Losing Weight Involves New Behavior, Image

Most of all, she remembers the pain. She remembers the cold looks, the stares, the cruel jokes. She remembers the shame on her children’s faces, the doubt in her husband’s eyes.

“I’ve been that heavy person at parties that people pull away from,” Sheron Silva said. “It’s so rarely a ‘glandular problem,’ which we all like to say. I’ve been that person in the supermarket with the extra ice cream, everyone wondering why she’s so unhappy.”

For Silva, 36, obesity was the product of change. When her husband left the Air Force, “it was a real shock,” she said. “I don’t mean moving--I mean the adjustment. I was unhappy losing the security of the service. Wherever we’d go, friends were always there. The service is a close-knit society. Very protective. You’re always taken care of. For a long time, I was terribly unhappy.”

In moving from an air base in Merced to Chula Vista, Silva went from 120 pounds to 200 in 18 months. She became sullen, withdrawn, a wallflower. She stopped playing softball with her daughter, one of the bad things. One of the good things--she thought--was using obesity as a shield.

“Being heavy,” she said with a wan smile, “wow . . . you can hide behind all sorts of things. You can divorce yourself from the human race. You become a pariah, an alien.”

For William Johnson, 44, obesity played a different role. He had spent a lifetime fighting the image of the fat kid and later the fat dad.

“My children were ashamed of me,” he said. “And I can’t blame them.”

Obesity plagued Phyllis, now a leader in Overeaters Anonymous (OA), much the same way. (Phyllis, 53, explained that OA members use only their first names in print.) She was an overweight child, then a woman who added guilt and desperation to a nightmare that wouldn’t go away.

“I abused my children,” she said. “I had a violent temper. I was an angry lady, partly for all the pain. My first husband was killed at a railroad crossing. I spent a lifetime alienating people, beating up on them. I went through a scary blackout period. I overdosed on pills, tranquilizers, booze. And food. Always food!”

Haltingly, sometimes fearfully, Phyllis, Silva and Johnson now command a measure of control. They’ve controlled, Phyllis said, by “letting go,” by making themselves “powerless, which all fat people have to do.” Each has lost and kept off more than 100 pounds. Each used different methods in getting there.

The joys each feels are as real as the summer wardrobes that fit, the bellies that don’t jiggle, the children who look at parents with pride.

“The wonderful thing is that it can be maintained,” Phyllis said.

Along the way, first-time pleasures have cropped up repeatedly. Johnson is a tall, raw-boned man with a slow drawl and a kind, effacing manner. He’s noticed a mildly alarming trend recently.

“Losing that weight has had a huge effect on social life, confidence, everything,” he said. “Lately, some women are makin’ outright passes at me.”

He lost 100 pounds in 22 weeks, from a “personal worst” of 318. Phyllis came down from 225. And Silva’s 105 is up from a low of 92.

For her, a different woe set in.

“I became clinically anorexic,” she said, alluding to a crisis that experts say isn’t uncommon for thin people who once were “morbidly” obese. “We often trade one extreme for the other.”

The Silva who used to strain in walking around the block found herself running 60 miles a week, a regimen started five years ago. She learned to relax--to live and eat--in moderation.

“Now maybe I run five to six days a week,” she said. “I might run for 30 minutes or an hour. If I feel like 40, I do 40 and not a minute more.”

A small woman with curly hair and a soft Georgia accent, Silva has undergone an image change the likes of which Madison Avenue can’t match.

“Obese people give so much time to negative images,” she said. “You have to do a lot of rewriting in the mind. You’re constantly saying, ‘I’m fat, I’m ugly, people don’t like me.’ You have to change all that.”

Silva lost her weight through the program she now heads at Community Hospital of Chula Vista. Be Trim costs $145 for a five-week session, is sponsored by the National Center for Health Promotion, and is also offered at Grossmont Hospital in La Mesa. Silva likes it for the cost (one of the lowest in the county), its low-pressure approach, and its focus on changing behavior.

“We get to the cause rather than the effects,” she said. “We use self-awareness, getting into feelings--anger, exhaustion, boredom--how to give ourselves options other than food. If you’re mad at the kids, rather than start grazing in the kitchen, try to recognize the anger--do something else. Eating is always an option. But so is walking or reading a book.”

Be Trim is, Silva explained, “no diets, no pills, no shots, no hypnosis, no weigh-ins.” That alone makes it different from most weight-loss programs in America. It teaches portion control and reading ingredients.

“Be aware of additives,” she said. “Read the labels. Even when eating out, sometimes you’ll notice your hands are swollen. That’s nitrates, dyes, MSG (the preservative monosodium glutamate), who knows what all.”

Without counting calories, clients also are urged to avoid fats and junk food. “Do you realize,” she said, “that a triple-triple (cheeseburger) at Wendy’s is 1,100 calories? That’s enough for a grown man every day.”

Silva urges eating favorite foods last, least favorites first; also, taking a bite, then putting the fork down. She despises diets.

“They only reinforce the weight problem,” she said. “It has to be a ‘forever’ approach. All diets work in the short term, but the guilt people feel in going off a diet is just phenomenal.”

Physiological dangers also trouble Silva. “The reason people get so upset emotionally is that dieting means not eating at regular intervals,” she said. “Blood sugar is never normal. It’s like a roller coaster, a metaphor for the problems of the obese person in general.”

Phyllis, a tall articulate woman with a thick Long Island accent, wears jewelry and stylish glasses. Her intensity comes through in stories from a tragic past.

“Dieters are like alcoholics,” she said. “Their bodies don’t function normally--with food. Diets always mean cheating. For many, there’s always Monday morning. In OA, the byword is, ‘Do it now .’ The last thing we want to hear is, ‘I want a three-month diet, so by July I can be thin for the wedding.’ ”

Phyllis believes “Sugar Blues,” the book that is to the refined sugar industry what “The Gulag Archipelago” was to Soviet justice. Refined white sugar is at the top of the list of OA “no-no’s.”

“I can’t have a little ice cream, or a little popcorn,” she said, explaining that OA prohibits between-meal snacks. “An alcoholic can’t drink a little wine.”

The OA approach is more spiritual, she said. “It’s not so much what you’re eating,” she said with a sly smile, “but what’s eating you.”

William Johnson wants to lose 30 pounds more, and thinks he can by walking on a treadmill and sticking to the rules of The Diet Center, one of many commercial programs. This one, however, seems to work, in an ethical, safe way.

“I had been on diets most of my life,” he said. “I had gotten to the point where I felt hopeless, lost. I didn’t think I’d ever lose weight. Then I walk into Paula McIntyre’s office. (She owns an East County Diet Center.) She had such a positive attitude, I thought, hey, maybe I’ll give it a go. I still wasn’t totally convinced. As the weeks went by, the more I lost, the more encouraged I became.

“The diet itself is one of the best I’ve ever been on. You don’t get hungry. You eat six times a day. You don’t starve yourself. You eat fruit, vegetables, meats that are good. By good, I mean healthy.”

Johnson also supplements his diet with Vitamin B and protein tablets four times a day. He has avoided sugar, salt, junk food and, for the most part, alcohol. He did have a six-pack once, gaining eight pounds overnight, but was “pleasantly surprised” when McIntyre “didn’t chew me out” the next day.

Johnson doesn’t agree with those who criticize commercial programs for playing the role of a client’s conscience. He believes he’ll keep the weight off long after “maintenance” has ended. He has noticed unexpected joys from following a healthy plan rather than the fads he courted and failed at. Or, which failed him.

“I haven’t wound up with loose, flabby skin,” he said. “A friend of mine went through a program at Kaiser (a local medical center), lost 100 pounds and looks worse than before. He lost muscle instead of fat.”

Like many who lose weight--who go from morbid obesity to thinness--Johnson enjoys a new-found spiritual life. He attends church more often and feels “closer to God.” Silva speaks of the same “inner joy,” and Phyllis became “a true believer” after committing herself to the doctrines of OA.

“It’s so spiritual,” she said from the sunny living room of a home in Tierrasanta. “You find you don’t have to do it by yourself. Dieting’s such a lonely place. But with God, there is no isolation.”

She paused and, for a moment, looked determined, in a grim sort of way.

“If you’re willing to go to any lengths, you can find peace,” she said.