Dr. Howard Rankin - Weight Loss Interviews: The Real Life Stories Of How 13 People Lost Weight In Their Own Unique Way

Weight Loss Interviews: The Real Life Stories Of How 13 People Lost Weight In Their Own

Unique Way

Dr. Howard Rankin

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

COPYRIGHT 2014 by Talent Writers ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication is allowed to be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author. Only reviewers are allowed to quote brief passages from this publication.

Brenda Johnston

Results Not Guaranteed, They're Earned!

I was super skinny growing up. I lived in a small town in Canada until I was ten years old. Mom cooked healthy meals, for the most part, and I was always running around outside -- and even inside.

When I was ten, my parents felt I needed better educational and life opportunities, and we moved to a much larger town just outside of Toronto -- Whitby. I was active, involved, didn't have a problem and mom was still cooking for me.

Then I went to college. I weighed about 165 and was 5'9". Initially, I commuted to the International Academy of Design where I was studying marketing and design, then finally moved out to be on my own. Now I had unlimited access to all of those foods I had been deprived of, or thought I was. I went nuts. I was doing the college thing -- drinking, eating, and having fun. I put on fifteen pounds -- and that's when I was still living at home. I finally moved out when I was 21. I was now two hours away from my parents. Finally, independence! Awesome! But I didn't know how to cook! OMG! I'm going to eat Mr. Noodle and Kraft dinners every day.

I soon landed my first advertising design/ marketing job. It was stressful, crazy deadlines and of course, my first job and I didn't want to screw up. My solution was to not eat much during the day but drink four very large Snapples; water was boring, and the Snapples seemed to keep me full. At the time, I didn't realize they were full of chemicals. Why would I? No one teaches you that. So, I went from being fairly active- to sitting on my butt- drinking sugar water all day long. I was working long, weird hours, not eating very well and being fairly stressed.

The weight started to creep on. I didn't think about it much -- or at all. I was 180. I continued that trend. I've had an underactive thyroid since the age of 15, so I started to blame my weight gain on that. Then, I blamed my weight gain on the washer/dryer in my apartment complex. For some strange reason, the washer and dryer kept shrinking my clothes. But the scale also said I was now over 200 pounds. Well, that's okay because I won't get to 225. Or 240. Or 250. By this point I had stopped getting on the scale, likely because the one I had, only went up to 240lbs.

I could see that I was getting bigger but no one said anything. Well, that's not quite true. My parents did notice that I had gained "a little bit of weight." They actually shelled out a little money for me to go to Weight Watchers. Over the next several years, I went back to Weight Watchers over 11 times, meaning I literally signed up 11 different times for new sessions, thinking I would have a different result. Each time, however, I had the same result -- no real, as in maintained, 'weight loss, changed my life,' success. I know Weight Watchers works for a lot of people; it just wasnt working for me, probably because I wasnt ready to make it work.

By now, I was 24, and I had just gotten married. I weighed 232. I resolved to come back from my wedding and really do something about this weight. I did not want to get any heavier than 232, period.

So, a few months later, I was reading about Dr. Bernstein's program, a very low-carb diet designed to control blood-sugar levels. I signed up for a lot more than a little bit of money, with the expectation that I could lose the excess weight in no time at all. I was on it for six weeks, about 800 calories a day, and not exercising (fortunately, given that I was on 800 calories a day). I lost fifty pounds in the first month. But, I didn't look good. I looked gaunt and unhealthy. My skin color even changed, and my hair had lost its shine, but that didnt matter because the scale was going down, and in my head, that was ALL that mattered

While on the program I happened to mention to one of the nurses, I was hungry a lot of the time. Duh! The nurse gave me the solution.

"Go to the store and get a supply of flavored fizzy waters. The bubbles in those drinks will help fill you up." Well, who am I to argue with a trained health professional? I did just what she said.

It didn't work very well. I started to get severe stomach cramps, largely due to the fact, that I am sensitive to aspartame. The filling fizzy waters were full of that, along with about a zillion other chemicals. But again, how was I supposed to know that? For the longest time, I had a diet coke addiction, drinking at least three a day. I didn't drink coffee or tea, and the diet soda was one way to get caffeine. Looking back, that sounds disgusting, but it was my habit for a long time. Incidentally, I can tell very quickly -- like 3.2 seconds -- whether a food has aspartame in it. I bloat like mad and get a crazy headache.

I kept the Bernstein weight off for about two months. I went back to tell them I wanted to go on maintenance and onto a more moderate program. The doctor responded very compassionately. He said: "Well, if you want to be fat for the rest of your life, you can go on maintenance now." I remember thinking Ill show you! then I stopped at McDonalds on the way home and ate three hash browns, a sausage and Egg McMuffin. Take that!!

I considered the various forms of bariatric surgery but, fortunately, the idea of surgery scares the heck out of me, so it was never really an option. And looking back now, after maintaining a 145-pound weight loss for several years, I am so glad I didn't go that route. It has worked for some people that I know, but it's just not for me. What that surgery does, in my humble opinion, is buy you some time where it is easier to change your eating and exercise habits. But, if you don't make that change there's a very real risk you'll regain all your weight back -- and then some.

Of course, I eventually regained the Bernstein weight loss and added some more for good measure. In fact, after losing the 50 pounds in those first few weeks, I gained about 100 over the course of the next four years. That was okay because at that point, I decided that I was indeed meant to be the funny, big and curvy girl. And 315 pounds.

Along the way, I tried a few programs like Herbal Magic, Atkins, Weight Watchers, the Cabbage Soup Diet, pretty much every diet known to mankind, and possibly a few other species, too. At one point, I sat down and calculated how much I had spent on weight-loss programs. It wasn't a little bit of money. It was close to $15,000 - 20,000. That's a conversion rate of about $130 for every pound gained.

I was working in marketing, and some of our clients were in the health and diet industries, so I was reading a lot about the latest products, and buying into most of them. Not that it was really helping. On my 30th birthday, my husband at the time and my parents threw a giant party for me. Afterwards, I saw the pictures of the party, and I didn't like what I saw. In fact, my reaction to the photos of me was, "Who the hell is that obese girl?" I remember staring at those pictures and crying secretly and then throwing them away. I resolved, right there and then, that it was time to take action. Now I had hit the landmark birthday, I needed to get control of my life and my weight. This had gone on for too long. The time was now. I was ready!