Team Second Helping
Angela Baldo, Columnist, “Strength in Numbers”

Angela Baldo decided she had enough of the weight loss yo-yo — each decade of her 44 years brought another high and low. Overweight since childhood, Angela lost more than 100 pounds in her 20s to regain it all her 30s. In her 40s, Angela reclaimed her lost ground by becoming a valued member of Sparkpeople.com, a free weight loss community Web site. With the site’s tools, Angela lost more than 170 pounds.

“I worked really hard over the past year or two to get rid of 180 pounds. I organized and planned and monitored every calorie eaten and burned. I used an increasingly sophisticated series of food logs, from my old paper Weight Watchers logs, the SparkPeople.com nutrition tracker, and finally Lean Me on my iPod.”

“I weigh all my food, and have a tiny scale in my purse. From tracking steps with a pedometer to a heart rate monitor that uploads to a computer. My bathroom scale estimates body fat as well as weight. I’ve tweaked my fat, carbohydrate, and protein ratios to figure out what works best for me, experimented with various exercise regimes, and explored how bodybuilders lose fat while increasing muscle. As anyone who has lost over 100 lbs can tell you, it’s a big, hairy, long-term Project.”

She’s a Californian transplant working in plant genetics in upstate New York, and laughs that she regained her weight while finishing a PhD in genetics; a biologist should know better! Weight loss and maintenance aren’t about how smart you are, she says, but having motivation and a sound strategy.

“The irony of the situation is that I hold a graduate degree in a biological field (PhD, genetics).  If anyone should be able to understand what is happening during weight gain it should be a biologist, no?  But keeping weight off is not about how intelligent you are or how much knowledge you have.  It’s about what you do.  While earning that degree I let my own fitness and nutrition slide until I weighed well over 200 lbs.”

So in her free time Angela began applying her research chops to re-losing the weight – and keeping it off. Determined not to do this again, Angela hunts and collects the maintenance research out there for answers.

E-mail Angela at angela@secondhelpingonline.com, or visit her at SparkPeople.com under the pseudonym “4a-healthy-bmi.”