Losing weight after having a baby

BROWN-GRAY THEN & NOW

Age: 56

Hometown: Lambertville, Mich. (near Toledo)

Occupation: Artist, art teacher, docent at the Toledo Museum of Art

Height: 5-4 1/2 Pounds Weight in Sept. ’09 190 Current weight 170 Loss 20 Goal: 155 Exercise routine Activity Amount Swimming 30-34 laps or walking 40 mins. Evening walks 30 mins.

A sample eating day

Breakfast: Cheerios, skim milk

Morning snack: Vanilla yogurt with raspberries or blueberries

Lunch: Wendy’s chili, four saltine crackers, garden salad with low-fat Italian dressing

Afternoon tea: Cup of hot tea (Earl Grey and peppermint)

Dinner: A homemade stew of turkey sausage with sweet onion, red-skinned potatoes, caraway seed. Glass of red wine

Evening snack: 15 pretzel nibblers

Insight for others: “Write everything down. The Lose It program on my iPod Touch made all the difference in the world for me. I put everything in there, even if I had a little bite of chocolate.

“I didn’t cheat myself. If at the end of the day I had extra calories (remaining), it was like, ‘Oh, I can have some almonds or pretzels.’ And if not, ‘I’m done for the day.’ ”

Dieting downfall: “Chocolate. After I weigh myself each week, I go to the fresh market and I get a very small bag (10 pieces) of their bridge mix, and I eat it that day so it’s a whole week before I have to weigh again.”

Enlarge By Sara D. Davis, for USA TODAY Andre Gratton works out at the YMCA in Cherryville, N.C. He’s lost 40 pounds since last September. THEN & NOW ANDRE GRATTON

Before photo:

Age: 43

Hometown: Cherryville, N.C.

Occupation: Manager of staff that installs computer programs for Choice Hotels International

Height: 5-9 1/2 Pounds Weight in Sept. ’09 310 Current weight 270 Loss 40

Goal: 220

A sample eating day

Breakfast: Oatmeal with a teaspoon of brown sugar, or Cheerios with skim milk and fresh fruit

Lunch: Soup or salad with fat-free dressing

Dinner: Chicken breast, vegetables

Snacks: 100-calorie bags of popcorn or other 100-calorie snacks; some-times eats two or three of these

LOSE 10 POUNDS IN 10 WEEKS

The goal of USA TODAY’s seventh annual Weight-Loss Challenge is to help you lose 10 pounds in 10 weeks. We’re offering a simple eating plan and walking program to get you started. For extra meals, menu options and a video of time-saving tips for eating right, visit dietchallenge.usatoday.com.

You can use:

Our mix-and-match, low-calorie eating program

Practical tips that will help you succeed

A basic walking program

How you can help your children lose weight

She wasn’t golfing because her stomach made it awkward, she says. She wasn’t visiting family or old friends because she didn’t want them to see how much she had gained. And she wasn’t wearing the clothing styles she liked.

She knew she had to lose weight soon or “I was going to be a fat person until I died.”

So she started following an eating plan and walking program designed especially for this year’s seventh annual USA TODAY Weight-Loss Challenge, which starts today. And since late September, Buckley, who is 5-foot-4, has lost 28 pounds, dropping from 226 to 198. She hopes to lose 50 more on the program.

The challenge was created in 2004 to offer nutrition and fitness guidance. The goal of this year’s plan: Lose 10 pounds in 10 weeks.

Buckley is one of the readers who volunteered to try out the program this past fall. Stories about readers who have trimmed down on the program will be featured every Monday through early March in the newspaper and at dietchallenge.usatoday.com.

The advice offered in this year’s challenge is based on the latest scientific evidence, which shows that dieters generally lose about 5% to 10% of their starting weight in the first three to six months on a program. For many people, that’s a loss of 10 to 20 pounds. After that, losing weight often gets more difficult.

One reason it’s hard to trim down more and keep it off is that there’s a cascade of biological responses designed to return dieters to their pre-diet levels. A hunger hormone called ghrelin increases, and a fullness hormone called leptin decreases, research shows.

“Regardless of these hormone shifts, it is still possible to lose some weight and keep it off,” says Dawn Jackson Blatner, a registered dietitian in Chicago and author of The Flexitarian Diet. “You just need to focus on making realistic diet and exercise changes.”

A flexible plan

Blatner created the eating plan that is outlined this week in the newspaper and on our website. She has helped thousands of people lose weight and has found that dieters are most likely to succeed if they have flexible meal plans that include foods they enjoy. Her meals are designed to help people limit calories while eating a diet high in fiber, moderate in satisfying protein and low in saturated (animal) fat.

To follow this plan, it’s crucial that dieters figure out how many calories they can consume to lose weight.

That’s determined by several factors, but generally, a sedentary woman can lose weight consuming about 1,500 calories a day; a sedentary man can consume about 1,800 calories a day, Blatner says. Use trial and error to figure out how much you can eat and lose weight, she advises.

If you aren’t shedding pounds on 1,800 calories a day, try trimming a couple of hundred more. Some people may need to cut back to 1,200 calories a day.

To lose a pound a week, you have to burn 3,500 calories more than you consume. So you must increase your physical activity and decrease calories to create a deficit of 500 calories a day.

Blatner created mix-and-match menus so that all the breakfasts are about 300 calories, lunches about 400, dinners about 500 and snacks about 150 calories. The plan includes simple recipes you can make at home and meals you can order when you’re dining out at restaurants or fast-food places.

“We are offering lots of choices, but you may want to pick a couple of your favorite breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks and repeat them,” Blatner says. “Many people find that eating less variety is actually helpful when they are trying to lose weight. It makes the program more automatic, and it makes it easier to cook and grocery shop.”

Buckley has adhered closely to the program over the past three months. The way she’s eating now is a far cry from her former habits. She blames her weight gain over the years on “bingeing, overeating, no portion control and not planning my meals. I am lucky I didn’t weigh more than 226 pounds.”

‘I can do that’

In retrospect, she wonders why she didn’t stop gaining sooner. “Where was I when I got to 160, 170 and then 175? Was I not weighing myself? Was I not looking in the mirror? I just kept buying bigger clothes.”

The weight-loss challenge came at a perfect time for her. She was fed up and wanted to change, and she liked the fact that the plan was simple and that the goal of trying to lose a pound a week for 10 weeks seemed achievable. “I thought: ‘I can do that,’ ” she says.

Buckley read through the menus, cleared her house of junk food and started to plan and prepare her meals.

To keep things simple, she has the same thing daily for breakfast (high-fiber cereal, fruit and skim milk) and lunch (turkey sandwich, small salad), but she varies dinner. Usually she prepares a dinner from one of the recipes in the eating plan, but occasionally she eats out, relying on the dining-out suggestions in the program. Her calories have dropped dramatically from “several thousand a day” to 1,500 to 1,550.

She has learned that she has control over what she eats. “At luncheons and dinners out, when other people have a roll and butter, I don’t. When people eat desserts, I pass.”

But she says she doesn’t feel deprived and rarely feels hungry.

And she has made great strides with exercise. She and her sister, Jonna Convery, 54, walk 3 miles every morning, and Buckley walks another mile in the evening. “The 3-mile walk was taking us 50 minutes, and now it’s taking us 41 minutes. We’re doing a mile in less than 15 minutes. That’s mega,” she says.

The steering-wheel test

Another person who responded to USA TODAY’s request for people to try the program was André Gratton, 43, of Cherryville, N.C. When it comes to losing weight, Gratton has the diet deck stacked against him. He travels frequently for his job, sits almost all day in meetings, airports and airplanes, and has a difficult time fitting exercise into his busy schedule. On top of all that, he’s a gourmet cook, and he adores ice cream and bread pudding.

“I love to cook and eat. For my job, I eat out all the time and eat at the best restaurants all over the country, so it’s tough to stick to a diet plan,” says Gratton, who manages a national staff that installs computer programs for Choice Hotels International.

But despite these daily challenges, Gratton has cut calories dramatically and exercised regularly for the past few months and has lost 40 pounds. At 5-foot-9 , he weighs 270, down from a high of 310. “I knew when I committed to the challenge that the weight would come off fast, and so far, it has,” he says. He intends to lose 50 more pounds.

He estimates he was consuming about 6,000 calories a day before he started the program, and now he’s down to 2,000. He has made several changes that contributed to the dramatic cut in calories, including:

•Cutting way back on desserts and ice cream.

•Carefully reviewing restaurant menus and choosing foods that contain a reasonable number of calories.

•Drinking his coffee black instead of with cream. He has two to four cups a day. “I thought it was going to be really hard, but I eliminated cream the first day and haven’t looked back. Just this morning, I thought how good my coffee tastes.”

•Exercising regularly. He alternates weight training one day and working out on the elliptical for 15 minutes the next.

Gratton, a single dad, says he knew he was making progress with his weight loss when his 16-year-old daughter, Katie, told him she was proud of how good he looked. He asked her how she could tell he had lost weight. Her response: “Your stomach no longer touches the steering wheel when you drive.”

As for Buckley, she says now that she has started down the weight-loss path, she doesn’t plan to get off it until she has reached her goal. “I am changing a little bit daily and have given myself a goal to reach a healthy weight within a year.”

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