Half a year of training, zero movement
Alina is 29 and lives in Kyiv. Her weight had never been stable. The full-scale invasion added 12 kg of stress weight in a few short months. She started training online with a coach and kept it up for half a year. The scale didn’t move. Not even slightly.
Her training was honest. Her body wasn’t responding because the puzzle wasn’t in the gym. It was on her plate.
What undereating actually looks like
She barely ate complex carbs — almost no grains, almost no vegetables. She could put away a full day’s calories in sandwiches at breakfast, then drift through the afternoon under-eating, then crush a bag of crab-flavour crisps at midnight to take the edge off.
She wasn’t binging in the way that word usually gets used. She was running on a deficit her body had stopped trusting. When the body doesn’t trust there will be enough, it holds on. It also asks for fast fuel late at night, because that’s when the deficit becomes loud.
Rebuilding from the ground up
CARE rebuilt the foundation. She learned to look at food as nutrients first — what protein, what carbs, what micronutrients each meal was actually delivering. Complex carbs went in as the base, not as something to be afraid of. Real meals replaced the daytime under-eating.
The midnight crisps fell away on their own once she was eating enough during the day. Her sleep settled. The morning puffiness left. Food stopped feeling like a problem to manage and started feeling like a tool.
The numbers, and what came after
She lost 10 kg in three months on the programme. She lost 2 more after it finished. Months later, post-pregnancy, she was 6 kg lighter than where she’d started.
What might be the most telling part of her story isn’t the kilograms. It’s the household. Watching her eat, her parents adjusted their own meals; her mother dropped 5 kg, her father 7. Her husband joined her in the kitchen. The whole family’s defaults shifted.
What she takes from the experience
The two things she names most often: that real growth comes from the slow work of caring for your own body, and that the human support during the programme made the rest possible. Not the meal plan. The fact that she wasn’t doing it alone.
“The programme is a real investment. It changed how an entire household eats.”
— Alina
In numbers
−10 kg
in 3 months
Then another 2
kg after
Family followed (−5
kg, −7 kg)
Adapted to English from the original Ukrainian. Read the original.