From Fat to Fit

July/August 2008 Issue | Posted by Carmen Staicer in Features

My last two babies were born 16 months apart.

Losing weight was hard — too hard, I reasoned — and besides, I was busy raising my children.

My husband had pledged to marry me for better or for worse, and so he’d have to be happy with me the way I was. We weren’t going to get divorced, so I could relax and not worry so much about my looks. Not to mention, there was no way in the world that I would ever be able to look like a supermodel.

One day, though, my daughter came home in tears because a classmate had teased her about her fat mother. Something inside me clicked.

I realized that by being so cavalier with my health, I was sending my children a dangerous message. I was abusing the body that God had given me — not with illegal drugs or alcohol, but with food and drink, and that was every bit as dangerous. It was just as much of an abuse of myself to sit and eat brownies night after night as it would be to drink myself drunk in a bar.

And so it began — my journey back from a size 18 to somewhere closer to where I started my marriage.

One of the most important things I realized from the beginning was that the way I handled my own health and weight problem would be a defining moment for my children, especially my daughters.

Whatever I did, they would remember for all their lives. Would I starve myself, avoiding certain food groups? Would I binge on chocolates and candies and then punish myself with hour upon hour of exercise? I determined it would be best for all of us if I tried to achieve my weight loss goal with balance, using the brain that God gave me and making necessary lifestyle adjustments and sacrifices along the way.

People follow all kinds of crazy diets, and people make scads of money selling crazy plans, but in the end, being physically healthy comes down to eating sensibly and exercising. That’s difficult to hear, but we know it’s true. We would much rather take a magic pill or drink a magic powder and not have to change the way we eat and live.

“Take care of your body, as well as your soul,” is written on our hearts, but we need to see it written on glossy paper every once in a while, too.

Stop Negativity

Right from the start, I knew that I needed to stop the negative talk that ran a circuit through my brain, every waking moment of every single day.

“You are fat,” my inner voice sneered almost incessantly. “You’re not worth anything.”

Negativity is self-perpetuating. The more you say it, the more your mind thinks negatively. Ironically, even as I was trying to instill in my children a sense of self worth, I found that I was incapable of speaking to myself with love and kindness.

No more negativity, I decided. If I wouldn’t say it to my best friend, I had no business saying it to myself. Fat or not, I was a child of God, I realized, and I needed to recognize the worth of that.

When I brought up my negativity in conversation with my husband, he admitted that my defeatist attitude and self-pity had bothered him. He was my spouse, the person who was supposed to love me the most. If I made derogatory remarks about my body, and he loved my body, what was I saying about him?

I’d never before thought about my self-criticism with quite so much clarity.

Set Realistic Goals

At the beginning of my weight loss, when I had lost my first five pounds, my daughter came to me and asked, “How much weight do you want to lose, Mommy? What number are you trying to get down to?”

I realized then that I was focusing too much on the numbers. In my eagerness to lose the extra weight I had lost track of the very basic goal I had in the first place: to be healthy. To be around for my children, long enough to see them grow into adults and have families of their own. My answer to my daughter that day became my motto.

“I was overweight, and that wasn’t healthy,” I told her. “It wasn’t a good example for any of us, and I’m trying to change that. There is no special number that I’m trying to achieve — I’d just like to be healthy.”

Small Steps, Big Changes

When all was said and done, I lost a total of 80 pounds. I lost it the way I put it on — one pound at a time.

I realized that I’d developed a healthy case of self-reward. Let’s face it, a mom’s life can be tough. If I’d gotten through an especially tricky situation, I rewarded myself with cookies, candy, or fancy coffee drinks. If I’d handled things especially poorly one day, I treated myself to perk up my mood. If everyone was in bed and I hadn’t made any crucial mistakes, I allowed myself to eat.

I stopped all that.

I was also a prodigious soda drinker. I estimated, at the beginning of my lifestyle change, that I drank a gallon of soda a day. A gallon of soda!

To see exactly how much sugar is in one can of soda, fill a drinking glass with 12 ounces of water and then dump 21 teaspoons of sugar into it. That’s right — 21 teaspoons. That makes a concoction so sweet that none of us would be able to drink it, and yet many of us drink exactly that, in the form of soda, several times a day.

If you must drink soda, drink the sugar-free stuff. Far better to drink is water. Plain water, sparkling water, water with fruit, water with ice, water in a squirt bottle — find what works for you and drink the water. Your skin will clear, your digestion will improve, and you will sleep better.

Find Balance

I didn’t follow any commercialized diet plan to lose my extra weight, but I did discover the importance of balance. Here are some tips that helped me achieve a healthy balance in my diet:

• Visualize your plate. Half of your plate should be veggies — a salad, a green or orange vegetable. Split the other half evenly between protein, whole grain, and fruit.

• When you have a sandwich, eat it open faced, without the top piece of bread.

• With your salad, have your dressing on the side and dip the tines of your fork into it before you spear the greens. It’ll taste just as good and you will eat 80% less dressing.

• If you lack self-control with certain foods, rule them out entirely. For example, I made a rule for myself that I don’t eat candy anymore. It’s remarkably easy for me to say that, since I know that if I start, I’ll never stop. Far better never to start.

Get Moving

Hand-in-hand with diet changes are exercise habits. Be patient with yourself. Did you know that it takes at least 21 days to create a new habit?

If you are going to lose weight and achieve physical fitness, there is no way around it. You simply must exercise. It doesn’t have to be a full-out death march day in and day out, though. Just get yourself moving!

It can be simple to find little ways to add more movement to your days. Do 10 pushups immediately upon waking. If you can’t do regular pushups — and I sure couldn’t when I started — do them on your hands and knees, and graduate to inclined, against a wall or bathroom sink. Do 10 more pushups before you eat each meal. Squat 10 times while you wait for the microwave to beep, or each time you unload the dryer.

Walk around the block, or park in the very back of the parking lot when you go for groceries. Kick the soccer ball in the back yard with your kids. Download a version of the Rosary onto your iPod and go for a walk.

Is there a grocery store within a mile or two of your house? Can you walk there and back for your small runs? Don’t use your kids as an excuse. Babies in slings or backpacks love to walk, and I never met a toddler who didn’t love a stroller ride in the great outdoors.

It may sound obvious, but I think sometimes actually doing the obvious thing is the biggest victory. In the end, taking off (and keeping off) extra weight comes down to a surprisingly simple formula of eating right and moving more.

Do it for your daughters.

Carmen Staicer walks, runs, and writes in Virginia Beach, Virginia. She blogs at MomtotheScreamingMasses.typepad.com

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