Ree Drummond Came Clean About Her 'Rock Bottom' Moment

Yes, Drummond, who shot to fame as blogger The Pioneer Woman, is now having the time of her life on the ranch she shares with husband Ladd. In 2021 she told Entertainment Tonight, “I feel great and that’s what matters.” But Ree also acknowledged that it had taken more than half a century years for her to get to this state.

That’s right: it was only when son Bryce left the family home for college that Ree truly realized she had a problem. And her career as a food blogger, writer and businesswoman had been instrumental in its development. Thankfully, though, the Food Network favorite soon decided to do something about it.

Ree also left it relatively late to make her mark in the food world. The star was a virtual unknown before she started a blog titled The Pioneer Woman about her ranch life in the mid-2000s. But after sharing her favorite steak dish, Ree soon began to build a significant following.

As the blog’s audience grew, Ree was given the opportunity to publish her own cookbook. And no doubt much to her surprise, it climbed all the way up to number one on The New York Times bestseller list. Not long afterwards, the Food Network came calling, too. In 2011 Ree bagged her own show titled – what else – but The Pioneer Woman.

Within a few years, Ree had gone from ranch housewife to empire builder. Her The Pioneer Woman brand spawned a magazine, Walmart range and even a boarding house. Yes, many fans have flocked to the small village of Pawhuska to enjoy a night’s stay at the hotel that Ree opened with husband Ladd.

Just don’t mention the “E” word in front of Ree, though. In 2019 she told CBS News, “I just think of the word ‘empire’ as being in a position where you can just sit and reflect on everything you’ve done. And I just don’t have time to do that. I’ve got too much to do today!”

So why have so many Americans taken The Pioneer Woman to their hearts? Well, the star herself believes that she’s more relatable than some of her peers. Ree added, “I’m not a trained chef, and so I have a level of accessibility. I’m not going to show [viewers] anything that is beyond their skill. And also, I use a lot of ingredients that are pretty easy to get.”

Ree also uses a lot of ingredients, period. Yes, the star’s renowned for making the Barefoot Contessa’s recipes look healthy with high-calorie comfort foods such as mac and cheese, buns and Ree’s signature dish, chicken-fried steak. Her Instagram profile even contains the line “Butter is my boyfriend.”

Of course, Ree’s nearest and dearest have benefited from her cooking since long before she became famous. The star always ensures that husband Ladd has something substantial to eat for breakfast after an early morning shift on their 100,000-acre ranch. Breakfast burritos are apparently a particular favorite at the Drummond table.

You’ll probably be stunned to learn, then, that Ree used to be a vegetarian! Speaking to CBS, husband Ladd admitted that this unlikely stance could have caused a rift if the star hadn’t eventually succumbed to meat. He said, “There’s just no way we could have survived 25 years with her not eating any steak!”

The physical labor that Ladd has to do each morning as a cattle rancher has no doubt enabled him to shift all the calories from his wife’s cooking. But after breaking his neck in an incident involving a truck in 2021, he had to take a well-earned rest. That didn’t entirely put paid to Ladd’s love of exercise, though.

Frustrated with being unable to burn off all those calories himself, Ladd decided to help his wife get in shape instead. And Ree was more than happy to have a personal trainer so close at hand. That’s because the Food Network star had made a conscious decision to get fit after one particular night, when she’d hit rock bottom.

That moment occurred after returning from the college where Ree’d dropped off son Bryce. As a way of dealing with her empty-nest syndrome, the cook tucked into her favorite comfort food: chips and salsa. “I went a little overboard, but I thought that night, ‘I am going to start tomorrow,’” she later admitted to Entertainment Tonight.

It isn’t exactly the most rock and roll “rock bottom” we’ve ever heard. Who hasn’t spent an evening on the couch feeling sorry for themselves with a bag of Doritos’ finest? But still, it prompted Ree to make a change. And within a short space of time, the Food Network star lost an incredible 60 pounds!

In her interview with Entertainment Tonight, Ree insisted that she didn’t start exercising and watching what she ate simply to shift pounds. The star simply wanted to feel as good as she possibly could. “The scale was sort of a gauge for me that I was heading in the right direction,” Ree said. “And it was never about ‘I have to lose this amount.’”

A candid Ree added, “It’s really about how I feel. I feel great. Even when I was thinner, I don’t think I ever have been a squatter or a lunger before. Not since my ballet days. So it’s really nice to just kind of feel the muscles that I thought were gone forever.”

Ree hasn’t entirely given up the butter that her recipes are famous for, though. But it’s now all in moderation. She explained, “It changes your whole outlook, just having the routine of exercise in your day and, you know, I still eat the foods that I cook my family. I still eat cake. I just eat a Rhode Island-sized piece instead of a Texas-sized piece!”

So what else did Ree do to lose so much weight in such a short time-frame? Well, helpfully the star reeled off a whole host of tips on her The Pioneer Woman blog. She was keen to point out that her advice shouldn’t be taken “as gospel,” though, adding, “Definitely talk to your doctor before starting anything new. You know your bod and yourself better than anyone!”

Ree started by detailing what she hadn’t done during her new fitness regime. She’d shunned the keto diet after previous attempts failed to sustain the weight loss and resulted in an intense dislike of avocados. The food blogger also gave intermittent fasting a wide berth as she’d resorted to gorging when trying it in the past.

And Ree also wanted readers to know that she didn’t stop cooking her own meals, either. “Packaged foods can really be great in many cases,” she said. “I just knew it wasn’t right for me.” Nor did Ree sign up to a dieting scheme, admitting that she doesn’t respond well to strict rules.

Ree did resort to another tried and tested method, though. She revealed, “I tried to achieve a calorie deficit most days, which means I expended more calories (through exercise and just basic daily activity) than my body required to maintain my then-weight. I used online calculators to get a rough idea of what that weight maintenance calorie count might be, (though it’s only a general rule), then I tried to undershoot that number on most days.”

Counting calories proved to be an essential and eye-opening part of Ree’s fitness regime. “I’d completely lost track of the calories I was consuming on a daily basis, so it was very helpful to get a handle on what I was looking at,” she explained. “I could tell if it was working by whether I was losing weight over time, and adjusted up or down naturally as I went.”

Ree also had a digital scale to measure her food intake as precisely as possible. The blogger admits that she was initially shocked at how calorific her daily diet had been. But Ree now has a much stronger understanding of portion control, meaning she’s able to indulge in her favorite treats without piling on the pounds.

In order to burn off the calories she did consume, Ree threw herself into exercise. She made use of the rowing machine that took pride of place in her living room, for instance. And the star was sure to take her dogs for long walks every day to get some fresh air, too. She added, “I learned that making time each day to exercise simply had to be done – because, just like having a baby, there’s never a good time.”

It wasn’t just cardio exercises that Ree focused on, either. The Pioneer Woman also roped in her cowboy husband Ladd to help her build muscle. Ree admitted that her only prior experience had been bicep curling small hand weights. But she soon discovered that building muscle in her legs and hips was the most effective way to burn calories.

Ree confessed that she was initially “absolutely pitiful” at the various squats and lunges that Ladd mapped out for her. She added, “I had zero strength in my lower body and my legs trembled and gave out. But I still did it, about four days a week to start, and laughed at my uncoordinated clumsiness every time.” But after months of training, the food blogger’s now quite comfortable doing a straight-leg deadlift.

The food personality, who’s renowned for drowning everything in butter, also started to eat more healthily. For snacks, Ree would opt for raw almonds, plain Greek yogurt and home-cooked protein balls. And when it came to main meals, she’d accompany her meat or fish of choice with spinach, carrots or kale. Ree became obsessed with egg whites, too.

And Ree also watched her sugar content, preferring to go for a small piece of dark chocolate rather than a gut-busting doughnut. The TV personality also gave up alcohol for four months. But as she explained on her blog, this wasn’t quite the sacrifice that it could have been.

Ree told her readers, “Lent happened to fall during this time period. And since alcohol is usually the thing I give up, I got to have an added motivation there.” And though she’s back to drinking, Ree’ll now opt for a tequila with lime and mineral water instead of a much more calorific cocktail or wine.

Ree even altered the way she works to help her fitness regime. Instead of sitting down to pen her latest cookbook, the Food Network star decided to move an unloved standing desk into her lounge and let the inspiration flow from there. She recalled, “It helped shave off the cumulative sedentary nature of a desk job and just helped my overall motivation and movement.”

While she’d undoubtedly impressed readers with her weight loss, Ree also wanted to point out that it was still very much a work in progress. “I’m a real person who realizes I’m always going to be prone to weigh-in ups and downs,” she admitted. “But my experiences over the past few months have equipped me with real, doable tools that I feel like I’ll be able to whip out whenever things get off track in the coming months and years.”

And Ree also wanted to inspire anyone on a similar journey to place less emphasis on exact figures. She said, “Feeling good is really all that matters, and because of that, the weigh-ins are becoming less and less important to me. I’ll keep weighing in every day to have all the information I need going forward, but the number isn’t what I’m paying attention to now.”

Ree’s wardrobe has also changed since she committed to her new healthy way of living. In a 2020 interview with USA Today, she admitted that she’d spent much of the year in black yoga pants. But after starting on her new regime, Ree noticed that she could once again easily fit into her favorite pair of jeans.

And you can see the new look Ree when she makes her acting debut on Food Network TV movie Candy Coated Christmas. Yes, the network’s trying to give the Hallmark Channel a run for its money now. The Pioneer Woman bagged the role of Bee Tyler Essary, a bakery proprietor who makes friends with, yep, you guessed it, a woman returning to her hometown.

Though “bakery owner” doesn’t sound like much of a stretch, Ree admitted on social media that she was nervous about her first acting gig. She captioned a snap from the shoot on Instagram: “Fortunately, once a woman hits her 50s, the possibility of embarrassing herself really doesn’t keep her from doing anything in life.”

Corny festive TV movies aren’t the only new thing that Ree’s tried since celebrating her 50th birthday. The food writer has also taken to the in-vogue social media platform TikTok. In fact, it was on the app that Ree first announced that she’d lost a significant amount of weight.

TikTok was also where Ree joked that she doesn’t love feeding her family as much as everyone thinks. In a playful clip captioned “The things Food Network hosts never tell you,” the star contradicted claims that she never gets bored of cooking. Ree also admitted that she’ll sometimes resort to takeaway pizza and Hot Pockets instead of homemade grub.

That philosophy extended to Dee’s 2021 cookbook, Super Easy, too. “It’s a collection of the kind of cooking I’m doing these days,” she explained on Today. “Just giving myself permission to take it easy on myself and use some shortcut ingredients here and there, and not put so much pressure to make everything from scratch.”

In that same interview Dee also announced another surprising new business venture, this time into the world of fashion. And it wasn’t anything to do with yoga pants. She revealed, “I’m launching a denim jacket. I think denim jackets never go out of style, since the 1970s and 1980s. I’ve been wearing them that long. So I’m excited about the denim.”