Kathy's Story: 400 Pounds to a Decade of Showing Up
BLACK IRON RADIO EP. 385: Kathy's Story:400 Pounds to a Decade of Showing Up
Kathy was close to 400 pounds at 19, but her weight is genuinely the least interesting thing about her, and that's kind of the whole point of this episode.
Morgan and Brooke sit down with Kathy Novak, Brooke's client of many years and a friend for over a decade. Kathy was close to 400 pounds at 19, and what started as a weight loss journey turned into something bigger: years of setbacks, injuries, plateaus, and slow stretches, and a body she learned to value for what it could do instead of how it looked. She gets into the early rush of watching the scale drop, the long stretches where the number stopped mattering, and the line she keeps coming back to through all of it: thankful for the opportunity to keep showing up.
This isn't really a weight loss story. It's a story about what keeps you going once the novelty wears off and life gets in the way.
Kathy Novak remembers a bike ride better than she remembers any number on a scale. She was nineteen, nearly 400 pounds, and she decided to ride her bike to the library on the military base where she lived. She made it there. She had to walk the bike home.
That's the moment she points to, not a diagnosis, not an intervention, just the realization that her body couldn't do something that simple. Twenty-two years later, Kathy is a longtime Black Iron client, coached by Brooke Haas, and her resume now includes CrossFit competitions, a half Ironman, half marathons, and coaching a developmental club lacrosse team. But ask anyone who's actually heard her tell this story, her coach included, and they'll say the same thing: the weight loss is the least interesting part.
Losing the Weight Was Never the Complicated Part
Here's what actually got Kathy from nearly 400 pounds to a goal weight: a list of foods. That's it. At nineteen, after her family stepped in and pushed her to see a nurse practitioner named Lorraine (more on why below). Lorraine didn't hand her a calorie target or a macro breakdown. She gave her a list of foods and said, "I'm not gonna tell you how much. Eat from these foods. I don't care what you do."
Kathy dropped 35 pounds in three weeks. She set a goal to lose 50 pounds by her 20th birthday and blew past it, 54 pounds in two and a half months. That part of the story reads like a before-and-after ad, and it's also the part that fell apart fastest. Once she started working out on top of the restriction, her progress stalled and she had no idea why, because she didn't understand energy balance. Nobody had told her that a body training harder needs more fuel, not less. She kept cutting food to try to force the scale to move, which is the opposite of what her body needed. Losing weight fast was never the hard part. Understanding what she was actually doing to her body was.
CrossFit Didn't Change Her Body First, It Changed What She Was Measuring
Years later in Florida, a friend from her restaurant job dragged her into a CrossFit box tucked into a tiny bay in St. Augustine, run by a guy named Bobby. Three people. Ten kettlebells. Two barbells. Kathy walked in at 280 to 290 pounds.
What hooked her wasn't the results. It was that for the first time, effort counted for more than appearance. "It's not about having a smaller body because I need to look a certain way so somebody accepts me," she said. Inside that gym, success looked like a banded pull-up, a burpee, a 400-meter run, stepping onto a box. A 200-pound pull-up is genuinely easier than a 300-pound pull-up. That's not vanity, that's physics, and it gave Kathy a scoreboard that had nothing to do with the mirror. CrossFit didn't hand her a smaller body. It handed her a reason to care about something other than the size of the one she had.
She Wasn't Training For Herself, She Was Training For Her Family
Kathy's family was already carrying real loss by the time she was nineteen. Her mom's brother and sister, Kathy's aunt and uncle, had died two years apart in their twenties, killed by someone else's mistakes. Kathy is literally named after the aunt she lost, her brother after the uncle. So when Kathy's weight became something the family couldn't ignore, her mom's reaction wasn't about appearance, it was the thought of losing another Kathy. That's what got her in front of a nurse practitioner.
On top of that, Kathy's mom has been sick for as long as Kathy can remember: twenty-eight major surgeries, cancer, constant hospital stays. As a kid, Kathy's dad was deployed for 90 months total, so she spent years of her childhood living with her grandparents while her parents were stationed at the Pentagon.
By the time she found CrossFit, she was an adult, living 800 miles away in Florida, training while her mom's health crises played out back home without her. She couldn't be there in person, so she carried a sense of responsibility to "put up a fight" for a family that had already lost too much, and the gym is where that fight showed up. She describes some of her early motivation as spite, and she's honest about what that meant: "I don't have hate in my heart. I can't really be mean, but that was my way of being mean." Instead of taking family pain out on another person, she put it into the gym. That's not a strategy anyone should have to invent, but it's the one that kept her showing up.
Her Own Head Was the Hardest Coach She Ever Had
For years, Kathy ran on an internal voice she calls "Miss 50," a nickname she used to mock herself for doing things halfway. Finish a half Ironman instead of a full one, and Miss 50 was right there: "Of course you can't do a full Ironman." She'd use that voice on purpose, rage-baiting herself into training on the days she wanted to quit, picturing herself actually giving up and picturing everyone who'd watched her journey and believed she'd follow through. It only took a few seconds of that to talk herself back into showing up. It worked, but it's not exactly a sustainable relationship with yourself.
The softer version of Kathy is newer, and she credits the last two years, a lot of it built alongside Brooke, with teaching her how to access it. Even this past winter, she hit a real slump. She'd had a strong season of consistent tracking, then started using a high step count to justify letting treats creep back in. The treats piled up faster than she expected, and instead of just recalibrating, she spiraled and tried to fix it by getting stricter again. It took her two or three months to land on the line that actually fixed it: "You don't have a food issue, you have a food solution." Discipline got her a long way. Learning to talk to herself like someone worth being patient with is what's keeping her there.
Everyone Had an Opinion About Her Body, Nobody Asked For One
As a teenager, Kathy couldn't go out to eat with her family without strangers making comments to her mother about how much food was on the table. Later, after she'd lost weight and started competing, a guy she went on a date with told her he wanted to make her his "project" and get her lean in four months. Her response, on the spot: "Take care. Go play in traffic."
And here's the part that should reframe how anyone thinks about this: once Kathy actually did get leaner, the comments didn't stop, they just switched direction. People in her own gym told her she wasn't "too thin yet," as if her body was still theirs to weigh in on. Bigger, smaller, it didn't matter. Somebody always had a take. That's the part of this story that never gets fixed by hitting a goal weight, because the goal was never other people's approval to begin with.
The Takeaway
Kathy said some version of the same sentence at least seven times on this episode: thankful for the opportunity to keep trying, thankful for the opportunity to keep showing up. Brooke's read on her, after coaching her for the past year and knowing her for over a decade, is that the number on the scale was never the reward for Kathy. The process was. That's the piece Brooke says she wishes every client could borrow.
None of it ever came down to finding the right diet. It came down to Kathy believing she was allowed to try in the first place, and learning to talk to herself like someone worth showing up for. Trust yourself sooner. Take the action instead of sitting with it. Stop asking everyone else for permission to change your own life.
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