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Five years ago, Jody Hoelle weighed 215 pounds. One day she noticed that her vision
was blurry. “I couldn’t read street signs even when I was standing right in front of
them.” Tests showed that her eyes were fine—the problem was she was mildly diabetic.
“When I heard that, I went white. I felt faint. All I could think of was that I would
go blind and lose my limbs.”
“Just Taking a Few Steps Wore Me Out.”
Jody’s doctor told her she could control her condition with diet and exercise, but
at first she felt too hopeless to try. “I’d already dieted so many times before and
never kept the weight off. It took me a while to try again.” A few weeks later she
started trying to eliminate the “garbage” from her diet. “But I didn’t start
exercising for two years. I tried a little walking, but it was really hard. I was
always tired, both from the diabetes and from carrying around so much weight. Just
taking a few steps wore me out.”
In 1996 Jody took a course called “The Better Weigh” at the Loma Linda University
Hospital, where she learned how to incorporate exercise into a weight-loss program.
But for two more months she was still too discouraged to get started. “Then, one
morning, I just woke up and decided to ’just do it.’”
Making a Run for It
She began walking two miles a day and—following the Loma Linda recommendations—running
for a few seconds halfway through each walk. “Fear gripped me because I’d feel a
sharp pain in my chest for a couple of seconds and I was afraid I was having a heart
attack. But I’d read somewhere that you only had to worry about chest pain if it
lasted more than a minute. So I just kept walking. And I was exhilarated by the
thrill of having run.” It took several months before the chest pain and palpitations
went away.
Jody faced other obstacles too. “Several well-meaning friends said they were worried
about me exercising, and warned me about the possibility of hurting myself.” Then
there was the opposite extreme. “As I waddled down the street, people would laugh at
me. They shouted obscenities about my being so obese.”
I’m an Athlete, Not a Dieter
Despite these physical and emotional hurdles, Jody stuck with her exercise program and
a low-fat, low-calorie diet. She lost 80 pounds in about 18 months. “At one point,
a friend said to me, “you should have been an athlete.” I decided then that was how
I was going to define myself rather than as a dieter.”
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