”

In the clip, the food blogger stepped back and showed off her new physique, saying that despite her new body, she’s still the same “goofball,” just with a lot more energy.

“Moving more and building muscle has been the key for me! 💪 I still love fries, though,” she captioned her video.

[From People]

I applaud anyone who wants to lose weight and does. It’s a hard journey and I can only imagine harder for someone who has made a lifestyle around a certain style of food. It seems, from what I could read in her later books, that Ree has clued in to the fact that no one could eat her food all the time. I noticed some low-carb options and more greens popping up in the table of contents. But one thing I see in all of her books is a heavy reliance on canned and boxed goods, which is weird for a farmer. I know it makes mid-week meal prep easier, but it has its drawbacks in large quantities, especially in weight management. I’ll take her at her word that she didn’t use gimmicks, but I can promise you she used trainers, probably the best money can buy. And I’ll bet she turns her weight loss into her next cookbook – that’ll be the gimmick.

I also feel the motivation is slightly buried. I’m sure she wanted to lose weight, in general. But her sudden motivation in January to drop weight was more likely the family’s decision to push through with daughter Alex’s May 1 wedding, pandemic be damned.