Janet McCutcheon, 35, of Plymouth, Minn., knew that if she just put her mind to it, she could slim down.
And that's what she did. Over the past four months she has dropped 16 pounds and now weighs 150, down from a high of 166. She's 5-foot-8.
"The first week was hard, but once I started seeing results, I became more motivated and it got easier," says McCutcheon, director of sales for Hilton Garden Inn in Eden Prairie, Minn.
She is one of the readers who volunteered to try out the USA TODAY Weight-Loss Challenge program at the end of September. This year's seventh annual challenge is designed to help people lose 10 pounds in 10 weeks.
The advice offered in the plan is based on the latest scientific evidence, which shows that dieters generally lose about 5% to 10% of their starting weight in the first three to six months on a program. For many people, that's a loss of 10 to 20 pounds. Stories about readers who have trimmed down are being featured every Monday through early March in the newspaper and at dietchallenge.usatoday.com.
When McCutcheon started trying to lose weight last fall, she was preparing meals for herself but found she wasn't good at limiting her intake. "My portion sizes were really out of whack. They were double what they should have been."
So she decided to get her meals from Seattle Sutton's Healthy Eating, a company that offers meals that are freshly prepared and can be warmed up. She went in on Mondays and picked up three days of meals, and then back on Thursdays to pick up another four days' worth.
The meals tallied about 1,200 calories a day, and she bought her own snacks to bring her calories to 1,500 a day. The cost: a little over $100 a week for three meals a day, including fresh fruits and vegetables.
As with many dieters, McCutcheon found she was hungry at first.
"I'm not going to pretend that I wasn't hungry, but it got better quickly," she says. "It really is true that your body feels better and doesn't need as much when you're fueling it with good foods."
She used the service for 12 weeks, and now she occasionally picks up meals but mostly does her own cooking or goes out.
Throughout, McCutcheon has been consistent with her exercise. She works out for an hour or more a day, including strength training and walking or running on the treadmill.
Despite her workout schedule, she still considers herself a sedentary person: "My exercise is just making up for the fact that I'm sitting at my desk all day."
She and her husband, John, both wore pedometers. He works in the banquet department at another Hilton and is moving about all day. "He got 15,000 steps in a day," she says. "I got 2,000. I may work out an hour, but I'm still only getting up to 12,000 steps in a day."
Now that she's at her goal weight, McCutcheon is trying to maintain it by continuing her workout routine and consuming about 1,500 calories a day. She occasionally eats a little more when she goes out to dinner.
But she is determined to keep it off: "I never want to have to lose 16 pounds again."
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