Woman Attempted to Leave Amish Community at 17 with Twin. What Happened Next Was ‘Devastating’ 

Before she became a business owner, a content creator and a PhD candidate, Lizzie Ens lived in a Swartzentruber Amish community in Ohio — one of 19 siblings raised to reject technology and modern life in favor of a strictly rural world.

Her first attempt to leave came at 17. Her twin agreed to go with her, and the two made it out — briefly. After only two days away, Ens’ sister panicked and urged them to return. Ens went back, even though she already felt her future was elsewhere.

“It was one of the most devastating moments of my life when I realized that she wanted to go back. I thought I was out for good,” Ens, now 40, recalls. “But because we were twins and I felt like I needed to go where she was, I went back knowing that I wouldn’t stay.”

At that time, neither twin had officially joined the church, which meant leaving wouldn’t have carried the full consequences. But over the next two years — between her first escape and the one that would become permanent — Ens was baptized. After that, walking away would mean being shunned: cut off from her family, with communication ending completely.

Even so, her resolve didn’t change. As a teenager, she began questioning the church’s strict rules and the way faith was taught to her — rules that, in her mind, tied obedience to the church directly to obedience to God.

“If you disobey the orders of the church, they basically looked at [it] as you disobeying God, and you’re going to go to hell for that,” she says. “I had this epiphany of, ‘If I’m going to go to hell for putting a pin wrong in my dress, then I might as well go to hell driving a car.’”

She didn’t pretend her intentions had disappeared — not with her twin, especially after their first attempt.

“The day after we got back, I told her, ‘Listen, I’m not going to stay here. I will leave again,’” Ens says. “She responded by saying she would leave again, too. But she’s still there, and I think she has 11 or 12 kids.”

By 19, Ens had moved out of her parents’ home but remained in the community. She had a long-distance Amish boyfriend in New York, and they mostly communicated by letters, seeing each other only a few times a year. Then one day, she opened her mailbox and found a note with her name on it — in his handwriting — but with no return address.

Inside, he explained he had run away with his sister and her boyfriend. The three were driving from New York to Ohio, and they were offering to pick Ens up if she wanted to leave too. They said they’d bring the car around at 10 p.m., after most people were asleep.

That night, Ens sat on her roof for about half an hour, weighing two problems at once: how to jump roughly 15 feet without breaking anything — and whether she could truly leave right then. Her twin had just gotten engaged. The wedding was six months away, and Ens knew she likely wouldn’t be allowed to attend if she was shunned.

“I just knew that I had to leave, because if I didn’t go then, I probably never would,” she says.

For the jump itself, she reached for a lesson she’d absorbed growing up on a farm.

“I grew up on a farm. On the farm, you learn that it’s very rare that a cat breaks a bone when they jump,” she explains. “They could basically fall or jump down from 40 feet and not break a bone… When they land, they bounce.”

So she decided to do the same.

“I was like, ‘Well, I’m going to leap like a cat.’ I squatted down on my knees, and then I took a leap,” Ens says. “When I landed, everything was limp, and my knees took the shockwave. I didn’t break anything.”

After that, the shunning became total. Her family excommunicated her. She missed her twin sister’s wedding. For a short time in the years that followed, her sister still invited her to visit once or twice a year — a small window of connection.

Then that ended too.

“They started having children, and one day, when I was there visiting, her husband told me that I was never allowed to come back to their place again,” Ens says. “It was a very uncomfortable time. I haven’t been back since.”

Leaving didn’t instantly make life easier. Ens describes the transition as disorienting — a slow process of learning the modern world while also unlearning beliefs that had shaped her since childhood.

“When you leave the Amish community, even though you want to leave, it’s the biggest culture shock there could be,” Ens says. “You even don’t know what you don’t know.”

She left with no identification, just $20, and an education that ended at the eighth-grade level. Still, she began building from scratch. She earned her GED, discovered a passion for health, and worked toward a personal training certification.

Not long after starting work at a gym, she kept pushing forward — studying holistic health and nutrition. Today, she runs her business, UnDiet You, while pursuing a PhD in functional medicine. She has also published a memoir, Amish Renegade, released in May 2024.

Looking back, Ens says leaving required more than just the desire to go — it demanded a kind of strength that many people raised inside the community are conditioned not to exercise.

“It does take a very strong person to be able to leave the Amish,” she says. “I know there are a lot of people that would want to leave, but they’re not strong enough to pull themselves out because of the strength of the community and the church and what they’ve been taught.”

And even when they do leave, she adds, the internal conflict often doesn’t vanish overnight.

“Almost every single person that leaves the Amish still believes that what they’re doing is wrong,” Ens says, “but they just know that they need to get out and they don’t care that it’s wrong to the church.”