About Second Helping

Hi there and welcome!

You lost weight? So now what? Now you step back up to the plate.

Second Helping is an online magazine examining life after weight loss. As you’re near closer to your goal weight, and especially after you hit it, the challenges surrounding “maintenance” aren’t limited to eating and exercise — it’s just as much about catching your brain up to your body, letting everyone else catch up to your changes, and exploring where to go from there. These challenges are largely overlooked; not only does Second Helping discuss weight management frankly and honestly, we offer solutions or tools to keep making your life beyond your wildest imagination.

To that end, The Second Helping Manifesto is an overview of our mission and point of view.

We post news, interviews, commentary and analysis on various post-weight topics in food/cooking, loose skin issues, coming to terms with your success (it can be harder than it sounds!), style, and anything we find applicable to life, post-fat pants.

Because weight loss (even sustaining it) doesn’t occur in a vacuum, the The Second Helping Toolbox houses strategies, tips, product suggestions and more geared toward balancing time, money, your body, and your mind’s needs.

Myself and my cooking partner Kevin DeMarco co-write Rabbit Food for Lions, a cooking column teaches high-end healthful recipes and explains how their techniques can improve even the simplest meals. More philosophically, we want to apply improvisational cooking techniques to health food, and provide a new relationship with food — one of freedom.

We also feature a variety of bloggers who provide a first-person accounts of how their lives changed — the good, the bad and the ugly — after a weight loss. Their realizations, issues, lessons learned and mistakes made offer a tremendous amount to learn.

Work in Progress is by the lovely (and very well dressed) Jenna Cameron, who took on two major life changes at the same time — leaving behind obesity and entering college life. She keeps reconciling life before with life after, relishing the advantages of losing weight — did we mention she likes clothes? — dealing with its challenges in her relationships and redefining who she is, on her terms.

The Things We Carry is the story of Brooks Firth, a Texan bombshell who left the Mason-Dixon for Cambridge Mass. Unlike many of us at Second Helping, Brooks never had a weight problem until she gained 40 pounds from a steroid prescription. Suddenly she saw the world from a “fat” perspective, and even after she lost it again life — politics, current events and a new life as a New Englander — wasn’t the same.

My Husband Made Me Eat It is a new addition to Second Helping from Patty Newbold. When a marriage counselor loses 150 pounds, how does her own marriage change? Why does her husband keep ice cream in the house? The answers are seldom simple, as Patty finds. So she keeps exploring all the nuances of betrothed weight loss.

Second Helping v. 1.0 is my story of how I lost a total of 245 pounds while also working as a food writer, and how my relationship with food, fitness, myself and everyone else changed as a result. Written after the loss of my mother and life turning upside down, you could say it’s the story of how I stepped back up to the plate.

If you’re wondering why we named a weight loss site after a second helping, check out our history page. You can meet the entire team, also.

So grab a chair and a place at the table.  Join in the conversation — you’re among friends here.

Best,
Russ Lane
New Orleans, Louisiana
August 2009