Love, laugh, lose: Getting fit with an unlikely YouTube health guru

By Ify Chiwetelu, Now or Never host

Leigh Anne Shafer is an unlikely weight loss guru.

She lives in Winnipeg. Her day job is as a statistician. But she's recently embarked on a health journey — and she's sharing it with the world on YouTube.

I watched her balance her phone on an empty shoe box and a few coasters before settling into a chair at her dining room table to record a video. While her video-making skills are amateur, she is a professional when it comes to weight loss attempts. She's tried everything from the cabbage soup diet to liquid shakes to shed the pounds and get healthy.

The world of weight loss is filled with promises of easy, quick fixes that require unsustainable restrictions. It's a world I know well, and it's exhausting and demoralizing.

This is the thing that I love most about what Leigh Anne is doing now with her health journey: she is motivated to lose weight in a way that is slow but sustainable. When I spoke with Leigh Anne, she talked about wanting to create a culture of success with her YouTube channel Love, Laugh, Lose. 

She told me she wants to make getting healthy something that she can share and motivate people with. I'd say she's doing it — and she was kind enough to record this fun video sharing some of the steps she took to getting healthy. Check it out above!