STIMULATE YOUR DETERMINATION: SHE LOST 125 POUNDS, 5 POUNDS AT A TIME
Susan DeFusco knows how to lose 100 pounds. She’s done it twice. Only now she knows she has the formula right.
The first time she topped 200 pounds was in high school. “At the time, I had a jealous boyfriend,” Susan says. “We didn’t socialize much. In fact, about all we did was eat out. I think my overeating was a means of compensating for a lack of interaction with other people.”
When she was 19 years old, she stopped getting her periods. Her doctor told her that it was because she was so overweight. This ST was the wake-up call that Susan needed. Once she made up her | ^ mind to slim down, she cut her weight by almost half in 1 year. “I | § did it mostly by changing my eating habits and giving up certain fattening foods,” she says. “The trouble was, I never changed my attitude toward food. So once the weight was gone, my old eating habits returned.”
A decade later, with two kids and bills to pay, Susan went over 200 pounds again. “I wasn’t making the right choices food-wise, and I wasn’t exercising like I should have been,” she says. “I can put on weight very quickly, and it came back fast.”
By 1994, Susan weighed 260 pounds. Her back hurt so badly that she had trouble walking, let alone playing with her kids out in the yard. It was time to lose weight again.
While her overall goal was to shed 100 pounds, from day to day she focused only on losing the next 5. Each time she met one of her mini-goals, she rewarded herself with a small treat, like a bubble bath or an exercise tape.
“To wait until you get to your goal to say ‘I’m going to treat myself is too long a time,” says the Warren, Rhode Island, resident. “You need to look at each 5 pounds as something worth celebrating because it’s closer and closer to where you want to be.”
After a year and a few months of sensible eating, exercising, and participating in the support group TOPS (Take Off Pounds Sensibly), Susan had met all of her little goals. They added up to 100 pounds—gone for good.
Inspired by her weight loss and religious about her exercise, Susan became a fitness instructor. And she lost another 25 pounds.
Now in her late thirties, Susan passes along her success story to her support group and at the fitness center where she works. “It
gives people hope,” she says. “They realize that if I did it, they can do it.”
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Tags: Weight Loss