After being heavy all her life, Kim now welcomes compliments. Unconventional exercise methods (dancing to video games) and a kitchen-savvy husband helped her drop the weight for good.

I’d been heavy since kindergarten, which made it hard growing up — I remember getting teased a lot, especially in middle school, when kids can be really cruel. When classmates made comments, I’d tell them, "I was born overweight; it’s heredity," but then I’d go home and binge to relieve the stress, which only packed on more pounds.

As I got older, I felt unattractive compared to my thin friends, and I’d never want to go dancing or shopping with them. At trendy stores, I’d feel like everyone was looking at me and thinking, "What are you doing here? You can’t wear any of these clothes!"

I tried counting calories and exercising to lose weight on my own — I even ate grapefruit for breakfast and popcorn for lunch for an entire summer — but I wasn’t making healthy lifestyle changes I could stick with, and I’d just gain it back.
Needless to say, I didn’t have very high hopes when I went to my first Weight Watchers meeting and started following the POINTS® Weight-Loss System — I just tagged along with my husband’s mother and aunt.

But after I started seeing a couple pounds drop off every week*, I started thinking, "I can really do this."

My big milestone? The first time I bought clothes somewhere other than Lane Bryant. Just being able to wear a size 16 from Old Navy opened up a whole new world. My 10-year high-school reunion is coming up this year, and now that I’m a size 8, I can’t wait to show everyone how much I’ve changed.

The Perfect Husband?
My husband has always been the cook in our house, and he loves the challenge of turning our favorite recipes into low POINTS value extravaganzas. One of our favorites is pizza using a whole-wheat crust and a topping of veggies and just a little cheese. It’s really good! And since he’s been eating better with me, my husband — who I never thought would change his eating habits — has lost weight too! The fact that we’re in this together, and can be there for each other when, say, one of us is craving ice cream, has really brought us closer.

On top of that, we love to show each other off! If we have a formal event in the evening, we’ll really dress up and then bask in the compliments we always get. My weight never bothered my husband, but I know he enjoys it when his friends tell him, "Your wife is hot!" I also feel much better about our health — I used to worry about him even more than I’d worry about myself, because he needed to lose more weight than I did. But now we’re planning to join a co-ed soccer league, something I never could have imagined us doing a few years ago.

Staying Cool at School
My biggest challenge? Avoiding sweets at school. I teach junior high, and there’s always a lot of food sitting around the teacher’s lounge — teachers love to bake cookies. It was even harder around the holidays, when all the kids were bringing me food as gifts. I would thank them and then, as soon as they were gone, give the sweets to the other teachers!

My students have been really impressed with my weight loss. I have a wedding picture hanging up in my classroom, and the kids will look at it and say, "That was you? I don’t remember you looking like that!" They just don’t believe it.

There’s another motivator at school too: We have double flights of stairs, and I used to get to the top of them and hope no one would talk to me because I’d be so out of breath. Now those stairs are nothing. I’ll never go back to my old eating habits — I feel so much healthier, more attractive and more confident now; and I want to stay this way forever.

The Video-Game Workout
I was never a big exerciser, but then I got this cool little PlayStation game called Dance Dance Revolution, where you move your feet along with the game on a special floor pad. The fast songs give you a great aerobic workout, and I’ve gone through quite a few of those dance pads! Then in September I did a walk for breast cancer, because my grandmother died of the disease. My sister-in-law did it with me, and while we were on the walk we said, "You know, we should run a marathon."

Mind you, I had never run before in my life. But we started a training program, and now I run four or five miles three times a week, plus a long run on the weekend. My sister-in-law and I do our long runs together, because, like everything, it’s much more fun when you have somebody with you.