Team Second Helping
Patty Newbold, Columnist, “My Husband Made Me Eat It”

Patty Newbold, then & now. Having gotten her marriage right the second time around, she also explores how her weight influences her new marraige at Second Helping.

When Patty Newbold showed up as a student at MIT way back when, she weighed the same as that year’s Miss America, just 125 pounds. And she stood three inches taller! She had always been a skinny kid.

A couple years out of MIT, though, Patty hit 180, and it’s been an up-and-down journey ever since. On Christmas Day, 2006, she peaked just shy of 280 pounds. It took 21 months to drop 130 of them and start really enjoying life again.

At her new weight, Patty walks everywhere and enjoys being a kid again, now with her two always running, climbing, jumping, giggling grandchildren.

She thumbs her nose at the statins, blood pressure meds, and glucose meter that snuck up on her while she was thinking about losing weight; she doesn’t need them any more.

These days, Patty writes and speaks about how to enjoy being married or in any other permanent relationship. It began with an argument with her first husband, culminating with a list of needs she had that weren’t being met. He died the next day.

“When I got to the bottom of my list that morning after he died, I realized for the first time in my 34 years that marriage isn’t about my needs or his needs or about how well we communicate about our needs. And it really doesn’t require any hard work after all.

“Marriage is about loving and being loved. That’s all. Life is about meeting (or letting go of) my own needs. Marriage is about loving another person and receiving his love in return. I had thought that I would receive more love when my husband gave more. Now it suddenly became oh so clear that receiving love is something I make happen, not him.”

Patty has since remarried, applying what she learned from her first marriage. On her Web site Assume Love, she and her guest bloggers delve into marriage issues and how to overcome them.

She brings to it her ten years of helping Positive Psychology researchers study what makes us happy, her 35 years as a management consultant seeing what a mess unhappy marriages make of our work lives, her training in several marriage education programs, and her own experience as a widow who definitely got it right the second time around.

That includes guiding your relationship through weight changes, up or down, and the lifestyle changes that go with them. Or making jokes about your loose skin — Patty wants to put hers in the shape of a daisy!

More about Patty | See her marriage Web site Assume Love, or e-mail Patty at patty@secondhelpingonline.com.