Kate:

I’ve read a LOT of books about weight loss, but it all comes down to the same basic idea: eat less, move more.  Thank you, Oprah.

My approach to losing weight this time is to keep track of my daily intake with a food journal.  (I use about.com’s Calorie Count which has a link to the right.)  I try to stick to somewhere between 1400-1700 calories a day, but more importantly, Calorie Count gives you a grade.  Sure, I could eat a filling salad for lunch then consume the rest of my calories in ice cream, but I’m also trying to be healthy, not just lose weight.

Calorie Count also has message boards and daily articles about healthy eating.  I have yet to form an online community since I have plenty of personal support at the Center for Lifestyle Medicine, but I know people on there have benefited greatly from their online friends.

The other component to productive weight loss is “move more”.  I knew I would need to take it slow or I’d never stick with it.  There are no morbidly obese people who love hitting the gym every day, I promise.  So, I got a couple of friends to agree to walk with me.  One friend and I would walk every Tuesday for about 90 minutes.  It went by very quickly because we would just chat the whole time.  My goal was not to walk to the point of breathlessness, I just needed to get out and be active.

My Tuesday night friend got buried in schoolwork, so I decided to take my activity to the next level.  I’ve been a gym member for 4 years, so I decided to go more regularly.  I enjoy the elliptical machine because I feel like I burn a lot of calories without as much effort.  I don’t even have to pick up my feet!

In addition, I try to add more mileage to my day.  I take the El rather than the bus because it means I have to walk more and climb steps.  I’ll walk to the library rather than drive.  I just try to find little ways to get in the exercise.  It’s not as overwhelming.

Lo:

So, ok hi.

I’m Lo.  I, like Gertie and Kate, have spent my life struggling with weight. To give you a little insight into my daily life, I teach English to darling middle school students. If for no other reason, I want to lose weight so I don’t have to worry about knocking any more kids in the head with my butt cheek while I am walking down the aisles of my classroom. Teaching is a very exhausting profession, but I know in my heart that I could do a better job, and have more energy to keep up with my students if I reached a healthier weight.

The weight rollercoaster in my life has reached absurd proportions…and more than anything I just want to get to a relatively healthy place, and stop this yo yo madness. I reached a moment in the last 6 months or so, that I was so disheartened from my most recent weight gain that I wanted to give up trying. This wasn’t I feeling I had felt before…hopelessness.

Let me start from the beginning.

The first time I can remember being conscious of my weight in 2^nd grade…which is weird because I can remember almost nothing from that year. I do remember my weight, though. We were getting weighed in class (god… I hope they don’t still do that), andwas the kid in front of me weighed 69 lbs.  The teacher made a comment to him about “you are so tall, that is why you weigh so much,” and then I stood on the scale weighing in at 70lbs. The teacher didn’t say a word to me, and I convinced myself that I was a chunk. By the time I was in 5^th grade I was 130lbs (while telling people I was 105 lbs). By 8^th grade, I was in the 180s, and into high school I settled around the 230 lb mark. I should note that I am about 5’11”, and at the time I was convinced that I should weigh 120 lbs like all my friends.

Around junior year, my real obsession with weight and food set in. I think this is when I realized if I ate very little, I could lose weight very quickly. Within 6 months, I lost about 60 lbs and predictably gained it back within the next year.

This pattern repeated itself several times over in the next seven years, and now I am around 280lbs.

For a long time, I have sought a quick & easy weight-loss solution.  Unfortunately , the quick solution has led me to the place that I am now, and I have finally accepted that if I truly want to lead a healthy life and lose weight permanently, I must take it slow and seek a new path. I want to begin to develop healthy habits in my life that will lead to a healthier me. I am 25 years old, and if it takes me 20 years to get to my goal weight, at least I will be heading in the right direction.

My to-dos:

Read Judith Beck’s book Beck Diet Solution (a book on cognitive therapy for weight loss)

New habits I am working on:

Eat a healthy breakfast every day

Start journaling food intake

Long-term goal

Weigh what I have had printed on my driver’s license for the past six years:)

Gertie Stein:

I’m basically a mom with no kids.  Or, as my brother puts it more crudely, I do a lot of the work to run a family, without the love that usually comes along with the job.

Six months ago, I transitioned from a life primarily occupied by theatre and the arts to a new job as assistant/nanny/cook/jack of all trades for a family in Chicago.  I took the job because I was down-right desperate for one after the touring Broadway show Kate and I had been working on closed.  I kept it because I found that, surprisingly, this was something I was actually good at.  Somehow, I found a patience inside myself that I didn’t know I had and discovered that the chaotic schedule, in which every day is different, made the weeks and months fly by.

This is all fine and dandy but after a few months of Chuckie Cheese playdates and cooking for kids who refuse to eat anything that isn’t beige (and eating the leftovers…), my mind AND thighs are suffering.  I need a change!

I guess I’ve always looked at myself as b.i.g.  Even when I was a young girl, I was acutely aware that ‘delicate’ was a good trait when it came to women and girls and I was anything but delicate.  With feet that were always a few sizes bigger than my friends’ and a whole lot of curves, I never really fit into that mold.  Because I was convinced that I was a fat kid, even when I wasn’t, I gave into many of the unhealthy habits and the lifestyle that goes along with the stereotype.

Now, I tend to be a lot more confident about who I am on the outside (especially when it comes to the curves….I’ve discovered their benefits )  I’m not looking to become one of the skinny girls I envied in high school.  But, as I get older, I’m discovering that healthy eating and exercise isn’t just about being littler.  

I need to do better so that I function better, so that my mind is clearer, so I sleep better, so I can walk my dog without suffering for it, so I can breathe without coughing, so I am happier!

I’ve come close enough in the past to know it is possible, and that even 5 lbs can make a major difference in the quality of my life.  Its not what other people are thinking about me that is motivating me, its the understanding that I need something to work towards in my life and that my goals for a healthier, happier life are attainable.  Ack. I’m over-Oprah-fying.

My goals:

• Lose 35 lbs
• Walk my dog the long way whenever I can
• Look more people in the eye and smile
• Take advantage of all Chicago has to offer
• Get drunk every once in a while because I can
• Don’t do anything stupid while drunk 

Is that too much to ask?

Kate:

I’ve been trying to lose weight my whole life.  When I was about 9, my mom enrolled me in a program offered by the local children’s hospital, though I barely remember that experience.  When I was in college, I joined Weight Watchers with a friend and lost about 10 pounds before becoming too caught up in school.  When I moved to Chicago, I used my Weight Watchers materials to lose 40 pounds on my own.

Now, five years later, I’m trying to lose the pounds again.  In the years after losing those 40 pounds, I gained back 70.  I used to think 320 pounds was some sort of threshold that my body wouldn’t pass, but when I got to 350 I knew it was time to get things under control.

I had been unhappy with my general practitioner, so I went online to a reputable hospital’s physician referral site and found an internist who was interested in helping her patients lose weight.  She referred me to the Center for Lifestyle Medicine (CLM) at Northwestern Memorial.  I knew if I wanted to make this stick, I was going to need all the resources I could amass.

My current weight loss quest began at the beginning of May 2009, and by the time I went to the CLM, I’d already lost about 10 pounds on my own.  It’s now October 2009, and I’ve lost a total of 40 pounds.  In future posts I’ll talk more about what tools the CLM has given me, but I wanted to give you a background on me and tell you about my current approach.

I would love to get down below 200 pounds, but I haven’t weighed that little since I was 12, so we’ll see how I feel about that number the closer I get.  I really look forward to it working this time.