The pins in Lizzie Ens‘ dress were placed thoughtfully and meticulously. Scorn and judgment could certainly come otherwise. Or worse. An eternity in hell awaited little girls who didn’t place their pins perfectly.
The pins must be perfect, and Lizzie, too, must be perfect.
Ens was raised in a Swartzentruber Amish community outside of Navarre, Ohio, about 11 miles west of Canton. Its strict doctrines demanded compliance, but the need for perfection came from the constant comparison to a smaller sister that led her into a downward spiral of starvation and dieting, as well as a destructive, guilt-ridden desire to re-create her self-image with brute force.
But after years of struggling, Ens found a path of independence and healing. Today she is a holistic health practitioner, business owner and author who helps others break chains similar to those that held her down for so long.
Lizzie Ens’ path to perfection
Ens is one of 19 children, a family size she said came with pros and cons. Her parents were amazing, she said, but there are only so many arms to go around and a strong, individual connection with each child was difficult.
She developed a sense of aimlessness and often felt she lacked a sense of belonging. Endless comparisons to her smaller twin sister only complicated things.
“Lovina and I always got compared to each other,” Ens said. “I wasn’t obese or anything, but I was always looked at as the bigger one.”
She was pincered between iron-fist strictures and the happenstance of being the bigger of the two. An unrelenting thought lingered: “You’re not good enough. You need to be smaller. If you weighed less and were smaller, then you would be accepted.”
“That’s what led to my eating disorder,” Ens said “It’s even harder when you’re the black sheep and you know you don’t belong. You’re always going to feel like the outcast.”
Ens was 15 or 16 and trying extreme fad diets, like drinking nothing but lemon water for seven to 10 days or overusing laxatives. That was her introduction to dieting, she said.
By age 17 she was at a crossroads.
Lizzie Ens was brought up in a Swartzentruber Amish community outside Navarre, Ohio (southwest Stark County.) In 2004, she jumped off the roof of her house and took off. It led her on a path to becoming the CEO and founder of her own health and wellness company.
Leaving Navarre
It was the pins. The dress had to lay right. Her hair had to be covered. The doctrines stood in the way of who Ens yearned to become.
“I hated having to get dressed like that every day. I didn’t understand why the pins had to be part of the order, and I never got answers on why this is,” she said.
She dreamt of wearing her hair in all different styles. She dreamt of wearing heels. Ens bided her time, waiting for the right moment.
Then, in 2002, at the age of 17, Lizzie and Lovina darted off into the woods for two days away from their Amish home in southwestern Stark County.
“I thought I was out,” Ens said. It wasn’t that simple, though.
“‘We got to go back. I can’t put my family through that,’” she recalled of Lovina’s words.
“It was one of the most devastating moments of my life,” Ens continued. “Every ounce of me didn’t want to go back. … The following day, I told her I wasn’t going to stay (in their home), but it took me two years from there.”
In those two years, Lovina started dating and was baptized into the Swartzentruber church, a sacrament for those ages 18 to 20.
Lizzie, too, started dating and was baptized into the Swartzentruber church. However, she was just going through the motions of what she thought she was supposed to do, she said.
One night, Ens crept out into the darkness onto the roof 15 feet high. It took two years and 30 minutes of contemplation to hit the ground, but it wasn’t a question of staying or going. Now, it was how to land without breaking a bone.
“I took off that roof and left. And that was my escape,” she said.
It was 2004. She was 19. She never looked back.
Finding health, wellness and Undiet You
Ens is now 40 and lives in Phoenix. She travels frequently. She works full time as a board-certified functional practitioner, specializing in hormonal and thyroidal health, and is the founder and CEO of Undiet You. Established in 2020, the company focuses on health and wellness coaching.
But it took years of healing to get to where she is today. She remembers the temptations that came with the glut of frozen foods and fast-food restaurants that suddenly became available.
She gained around 20 pounds and had a realization, and her defining moment: “There’s something wrong with this.”
The quick-fix miracle diets weren’t such. They never were. Starvation turned into rapid weight loss, but she felt worse and rebounded later with drastic weight gain, thyroidal issues, metabolic strife, hormonal discord and autoimmune concerns.
The cycle continued for a few years, Ens said.
Around 2014, she became certified in personal training and started working with other people. Two months later, she introduced the nutritional aspect, which led her to holistic health school called the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.
“You don’t need to be scared of food. It’s here to heal and nourish you,” Lizzie noted.
In fact, she loves salmon or a big ribeye steak and butter cake for dessert ― and the guilt is gone.
Lizzie Ens became a certified personal trainer around 2014. It paved the way for her to start learning more about health and wellness and nutritional sustainability. In 2020, she became CEO of her own company Undiet You dedicated to that cause.
The legacy of Lizzie Ens
Ens now helps others with their journeys. She wants to get to the root causes of others’ struggles and help them become who they want to be.
“My purpose is to show people how to truly live,” she said. “Too many are lost in the day to day and not truly living. That’s my purpose: to show people how to live.”
Much of what she does, whether cooking videos, testimonies or exercise videos, can be followed on her many social media outlets: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and the Undiet You website.
She’s also published her first book, “Amish Renegade: The Anthropology of an Amish Girl Turned Global CEO,” which can be found on Amazon, and is in the process of printing a second book called “The Gap Between.” It’s loosely set for release in late 2026.
Ens’ journey is very uncommon, especially for one leaving the Swartzentruber community, noted Steve Nolt, director of Elizabethtown College’s Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies.
He estimated that about 15% of Amish children don’t end up joining the church, and it’s even lower for the Swartzentrubers, around 10%.
“It is certainly not the norm in Amish society,” Nolt said. “For a Swartzendruber person, it’s a bit of a different dynamic. … So, in her immediate experience, it’s really, really unusual.”
Ens’ abrupt departure six months after baptism resulted in her excommunication from the community.
It’s a fairly rare and somewhat symbolic concept, Nolt said. While it doesn’t always result in a complete literal lack of communication, it prohibits community members from making business contracts or eating meals with those being shunned.
When Ens left, she knew she would be shunned, but she also didn’t know what all she would eventually accomplish.
Lizzie Ens is shown in February 2026. Ens is the CEO and founder of Undiet you, a health and wellness coaching company.
She’s traveled all over, from the Grand Canyon to Monaco, Mexico, Brazil, France and the Bahamas. Traveling is another of Ens’ 2026 and even longer-term goals, and she already has one special location in mind for later in the year.
She’s scheduled to take a 10- or 11-day visit across Europe and will be looking for something specific while stopping in Germany and Switzerland: the former home of Jakob Ammann, founder of the Amish, and the caves where he hid as many Amish and Mennonites were martyred.
Back to where it began.
Ens left the Amish community almost 21 years ago. She left with $20, an eighth-grade education, and no Social Security number. Now she’s traveling the world ― a CEO, an author, a mother of 7-year-old Trevor, and the woman she says she wants to be.
“I wanted a different live. I just had to go make it happen. It doesn’t matter where you come from,” she said. “You can go out at any point and live the life that you want.”
Shawn Digity is a reporter for the Zanesville Times Recorder. He can be emailed at sdigity@gannett.com or found on X at @ShawnDigityZTR.
This article originally appeared on Zanesville Times Recorder: How Lizzie Ens left the Amish in Ohio and built Undiet You in Phoenix