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The 2-Week Fat Shred Workout That Sent Her to the E.R.

The things I wish I could’ve shared with her earlier

Kaki Okumura
4 min readMay 31, 2021
Illustrations by Kaki Okumura

“Did you hear about Q?”

I was meeting up with an old friend that I hadn’t seen in a while, when she brought her up.

Q was a girl that I went to high school with — I didn’t know her that well, but she was someone who I thought of as confident, smart, and ambitious. She was often active on social media platforms, advocating for queer rights, BLM, Asian representation, body positivity, and the like. People stamped her as a “social justice warrior” but she embraced the title with grace.

I shook my head, “No, what happened?”

Turns out a few weeks earlier she had ended up in the E.R. after attempting a 2-week fat shred workout. I suddenly felt my heart drop and stomach twist. How could that be?

In a shockingly honest post, she confessed feeling frustrated with her body, and began an extreme workout to rapidly lose weight and just “get it over with”. It happened that her workout triggered a chronic health condition, and a few days into the regimen she found herself one day vomiting on the floor, having uncontrollable seizures, and scared to death. She vowed she wouldn’t let herself get to this point again, but what damage had already been done?

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Kaki Okumura
Kaki Okumura

Written by Kaki Okumura

Born in Dallas, raised in New York and Tokyo. I care about helping others learn to live a better, healthier life. My site: www.kakikata.space 🌱

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