Whenever Pat Beyer gets the urge to splurge, she picks up a 5-pound bag of sugar.
“Five pounds of sugar is heavy,” says Pat, a 41-year-old resident of Huntingtown, Maryland. “When I think that I lost the equivalent of five of those bags, it’s easy for me to resist temptation.”
Pat found the extra 25 pounds after giving birth to twins in 1992. Three months later, she found the motivation to get rid of them when she saw a family photo. “I stood out in the photo, but not because of my outfit,” she recalls.
A size 14 and only 5 foot 4, Pat knew that she had to make a change. She joined Weight Watchers in October and was down to a size 8 at her twins’ christening the following February.
Pat has successfully kept off her weight, but not without temptation. She has that bag of sugar as a reminder of what she used to weigh. “I remember coming back from the grocery store one day and lifting that 5-pound bag of sugar to put it in the pantry,” she says. “I thought, ‘I lost five times that much!’
That realization has rescued Pat from many a sticky dietary situation over the years. She recalls one incident in 1998, when she was § feeling particularly frazzled. “The kids hadn’t eaten, and they had to be at T-ball and soccer practice on the opposite sides of town,” she says. “I figured that the easiest thing was just to stop at McDonald’s on the way.” As she reached for her keys, she remembered the sugar.
“I’d taken off five bags of sugar, and I didn’t want to add one back on,” Pat says. She put down the keys and went to the kitchen to prepare a quick meal of chicken and vegetables.
WINNING ACTION
Pick up a bag of sugar. Find a symbol of your weight loss—a 5-pound bag of sugar, a can of Crisco, or a slab of bacon. When somebody says McDonald’s, think about your symbol. Pick it up to remind yourself of how far you’ve come and how much additional weight you’d have to carry around if you gained it back.
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