Staying slim

There was a time – it seems like a lifetime ago now – when Kaye Boone was so overweight she could barely make it up a couple of flights of stairs.

Her knees hurt. Her ankles hurt. She huffed and puffed.

The Spokane woman was only 39.

In 1995, Boone signed up for a charity walk with her husband and couldn’t cross the finish line.

“That was so humiliating,” she says.

She knew she had to do something.

So the self-described bookworm who works in accounting mustered her courage and signed up for an aerobics class.

She weaned herself off chips and ice cream and hamburgers. And she discovered she actually enjoyed exercise.

She lost 100 pounds the year she turned 40. And, unlike most dieters, she has never found the weight again.

But, then, Boone was never on a diet.

“I decided I would never diet again,” she says. “Nothing would be off-limits. But it had to be in moderation.”

In keeping her weight off, Boone has done something most weight-losers find almost impossible.

“Weight-loss maintenance is different from weight loss,” says James O. Hill, a professor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and director of the Center for Human Nutrition. “Weight loss is sort of a temporary state you can produce in a lot of ways. Weight-loss maintenance is permanent. It’s a way of life. We fail way more than we succeed.”

But some people, like Boone, do succeed.

In 1994, Hill co-founded The National Weight Control Registry with Rena Wing of Brown Medical School. The registry keeps track of people who have successfully maintained a weight loss of at least 30 pounds for at least one year. There are now more than 6,000 people in the registry, Hill says. They’ve lost an average of 70 pounds and kept it off for five years.

“We started the registry because there was this sense that nobody succeeds at long-term weight-loss maintenance,” Hill says. “We didn’t think that was true. We wanted to identify people who did.”

They continue to study the success stories, and they’ve found some shared traits among the maintainers: They eat diets moderately low in fat. They weigh themselves regularly. They get about 60 minutes of exercise most days of the week. They eat breakfast. They keep journals of what they eat and what activity they do.

Shirley Wagoner knows how tough it is to keep those lost pounds from creeping back up.

She lost 30 pounds on Weight Watchers in 1971. Then she gained it all back in one summer. She lost the weight again the next year but didn’t keep it off for long that time, either.

In 1974, the Spokane woman lost those same pounds yet again. And she has maintained her weight ever since.

“I knew I couldn’t live my life doing that,” Wagoner says.

She has led Weight Watchers groups since 1977, watching hundreds of other people struggle to shed pounds while she works each day to keep her own scale steady.

She makes sure her indulgences are worthwhile ones, no pre-packaged cookies or junk. She tries to keep active. And she weighs herself twice a week.

“A healthy lifestyle is about what you do most of the time,” Wagoner says. “Most of the time you’re not overindulging. Most of the time, you’re making wise choices.”

George Britton of Spokane has kept off 50 pounds since 1991. He was scared into action after suffering a heart attack and undergoing cardiac bypass surgery.

In the old days, he’d sit down to a massive steak. Now he limits himself to small portions and sticks mostly to lean meats. At 71, he continues to work part-time and goes for regular walks.

“You’ve got to learn to push yourself away from the table,” Britton says. “You need to make up your mind that you’re going to make a life change.”

Boone, who works in accounting for Catholic Charities, has come a long way since that first aerobics class.

She started taking a kickboxing class not long after losing her weight. And the instructor proposed that Boone start teaching exercise classes herself.

She didn’t know if she could do it.

“Inside, I’m still that scared little girl; that overweight scared girl,” she says.

But she pushed aside her fears. And since 2000, she has been teaching spinning, a sweat-inducing, heart-pumping exercise class on stationary bikes. She teaches several classes a week at the Spokane Athletic Club.

She and her husband now do charity bike rides. In a recent one, they pedaled 155 miles in one day.

She’s been cross-country skiing and snowshoeing, and even did the Coeur d’Alene half-marathon.

Like others who have successfully maintained their weight loss, Boone keeps track of her exercise and eats a well-balanced diet. She weighs herself every day. Exercise, she says, has been central to keeping those pounds from returning.

On those days when her heart’s just not in it, she gives herself 10 minutes. If she’s still not energized, she’ll quit. “I’ve never had to stop,” she says.

“To find something you love, to find a passion; there’s no other way around it,” she says. “You have to watch what you eat, but the key is exercise.”