“With summer coming on it was a good time,” said Jan Gustafson of the winning team “Sizable Siblings.”
“June is when I normally start thinking about doing something like this and this was a good start to that,” he said.
Jan, along with Mary Lee, Melissa Ingle and Bob Hall, took the prize for greatest weight loss over the three month contest, shedding 124 pounds as a team. As Lee explained, it was a lifestyle choice.
“We really just became aware of the amount of fat in a cheeseburger,” she said. “Now it’s just a lifestyle choice.”
Jan agreed about the cheeseburger.
“All I could think about was how long I was going to have to run to get rid of that cheeseburger,” he said. “The further we went, the easier it got.”
For Dan Sherwood of the second place (and corporate champs Del-Monte) it was the same.
“You have to cut out the pop,” he said. “We all still like to have a beer occasionally, but we all cut back on the pop we drank all day.”
While they admit it was hard work, “…we didn’t starve ourselves either,” admitted Lee.
“When we first started, I wouldn’t touch anything with my mouth I wasn’t sure about,” she said. “We have Bruno’s cheese pizza once a week now. There are those little ‘cheat’ nights you can have, but you have to know what it’s going to take to get rid of that. You have to be aware and make a lifestyle change.”
A lot of that change was, simply, exercise.
“You just find time to do it,” said Sherwood. “A lot of the guys got up at 4:30 a.m. to get it in because then it was done and when the kids’ soccer practice or whatever comes up in the evening, you don’t have to worry about it.”
“We started running about seven miles, three times a week,” said Lee of she and Gustafson’s approach to exercise, adding with a laugh, “It didn’t start at seven miles. It started out with maybe a mile.”
“Maybe a half a mile,” said Gustafson with a smile, saying his biggest obstacle was one of pain. “My feet just hurt so bad to start it was hard to come back a day later and do all that again. After awhile, when the weight started coming off, the pain stopped because there was so much less stress on my feet.”
That very fact was really brought home to Ingle this week.
“I started wearing a weight belt, about 15 pounds to start training for hiking,” she said. “That’s about what I lost and I started realizing, ‘Wow, how did I carry this around for so long?’”