Pete Riley had always been overweight. By the time he was 27, the 6’1” Riley had reached 250 pounds. However, once his weight gain got out of control, he decided to change his ways. He quit smoking, started running and cycling, and tried to stay away from buffets. That led him to lose 40 pounds over the first three years of his quest and get his weight down to 210 pounds. But he couldn’t get any lower than that. With a goal of 190, he looked for help.
Riley, a space physicist, had been thinking about how energy conservation works in weight loss. He decided that losing weight was as simple as tracking your energy minus how much energy you burned. He wrote some computer weight loosing programs to help him do this, but couldn’t create what he wanted.
Then he found DietPower. “It’s a scientist’s dream weight loosing program,” Riley says. “It doesn’t matter what type of foods you eat, just the calories.” Riley’s favorite feature of the weight loosing program is the bank account, which tracks your calories in and out and adjusts your basal metabolic rate accordingly. “This works really well because if I eat something every day that I think is 200 calories, but it’s really 500, then this mistake is accounted for by a change in the allowed calories.”
He also found that his weight loss goal was too modest. Riley had become a competitive cyclist during his weight loss quest and he decided that to become successful at it, he had to get his weight down to 170. DietPower helped him do this; he lost 30 pounds using the weight loss and diet software over a 15-month period. Riley no races in a bicycle league in Southern California with a team called Viejas. Riley, an avid Macintosh user, wishes that DietPower would release a Mac version. He’s tried Macintosh versions of food diaries and has found them lacking. He uses the Garmin Forerunner 201 GPS for fun while he’s training, and he also uses the S-Polar 720i heart rate monitor. Those products help him monitor his workouts. He considers exercise to be the essential ingredient in any weight loss plan because if you exercise long enough, you can eat whatever you want and still lose weight.
Riley, now 37, has reached a healthy point in his weight loss. After years of being overweight, Riley is now underweight. His doctor has even told him not to lose any more weight. “I’ve got a handle on my calories now. I can keep my weight where it is.” When he needs to, Riley uses DietPower to keep his weight stable; he’s been able to do so for several years.
Riley realizes that his gadgets and weight loss and diet software aren’t the real key to his losing weight he is. “For any weight loosing program to work, you have to want to make the change,” he says. “DietPower provided a framework for me to be disciplined. I had to do the rest.”
When Kathy Anderson moved from Washington state to Massachusetts in early 2001, she made an appointment to see the doctor to discuss some medications she was taking. Her new doctor treated her badly. “He treated me like I was subhuman because of my weight,” she says. Now 35, Anderson, who is 5’4”, reached 236 pounds in 2001. She decided to lose weight. “I decided that if I wasn’t treating myself with respect by being overweight, I couldn’t expect anyone else to, either.”
Anderson had been overweight since she was a child. Due to problems at home, Anderson had turned to food for comfort and weighed 207 pounds by her senior year in high school.
In June, 2001, Anderson decided to change all that. She started with a few rules she ate only when she was truly hungry, she didn’t need to clean her plate, and she cut down dramatically the number of meals she ate in restaurants. She also started a walking weight loosing program with her husband, reaching an average of 3.5 miles per day.
These efforts got her weight down to 190 within nine months, where she plateaued. She then found out about DietPower from an online support group for the show Cooking Thin, broadcast on the Food TV network. Host Kathleen Daelemans, who was a spa chef at a resort in Hawaii, lost a great deal of weight herself, started a show, and wrote a cookbook to help others lose weight.
Anderson loves online groups for support. She belonged to others on Yahoo! Groups and MSN. “When I was having bad days, I could post and get support, and when I was having good days, I could support other people,” she says.
Anderson wanted to get to 145 pounds, and she used DietPower to help her get there. “DietPower helped me track my calories and get control over binge eating,” Anderson says. “It was like balancing the checkbook. I could see exactly what I had left to spend, and could store calories ahead for a rainy day.”
Using DietPower plus eating at home and exercising, Anderson got her weight down to 145 by October, 2002. While she has backslid a bit, she is now starting to use DietPower again to get her weight down to 135.
Anderson’s favorite DietPower feature is the ability to enter recipes into the database. Her favorites are BBQ and turkey burgers. She also likes that she can log a whole day in just a few minutes.
As a learning experience, Anderson also logs recipes that she used to prepare into the database to see how bad they were. “It’s a very dangerous experience,” she laughs. Although Anderson likes DietPower, she warns that it isn’t a magic bullet. “It’s only as useful as the person using it,” she says. “Someone who is looking for an easy solution is going to be sadly disappointed. The only way to lose weight is to grit your teeth and get prepared to do some tough work, both mentally and physically.”
Anderson says that deciding to lose weight is the best gift that she could have given herself. She’s happier and more self-confident than she has ever been. She has gone back to school to get a medical degree, and she hopes to pursue a career in Bariatrics, which is a medical field that helps people reduce their weight. “I won’t practice weight loss surgery, though,” she says. “Surgeries don’t address the root causes of obesity just the symptoms.”
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