I Got This (11 page)

I asked my engineer to turn up the house lights so David could see the audience. He loved it. He had no fear whatsoever. As long as he is happy, I am, too. I guess we will all have to wait and see what happens!

W
ithin days of bringing David home from the hospital, I made a decision that ultimately altered my health for life. Becoming a mother brought on tremendous responsibilities, but none greater than the obligation I felt to get healthy to be there for my son.

I gained thirty-five pounds during my pregnancy. Like most women, I was shocked that even after giving birth, I still weighed around 237 pounds. I felt that surely I would drop at least some of the weight once that baby came out. This was the biggest number I had seen on the scale in many years. It was time to think about how I was going to lose the excess baby weight and then put that plan into action.

Since I had given birth via C-section, I was unable to do much
of anything for the first ten days or so. I could barely get off the sofa and couldn’t walk fully upright without pain for some time. For six weeks after giving birth, going to the gym or working out was definitely out of the question. What I could do during that time was try to break my body’s cravings for the unhealthy foods I freely ate during the last few months of my pregnancy. While I didn’t completely go crazy, I didn’t deprive myself of anything while I was pregnant, either. If I wanted cupcakes—I ate them. If I wanted Mexican food—and I did—often, I ate it. So when the time came to gain control over my eating again and hopefully once and for all, I fell back into my old diet mentality that had worked for me so many times before having my baby.

It was an all-too-familiar routine. I had grown comfortable with eating skinless baked chicken, brown rice, and steamed broccoli—morning, noon, and night. My staple diet foods. My big treat was two apple slices with peanut butter slathered on top. I only drank water and occasionally treated myself to Crystal Light. That way of eating is effective for quick weight loss, but it isn’t very interesting. And like anything, if we get bored we change things up, and usually not in our favor. It’s a total setup for failure because eating that way forever just isn’t realistic.

Once I was finally able to get active, I started walking a loop around my neighborhood that took close to thirty minutes to complete. To be honest, when I first began taking these walks, this same route took me closer to an hour because I had to take it slow.
After a few weeks I was able to cut that time in half. I relished these walks by myself because those precious moments were my “thinking” time. I enjoy being outdoors, especially when it’s really hot and humid. I put my headphones on and away I go. I do most everything with music playing in my ears. It gives me motivation to get up off that sofa and inspiration to take those extra laps. But sometimes, the motivation was hard to come by. If the baby had been up a lot or he was napping and I could get a few quiet moments at home, sometimes I just wanted to stay on the couch.

Whenever I’d try to talk myself out of going for a walk, and there were a few days like that, I’d take myself through a series of simple tasks so I would get up and go.

Like I said, I like to set goals for myself, and these small goals got me out the door more than a few times.

And if after all that I still didn’t move from the chair, as a surefire way of talking myself into just doing it, I’d trick myself by saying, “It is okay to walk for just ten minutes—because that would be better than doing nothing.” And once I got up, ten
minutes turned into thirty and eventually an hour. It got to the point where I would begin to miss how good I felt from working out that I’d actually get inspired by that, too.

Later in the year, when I was well on my way to losing the baby weight I had gained, I met with a team of people from Weight Watchers. They sat with me and explained the principles of their program. The best way to think about the program is as a plan that gives its members a personalized budget of Points values per day. Your available Points are calculated based on your weight, age, and activity level. Every food has a Points value and you use those values to fill your day up with food. You keep track of your Points by writing down everything you eat. There is flexibility in the program in this regard, but many members cite tracking what they eat and the values associated with their food as the key to their success.

To be frank, I thought it all sounded lame and I wasn’t all that interested. All I could think of was, Who wants to eat and then
have to write all of that down? I was polite, but I felt like this program was in no way right for me.

The representative said that the way the numbers work is that they quantify food for you. They show you that one food choice is better than another based on the Points assigned to that food. For example, a processed nutrition bar, which is something most people think of as a good choice when trying to lose weight, might have a seven
PointsPlus
^®
value and may carry as many as two hundred and fifty calories. On the other hand, a banana has a zero
PointsPlus
^®
value and will actually keep you fuller for longer than a protein bar. It has more fiber and more water and vitamins, too. So the program quantifies food in a way that teaches you to navigate the environment that we all live in. As I listened, one of the more promising aspects of the program for me was learning that the program builds in some extra flexibility for you because they know that if you don’t get in some of the things you love—the sweets you crave and such, you won’t stick with the plan. They actually give you an added allowance of an extra forty-nine Points every week so you can have those things along the way.

What this means is, if you’re going to a wedding over the weekend and you don’t want to sit it out because you’re afraid of breaking the plan, you can still go. You can even have a cocktail or a piece of the wedding cake without worrying about your Points allowance for the day. If a friend calls you to go to dinner and you’ve already had twenty-five of your daily twenty-nine Points, you can pull from
the extra forty-nine allowed for the week. It gives a kind of real-life flexibility I had never seen in any other plan. When I first talked to Weight Watchers, they hadn’t yet launched their current program,
PointsPlus
^®
, but did so soon after. It is now in full swing and has been used by millions to great results.

I listened carefully as the folks from Weight Watchers explained the program, but I still didn’t believe most of what they were saying. I nodded in agreement, but they lost me at “You can eat whatever you want.”

I thought, There is no way I can eat those types of foods and lose weight, because it was against everything I knew about weight loss and healthy eating. My mind was programmed to think deprivation, not freedom of choice. No one can sustain a diet of grilled skinless chicken, brown rice, and steamed broccoli forever. Eventually you have to nourish your body with something else and when you do, the weight comes right back. I would stop myself from having the foods I loved until the cravings got so bad I couldn’t take it for one more second. I’d inevitably break down and give in by heading to my favorite chicken wing place, ordering a huge box of wings, and eating the entire thing. Afterward, I’d feel so bad about making that choice, the next day I’d go right back on my extreme deprivation diet until I’d repeat the same pattern over and over again.

I had been so brainwashed into believing that dieting meant excruciating limitations that I had rejected the principles of the Weight Watchers program. I simply didn’t believe I could eat chips, cookies, or pizza and lose weight. My mind was made up. There was no way their plan would work. But out of courtesy, I reluctantly agreed to try the program for one week.

Weight Watchers assigned a woman named Liz Josefsberg to be
my Weight Watchers leader. Liz was there to help me understand and then navigate my plan on the program. The first thing Liz and I spoke about was the ways I’d lost weight before and what I had done to take off the excess baby weight. She recognized that I had what she called “a lot of diet baggage” left over from my past.