Top Shrinkdown teams share their weight-loss secrets

By CINDI ROSS SCOPPE

Associate Editor

THE SITUATION was getting desperate.

Sure, some members of our team had been doing extremely well on the Greater Columbia Shrinkdown. (Including me: six pounds so far.) And our official weight-loss average going into today’s sixth weekly weigh-in was 3.8 pounds — a full pound better than the average for all 4,776 participants and ahead of 38 of the 61 teams vying for top honors.

But I’m in this to win. And with just four more weigh-ins to go, we were 6.2 pounds behind event leader Three Rivers Medical Association.

I had to know their secret. But how?...

Aha! I would tell them I was writing a column about their success. That’s the great thing about being a journalist: People will tell you anything.

I called Lori Dalrymple, a 28-year-old X-ray technician who was happy to spill the beans.

“It’s easy to lose weight if you have a group,” she said. “Not easy, but easier.... It’s always helpful if you know when you get to work people aren’t going to be walking around eating chocolate cake.”

I don’t know what kind of office you work in, but nobody walks around eating chocolate cake at The State. We sit....

But enough about motivation. Let’s get down to the nuts and bolts — or the nuts and vegetables.

“If one of the girls is eating something they don’t need, we’ll say, ‘Are you supposed to be eating that?’” she said.

Hmmm. Maybe if I started snatching food from my teammates’ mouths ....

Inspired by TV’s “The Biggest Loser,” Lori and her co-workers started staging weight-loss competitions last year. (She’s lost 60 pounds and wants to drop 10 more. One colleague has lost 50 pounds, and another between 30 and 40.) So they know the drill: “Try to drink a lot of water. The majority of us are doing low-carb, low-fat. If we drink soda, it’s diet soda. Cutting sugar is the biggest thing. Unsweetened tea. Splenda in your coffee.”

Yeah, yeah. I know all that. I need the secrets.

Lori keeps giving me sensible answers: “The first week or two you lose a big bunch of weight, then nothing. Don’t give up, because you do kind of plateau out.

“You can eat regular food; it’s just knowing portion size. You can eat macaroni and cheese, but don’t eat enough for ten.

“Another problem people have — they have a plate and they finish the plate whether they’re hungry or not.”

Dieting is only half the equation, she continues. Her team exercises, together, daily. Team members go for a walk at lunch. Some also walk at home. For the Shrinkdown, four joined a gym, where they work out several days a week.

That’s four of the five of them — which Lori concedes may be the key. Get too big a group, and it’s hard to keep an eye on everybody. (Stop eating that!)

Unfortunately, it’s too late to whittle my 24-person team down to a core of motivated dieters. And who knows? I might be one of the people voted off the island.

So I extend my opposition research to the other big loser, First Baptist Church of Lexington, which held down first place for the first four weeks and still is within striking distance with a 9.2-pound average loss.

Assistant Pastor Hector Rodriguez is every bit as talkative as Lori. He’s got plenty to talk about, having dropped 20.5 pounds on his way to losing 100 by September, when the church christens a new worship center.

His daily routine starts with a mile on the treadmill. “And diet of course is big, just watching the portions I eat,” he said. “I personally am trying to stay away from starchy foods, which is huge for me. Drink more water, naturally. Just common-sense things. I eat more fruit between meals, to take that edge off. I’m eating more salads.”

The church’s 10 team members have been shaping up on their own. but as word has gotten around about how well they’re doing, interest is growing. Add the need Pastor Hector and some fellow shrinkers feel to continue beyond the eight-week campaign — “We don’t want to be known as Fat Baptist Church” — and you see why he’s been tapped to create a more permanent shrinking program for the congregation.

He’s not sure yet what he’ll do, but he’s not worried. “Those that are caught up in it are excited about it, and it’s just going to be a matter of recruiting some more people and letting them know what we’ve done so far and that it’s not that bad and it’s just a mind-over-matter deal.”

He’s the perfect Shrinkdown evangelist. “I’m 50 years old, and I’ve been trying to do this for 20-some years, but it always seems like there was something getting in the way,” he said. “But it just came to the point where I said, ‘You know what? I’m gonna get with it.’ Just a few changes in lifestyle make that big a difference, and I’m still at it, I’m excited. I’m having a ball with it.”

I am dejected. My fact-finding-mission has turned up no silver bullets, no magic weight-loss pills. Which means my teammates and I will have to settle for the slow, sensible routine of eating less and exercising more.

On second thought — maybe it’s not too late to switch teams ....

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.

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