Ann Marie Overcame Emotional Eating and Lost 96 Pounds

Before: 279 lbs.
After: 185 lbs.
Program Used: Weight Watchers

When Ann Marie Davis, 49, first learned that her mother, Ina Enid, had Alzheimer’s disease, she was overwhelmed. To care for her mom, Ann Marie uprooted her life and moved into her mother’s Oakland, Calif., home. “Having the stress of her health situation on my shoulders changed everything,” says Ann Marie, who works with disabled college students. “Suddenly, I was so preoccupied with taking care of her that I stopped being an advocate for myself.” Within a year, she had added 100 lbs. to her 5-foot-7-inch frame, bringing her to an all-time high of 279 lbs.

“When I started taking care of my mom, I noticed I was gaining weight, but I also just wasn’t feeling well,” Ann Marie recalls. “I was always cold and irritable, and I felt like sleeping all the time.” She went to see her doctor, who suggested she lose weight. “I would try to exercise, but my muscles always felt so sore. For years I couldn’t work out hard enough to break a sweat,” she says.

Her eating patterns didn’t help, either: “I’d always had a good appetite, but once my mom got sick, I turned to food for comfort and ate too much of everything, especially sweets.”

Ann Marie went back to her doctor, who diagnosed her with an underactive thyroid and put her on medication. “I lost about 15 lbs. almost immediately, and I was finally warm again,” says Ann Marie. “It was great to feel better, but I had a lot of excess weight to deal with.”

Plus, she still had to face her mother’s deteriorating health. “The overriding thing in my life at the time was my mother’s illness: I was miserable, struggling to make ends meet financially, and she couldn’t understand why I couldn’t always be there for her,” explains Ann Marie. “I lived in constant fear because I never knew what was going to happen to her next.” (People in the later stages of Alzheimer’s can become anxious or aggressive and often put themselves in danger by wandering away from home.)

In 2001, Ina died, leaving Ann Marie with a sense of overwhelming loss. “I felt like I had this huge hole in my life that I had to dig myself out of,” she remembers. It took her a full year of mourning before she felt ready to move on. Ann Marie found her own place in Oakland, and it was her new home that helped inspire her to slim down. “There were all these mirrored doors, so my reflection was everywhere,” she remembers. “Before that, I didn’t know how I looked because I never looked in the mirror. I hadn’t had my picture taken in years, and my friends never said anything. But suddenly, I was confronted with how big I had become.” The thing that upset her the most? “Obesity is one of the risk factors for Alzheimer’s, so that made me worry.”

In spite of her health fears, it still took a year before she was ready to lose the weight. “I started doing research online about the various programs,” says Ann Marie. “Then one day in April of 2004, I finally got into my car and drove around the corner to Weight Watchers.”

Whole New Outlook
The first thing Ann Marie learned was the power of positive thinking. “I had a leader who believed that I could lose the weight, and she kept me going until I was ready to believe it myself,” she says. Another challenge was learning to ditch emotional eating. “When I’m facing change, I turn to food, even now. So before I give in to a craving, I make myself have a bowl of soup first. I usually change my mind, but no matter what, I end up eating less.”

Exercise also became part of her routine again. “One day I was sitting on the couch in front of the TV and I asked myself, ‘What are you doing?’” she says. “Now there’s no couch in the room with the television — only an elliptical trainer and a stationary bike — and I alternate between those machines or swimming four or five days a week.”

Today, Ann Marie is down to 185 lbs. “I was shopping, and I had a waistline for the first time in 15 years,” she says, smiling. She also started noticing changes in the way her body felt. “My knees gave me problems when I was heavier; I couldn’t make it across the street when a light turned yellow.” These days, she’s able to sprint to beat traffic lights, and she recently completed a fund-raising swim to benefit women with cancer.

But the best part of her weight-loss journey has been the friends she has made along the way. “When I realized that this new lifestyle was something I’d have to embrace for the rest of my life, I thought it was a bad thing,” she explains. “But I’ve discovered there are people who make it worthwhile.” She’s also enjoying her role-model status. “There’s this woman in my meetings who has lost almost 50 lbs., and she told me that she was motivated by my ‘before’ picture. It makes me happy that I’m inspiring people to lose weight. It’s the best feeling in the world.”  source: quickandsimple.com