Fred Schenck: "Avoid the whites"

Fred Schenck, a retired human resources executive for Cunard Line, was cruising along in retirement.

He had enjoyed a high-profile career working for Donald Trump, New York City mayor David Dinkins and the Kennedy administration. Yet now, Fred was enjoying his life on the West Coast of Florida. An avid golfer, he and his wife Quinta also liked to travel, particularly enjoying—what else?—cruises.

So, he was a bit dismissive a few years ago when his doctor suggested that to lower his blood pressure, Fred should take off some weight.

“I ignored him,” Fred admits. “I was married to Mrs. Haagen Dazs and I couldn’t see myself changing. I just thought that high blood pressure was a fairly typical complaint.”

At 5-foot, 10-inches, Fred’s top weight was 228 pounds. He dealt with the situation by making sure his clothes fit well and flattered his frame. Yet even his tailor had something to say. “He'd tell me, ‘Schenck, take off the weight,’” Fred says. But still, he thought nothing of downing a half pint of ice cream every night.

Fred’s penchant for sweets had its roots in childhood. “There was a drugstore on my newspaper route," he recalls. "Every time I earned an extra 35 or 40 cents, I’d stop at the soda fountain for ice cream sodas or milk shakes.”

As Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for President Kennedy, Fred mingled in the Beltway’s social circles. And, his career in high-end leisure and travel businesses did nothing to curb his appetites. “In the hotel business I had free reign in five different restaurants. I could eat anything at any time,” Fred says. “You develop bad habits that way.”

In March 2007, Fred’s doctor spoke up again. Fred’s glucose levels indicated that he might be developing diabetes. This time, Fred listened.

At his then-current weight of 216 pounds, not only did Fred “divorce Mrs. Haagen Dazs,” but he went a step further. Humorously, he calls his approach “avoiding the whites.” Here’s what disappeared from his diet: white flour, white rice, sugar and some dairy. It took a little re-education. After all, Fred reasoned, isn’t “enriched flour” good for you?

Fred and his wife substituted higher fiber, whole grain “brown” products—brown rice and whole wheat flour. Fortunately, Quinta enjoys cooking this way. “She loves these kinds of challenges,” Fred says.

And, Fred curbed his appetite for sweets. “We have a number of lovely candy dishes, and they’re all empty,” Fred notes, with both pride and wistfulness. In addition, Fred added some activity to his daily routine. He began to walk in his golf community 40 to 45 minutes a day.

Over eight months, Fred brought his weight down to 188 pounds and lost two inches off his waist. “I made my tailor happy,” Fred says. “I sent two jackets back to have them altered for my new size.”

Not only that, but by grounding his diet in high-fiber whole grains, he has moderated the sugar rushes of white flour and sugar. He takes a low dose of blood pressure medication, but his doctor hasn’t mentioned diabetes again.

These days, Fred gets his rushes from a different source—compliments. “I was at a function recently and someone said to me, ‘Fred, you look 15 years younger,'” he says. “That feels good. ”

Good Will shopping

Ha! Here I thought my sister would take all the clothes I no longer fit since losing weight. Of the five dresses and eight pairs of pants I brought her, she only took three items! The rest were too BIG for her. She's doing great!


The Saturday after Thanksgiving, we went shopping at Good Will. I know... not too glamorous. But we had a great time trying on clothes and judging each other's choices. I bought a royal blue blouse with an interesting neckline of loose knots (still trying to draw attention away from the hips!), along with a black skirt and a pink and black three-quarter-sleeve sweater. The sweater is form-fitting with a line of color at the waist. Great to be in the market for something like that! And, I must admit to buying flannel jammie pants and a hoodie. My sister bought, among other things, a suede teal dress with diagonal seams across the front. Very flattering for her new size!

She beat me... she spent $36 and I spent $32. And our money went to a good cause. Can't beat that!

Weight loss is contagious!

I've been talking with my sister a lot on the phone recently. Our family is getting together for Thanksgiving, so there are some culinary logistics to work out. I thought ahead and bought lots of local New Jersey sweet corn this fall, cooked and cut it off the cob and froze it to take to New York with me. I made applesauce, too, using my grandmother's recipe. (You leave the skins of the apples on when you cook them, so the applesauce has a nice rosy pink color. I use half Macs and half Cortlands.) My parents are making our family's favorite, a broccoli and bleu cheese casserole... it wouldn't be a holiday without it!

Add all that to the usual menu -- turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, glazed carrots, etc. -- and this is going to be one groaning table. But, you know what?! I am DETERMINED that I will NOT be groaning! I can't even say that bounty like this tempts me to overeat. This is partly because I just don't have the capacity anymore, after losing 30 pounds and three sizes. But, strangely, I find myself overwhelmed by an overabundance of food now, and it makes me eat less. It's like grocery shopping... one whole AISLE of cereal??? My eyes glaze over.

But what I'm really looking forward to is seeing my sister. It's been about four months and in that time, she's been working at losing weight. I was dumbfounded when she told me she's already lost 36 pounds! She was talking about how it doesn't make sense to run out and buy all new clothes when you're still heading downward. A light went on in my head! I ran to my closet and began pulling out all sorts of shirts and pants, chinos and jeans mostly, in the sizes I'd gone down through. I washed and ironed everything -- eight pairs of pants in all. I can't wait to give them to her! Oh, and a beautiful black dress with a scalloped hem trimmed in a red floral pattern. Sigh. I loved that dress.

I know you're supposed to empty your closet and get rid of the large sizes, so you're not tempted to go back there. But I just couldn't stand the waste! I'm way too frugal. I'm so glad these clothes will have another life. And I'm SURE it won't be long before my sister's handing them off to someone else. I am so proud of her!

Roni Noone: A new mom's plan

Most women plan for a healthy pregnancy. Roni Noone had a plan for after her pregnancy.

Two weeks after giving birth to her son, Roni walked into her local Weight Watchers meeting, baby in tow. She weighed in at 206 pounds, but she wasn’t discouraged. "I knew what to do. Everything was in my corner. I was confident, even looking forward to it," she says.

From her teen years on, Roni remembers being heavy. One childhood moment haunts her. "I was 12 and I weighed about 150 pounds," she recounts. "A very tall male family member said to me, ‘We weigh the same.’ I was devastated."

Roni began skipping meals, lying to her mother about having eaten, hiding food to eat later by herself. At 14, she took a job at a McDonald's, where she made her own concoctions, grilling huge burgers in sausage grease, making sundaes with strawberry and chocolate toppings.

Alternating with bouts of sporadic dieting, Roni's weight yo-yoed. She graduated from high school a size 12. But leaving college, she weighed in the 180s, and in graduate school, 210. She wore a size 16 suit to her graduation, a size 18 while job interviewing.

Roni decided in January 2000 to try again. She tried zero-calorie diets, a weight loss clinic, diet pills. She had the most success with a low-carb diet, getting down to 155 pounds, but she was miserable. “I was obsessed. I agonized over every decision,” she says. “I just couldn't eat that way long term.”

In 2004, Roni and her husband began to talk about starting a family. Roni knew she had to find a healthy way to lose weight. Weight Watchers fit the bill. "For someone like me, it's perfect," she says. "I love keeping statistics, plotting my progress, going to meetings and weighing in."

In fact, Roni loved the supportive atmosphere of the meetings. "I was glad to have people to ask questions of, somewhere I could go for reputable answers," she says. "Before, it was always me just popping pills by myself, just me trying to make it work."

Roni lost 11 pounds over the next four weeks on the Flex Plan. But then, she discovered she was pregnant, and the deal was off. "I did eat healthy foods throughout my pregnancy, but I ate excessively," Roni admits. "I ate entire cantaloupes, banana smoothies, fried foods, burgers. I ate for eating's sake. I felt it was my last hurrah."

Not surprisingly, Roni gained 70 pounds in her pregnancy. Coming home from the hospital in June 2004, she weighed 225 pounds. But this time she knew what to do. Adopting the Weight Watchers plan for nursing mothers, Roni began to steadily lose weight, most often just two pounds a week. By January 2005, she had reached her goal weight of 149.

In Weight Watchers, portions of food are awarded points by their nutritional value, and Roni welcomed the challenge. "The plan appealed to my creative side. I was excited about figuring out how to eat the biggest portions possible for the lowest amount of points and still eat foods I enjoyed," she says. "I make the best burger ever, on an English muffin, with spinach and pickles, and it has only four points."

Roni began walking with Ryan on her back, dancing around the house with him. She shut off the television and took the stairs instead of the elevator. In 2007, she joined a Y and began using a treadmill and reclining bike. She graduated to cardio, cycling and step classes and, eventually, 5K races.

Today, at 5-feet, nine inches, Roni weighs 144 pounds and wears a size 6. Although she doesn’t consciously count points, her eating habits are ingrained. She makes meatballs with ground turkey, weighs the cheese for a baked ziti, divides meals and snacks into rough point estimates. Roni blogs about her weight loss success, which she says keeps her on track. Ultimately, though, Roni gives her son all the credit for her success.

"I didn't want to be an afraid-to-have-fun mom, a mom who sits out, who won't put on a bathing suit because she's ashamed of her body," she says. "My son gave me all the motivation I needed. He has given me a renewed sense of life and purpose."

Feed a cold, starve a fever?

Feed a cold, starve a fever? Or is it, Starve a cold, feed a fever? I think I may have it mixed up. I have a raging sore throat this week and am not all that hungry. But I have one bad habit when I'm sick that ensures I don't starve anything.

When my husband has a sore throat, he doesn't want any food touching it. He'll spritz on bottle after bottle of Chloraseptic to numb it. I hate Chloraseptic! It gets on your tongue and the inside of your cheeks, and then you feel like you just came from the dentist.

Instead, I go for the blanket approach. I want to coat that throat and cover up the hurt. So... instead of tea, which I probably should drink, I make huge mugs of hot chocolate and wash down spoonfuls of peanut butter. I don't like plain chicken broth, but I do make a great egg drop soup, with a chicken broth base, but I stir in some fresh lemon juice and finely shaved parmesan. When I do get hungry, but it still hurts to eat, I make a big pot of mashed potatoes. That's my ultimate comfort food.

When I was growing up, boxed "pre-fab" mashed potatoes were all the rage. Remember those magic flakes? Well, I hated them. Of course you can tell the difference. But my mom, even though she hated cooking, never bought convenience foods because of the expense. Her mashed potatoes were always the real thing. Well, we ruined them by using margarine. (Butter was too expensive, too.) When I'm sick now, I do it right. Real mashed potatoes made with real butter, and topped with a pool of melting butter.

My son, on the other hand, wants whipped cream when he's sick. I'll give him a bowl of Jello and whipped cream, and he'll just skim the whipped cream off the top and leave the Jello. I don't have that same craving for whipped cream (luckily!), though I do love it when I'm not sick. Good thing, too. I'm probably already consuming as many calories as when I feel healthy, and yet not exercising any of it away. I guess if it's a cold I have, I'm doing a great job of feeding it.

Gwen Mergian: A Numbers Gal

Numbers are powerful. Just ask Gwen Mergian. The first number to slap Gwen in the face was the number 50.

“When I reached my 50s, I felt like I was living on borrowed time,” says Gwen. “My father died at age 49 from a massive coronary and my grandmother had a sudden fatal heart attack in her 50s.”

The second number that stopped her cold was 303.

"My diet was fairly healthy, even though I didn’t really exercise. I had no chronic disease, but I was maybe ten to 20 pounds overweight,” says Gwen. “Still, a routine blood check came back showing that my total cholesterol was 303."

That number put Gwen in the American Heart Association’s highest risk category. The AHA says that having total cholesterol of 240 milligrams per deciliter of blood or higher presents a person with twice the risk for coronary heart disease as someone whose cholesterol level is 200 mg/dL or below. Gwen’s doctor recommended she start on a cholesterol-lowering statin drug. Trained as a nurse, Gwen didn’t like that idea. She decided to bring the scientific method home.

“I read up on all everything that is supposed to lower cholesterol and I thought, I could conduct my own experiment. I could be the subject, the researcher and the reporter,” she says.

Gwen proposed to her doctor that she try to lower her cholesterol herself. If at the end of six months, her numbers weren’t good, she would go on the drug. Moldering in Gwen’s basement was an old copy of Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease. It is a low-fat diet rich in vegetables, fruits, whole grains and legumes.

Gwen’s goal was ambitious—and it involved another number. She targeted her LDL cholesterol, the so-called “bad cholesterol,” which can be a more accurate gauge of risk. Her LDL was 193—again in the AHA’s highest risk category—and she set a target level of 130.

“I was committed, but I didn’t really think I could do it,” she admits. “I am a very stubborn person, though, and when I put my mind to something I’m like a tenacious dog.”

Gwen says pizza was the hardest thing for her to give up. She also liked meat and cheese, eggs and omelets, and had ice cream about three times a week. But the real hurdle was a big one: she didn’t really like vegetables.

Nevertheless, in March 2007 Gwen switched to a plant-based diet. She gave up meat, except salmon a few times a week, for the omega 3 fatty acids. She ate huge salads and tried grains like kasha, quinoa and cous cous. She loves to bake and adjusted recipes to cut down on fat and sugar.

“I wanted to see what I could do,” she says. “I didn’t want to cheat. If you do, you have to think about it: Well, I cheated yesterday, so today maybe I’ll… I cheated only twice in six months, once when a very kind woman made a pie and I couldn't refuse a piece.”

After six months, Gwen's total cholesterol dropped to 177, well below the 200 mg/dL benchmark. Her LDL cholesterol came in at 96, almost 100 mg/dL below her starting number and 34 mg/dL below her target of 130.

In addition, Gwen lost about 20 pounds. At her highest weight, Gwen had been 140 pounds, and at five-feet, five inches tall, a size 14. Gwen is satisfied with her weight now, even though she has regained five pounds.

Gwen continues the Ornish plan. She takes a multi-vitamin and red yeast rice and flax seed, which are said to lower cholesterol naturally. She drinks white or green tea, and a drink she mixes from apple cider vinegar, pomegranate juice and grape or apple juice. Three or four times a week she has a scientific dose of red wine, about 30 millileters.

Gwen admits that exercise has not been a priority. She will sometimes walk the two and a half miles home from work. At the gym, she works out two or three times a week, usually speed walking on a treadmill. Gwen bought a bicycle that reminded her of her mother’s 1970s chestnut-brown five-speed bike. She began biking around her neighborhood, and eventually worked her way up to an 11-mile ride suggested by a friend.

“I was going to say no, but then I thought, You can try, Gwen,” she says. “I had to stop four times and walk my bike up the hills, but I did it.”

Gwen has also tried means of lowering stress, such as tai chi, mindfulness meditation and yoga. Focusing on making change fun, she has tried activities said to stimulate the right side of the brain, such as writing with her left hand or sketching upside down and left-handed.

What started as an experiment has turned into a lifestyle, which Gwen blogs about for the Albany (N.Y.) Times-Union. She's grateful for the opportunity she’s had to expand her horizons.

“This experiment took me in directions I wouldn’t have expected. It brings me such joy and pleasure,” she says. “As you age, it’s easy to get into a rut and experience things as diminishing. I find myself embracing new things and as I look ahead, I want to be healthy and I feel like there are good things to come. That’s the blessing and the bounties of this way of life.”

I'm Over the Moon with my Over the Top award

It was so nice to log on this morning to my blog and find a little "award" from my fellow blogger, Leah. What makes me feel even better is that she says on her blog that she finds the success stories that I write about here motivating for her in her weight loss journey. That's what it's all about! Thank you, Leah!