WIN THE FAT WAR: TOWN WATCHED AS SHE LOST POUNDS
When Debbie Owen decided to lose weight, she invited the readers of the newspaper in her hometown—all 500,000 of them—to cheer her on.
Even with her supporters, Debbie understood that there was only one way she would slim down successfully: She had to do it for herself. And she did, losing 91 pounds in 18 months.
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| Debbie, a 42-year-old marketing manager from Chesapeake, Virginia, had struggled with her weight since seventh grade. “I went i§ ; on every kind of diet known to womankind,” she says. When she reached 286 pounds, she despaired that she’d never achieve a healthy weight.
When her husband suggested they start exercising to an aerobics video every night, she reluctantly decided to join him. She admits that her heart wasn’t in it—until she noticed that her clothes were looser after just 3 weeks of working out. Inspired, she decided to give weight loss one more try.
Ever the marketing professional, Debbie wondered whether her story had any publicity potential for the newspaper that employed her. So she proposed that a reporter chronicle her quest.
Once a month, the newspaper ran an article on her progress. It also set up a special voice-mail number so that readers could leave messages for Debbie. “I heard from all kinds of people— husbands who wanted their wives to lose weight, teens, even people from outside the paper’s readership area,” she says. They offered their encouragement and asked for her suggestions on weight loss.
While grateful for the support of her husband and the strangers who followed her story in the newspaper, Debbie kept reminding herself that she was slimming down for her sake and no one else’s. “If you lose weight for another person, you start to look for feedback from that person,” she explains. “If you do it because you want to please your husband but he doesn’t seem to notice, you don’t get the reward you expected. But if you do it for yourself, the reward comes from within you. That’s when you start to succeed.”
With 91 pounds gone, Debbie is still working toward her goal weight of 175 pounds. She feels so good about herself that she’s confident of her ability to go all the way.
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