They were unhealthy and unhappy. Something had to change. But reversing decades of bad habits is no easy feat. And yet, somehow, some way, these people found the courage to hit the reset button, accomplishing what they once thought was impossible. And they want you to know, you can, too.
Bridesmaid dresses are sometimes a source of scorn and contempt for the woman who has to align her fashion sense with the bride’s wishes, but Kim Southard can honestly say that one of those dresses changed her life.
The Nazareth woman was attending a fitting for a friend’s wedding when she had an eye-opening experience inside a David’s Bridal shop: nothing inside the store fit her, and even the largest size that could be ordered would require extra fabric to fit Southard’s frame. “I was just too big,” she recalls. “I said to myself, ‘You know what, it’s over.’ That was my pivotal moment—a dress.”
Southard was 32 years old at the time, and her decision to take back her body and control her eating habits was decades in the making. She says a difficult childhood compelled her to develop a damaging relationship with food. “It was all about control,” she says.
Southard, a nursing supervisor for ARC of Warren County, New Jersey, says she was raised by an alcoholic mother who moved the family around often. She left home when she was 18 years old and married soon after, only to be forced back into the caretaker role when her mother developed a terminal neurological disease, olivopontocerebellar atrophy, or OPCA.
As her anxiety swelled, so did her weight. “It was just non-stop eating,” she says. Her mother succumbed to the disease in 1996, just four years after her diagnosis. By this time Southard’s weight had ballooned to 300 pounds. She says she spent the rest of her 20s “depressed, anxious” and hating herself. “I made other people miserable because I was so miserable,” she says.
“I look in the mirror every day, and I say, ‘You can do this today!’”
Her obesity wasn’t just taking a toll in social situations; it began to wear on her health, as well. Southard says she suffered from pre-diabetes, hypertension, and sleep apnea. She was unable to play with her two young sons for long periods of time.
“Everything hurt,” she remembers. “Doctors were telling me, ‘You’re going to die.’”
Then came that fateful trip to the bridal boutique. Southard initially considered gastric bypass surgery, but worried that the root of her problem couldn’t be eradicated in the operating room. “I needed to change the way I looked at food,” she says. “You can change the size of my stomach all you want, but if I don’t change my mind, my stomach isn’t going to matter.” Southard joined Weight Watchers and learned how to practice a different kind of control at mealtime: portion control. She could take comfort in knowing that she would still have a say about what went on her dinner plate, but her decisions now would be governed by moderation and by a new mindset. “Food is fuel, not comfort,” Southard says.
But even as the pounds began to melt away, potholes opened up on her road to a healthier, happier self. When her then-husband lost his job, she could no longer afford to attend Weight Watchers meetings, and she saw 20 pounds of progress erased on the scale. And then there was the constant warfare with her mind: “I would find myself saying, ‘I’m a fat girl, why not just stay a fat girl. This is my life, this is the hand I was dealt.’”
Still, Southard’s will to change was stronger than the nagging voice that preyed on her insecurities. She’s lost 150 pounds over the past 12 years. “As the weight came off, I discovered the joy again of looking in the mirror,” she says. “It was like pulling myself out of a fat suit.”
Last year, she decided that she wanted to add an exercise regimen to her routine, so she joined the Liven Up Health and Fitness gym in Bethlehem. But, once again, her old fears would nip at her confidence. “I was afraid of the gym,” she says. “I was still very self-conscious about my body.” She credits the gym’s owners with making her feel welcome. Now, she says, she’s delighted by her re-awakened energy and strength: “I’ve done things that I never thought I could do, like a simple push-up!”
Southard goes to the gym four to five times a week, and her devotion hasn’t gone unnoticed. Her weight-loss story, including before and after pictures of her physical transformation, was posted publicly at the gym to inspire others. Southard says she’s thrilled that her story has served as a motivator to her fellow gym-goers; at the same time, she strives every day to motivate herself. “I look in the mirror every day, and I say, ‘You can do this today!’”
Grab-and-go was the usual solution whenever Hasanna Birdsong’s stomach started grumbling. She was putting in a lot of busy days on the road, first as vice president of advertising for the Express-Times newspaper, and later for Bethlehem-based Micro-Clean. “Lots of drive-throughs, fast-food type stuff,” she recalls. “It made it difficult to eat well.”
The Bethlehem woman says her weight wasn’t much of a concern during childhood. She says, although she wasn’t athletic, and she didn’t always make the smartest dietary choices, she looks fondly at photographs that depict her during her days as a student at Easton Area High School. “I thought I was fat,” she says. “I wasn’t. Now I look at the pictures and think, ‘I wish I could be that fat again,’” Birdsong laughs.
But Birdsong watched the numbers on the scale continue to climb as she immersed herself in the rigors of adulthood, motherhood and her demanding careers. “You’re always trying to figure out the right thing to do,” she says. Birdsong recalls feeling tired and irritable when she was hungry. A history of diabetes in her family was troubling.
But it was a milestone birthday in May of 2013—her 40th—that finally inspired Birdsong to make a real change. “I wanted my 40th year to be the year I looked and felt the best ever in my life,” she explains.
She knew her eating habits were the first thing that had to change, so she swapped her usual breakfast routine (skipping it altogether) for something new: she began each day with a protein shake from health and beauty product purveyor Arbonne International (she’s served as an independent consultant for the company for five years). “[The shakes] keep my blood sugar balanced enough throughout the day so I can make better eating decisions all day long,” Birdsong says.
“I wanted my 40th year to be the year I looked and felt the best ever in my life.”
She also loaded up her diet with fruits and vegetables. But Birdsong knew there was still one missing ingredient from her new, healthier lifestyle: exercise.
Birdsong began walking short distances, but running seemed out of reach. “I was winded after a few yards,” she remembers.
“When you tell yourself you’re unhealthy or you can’t do something, you sabotage your own process.” Even while she grappled with getting into shape, Birdsong, a self-described “social smoker” at the time, saddled herself with another health challenge: ditching cigarettes for good. “Go big or go home,” she laughs.
Despite her initial reservations and the temptation to stray off course, she forged ahead, anyway, and ran her first 5K last autumn. She followed that up with a five-mile race at Christmas time, and made a new goal in the new year to complete a half marathon in Philadelphia.
Birdsong says a strong support system is what keeps pushing her to the finish line. “I couldn’t have believed it was possible for me to run any distance without my running partners Sarah Hesener and Therese Kelley believing in me first,” she says.
“Therese was my unofficial trainer and Sarah showed up when I needed her to. They were my original accountability partners.”
Birdsong shed 78 pounds between May of 2013 and July of 2014, a feat she once never thought possible. Ultimately, running worked as her go-to exercise of choice, because, she says, it’s an activity she could partake in no matter where her hectic schedule would lead her, whether she was putting in miles on her home treadmill or getting in a workout on the road. “I put myself in a position to make sure I can be healthy no matter what.”
Even so, Birdsong says sometimes the slim silhouette she sees in the mirror is still a surprising sight. “I never thought I would be this healthy,” she admits. But maintaining her revamped lifestyle isn’t without its challenges. “Bad food still tastes good to me,” Birdsong says. “Some days are easy, and other days I really want a cheeseburger and fries. It’s a constant struggle.”
Birdsong says she doesn’t do “cheat days,” but does give herself room to practice imperfection. ”I’d never have a fast-food cheeseburger, but I would have a ‘real’ locally sourced burger from Bolete, and thoroughly enjoy it!”
And Birdsong says she constantly reaffirms her decision to transform her mind and her body for the better, despite the necessary sacrifices. “Once you decide that being healthy is how you want to be, anyone can do this,” she says. “It’s never too late to get in the best shape of your life.”
Michael Palermo of Bethlehem was what he jokingly refers to as a professional smoker.
“I was a two-pack-a-day guy. I was no amateur,” he laughs. He lit his first cigarette when he was a teenager attending Valley Forge Military Academy. “I think when you attend an all-guys school, you develop bad habits to pass the time,” he says.
Palermo, a sales manager for a manufacturing firm in Easton, estimates he tried to quit “50 plus” times in the years that followed, sometimes trying and failing multiple times in the same month. “I was never fully committed to the quit,” he says.
“I would try to stop, but I just couldn’t.”
He admits that his addiction had a firm grip on him, much to the detriment of time spent with friends and family, including his daughter: “In social situations I was always waiting for that opportunity to have a cigarette. I could never fully focus on anything.”
It took a health scare for the 41-year-old to finally cut the cord for good. Nagging chest pains sent Palermo to the hospital emergency room in March of 2013. Doctors ordered a stress test and cardiac evaluation. Ultimately, it was determined that his heart was okay, but Palermo was told he had to change his ways. “So I decided to quit cold turkey,” he says.
It would be, according to Palermo, one of the biggest challenges of his life. Luckily, soon after that fateful trip to the ER, a longtime friend called him with a proposition just in the nick of time: he wanted to run a marathon, and he wanted Palermo to do it with him. “I looked at it as an opportunity to use the training to help get through the quit,” he says. Palermo had been a cross-country runner during his school days, but hadn’t kept up with it in adulthood. “It was much easier to stay home and smoke,” he recalls. “This was like starting over.”
“I was a two-pack-a-day guy. I was no amateur.”
He used the “Map My Run” app and the Livestrong Foundation’s “MyQuit Coach” app to manage both his workout routines and his commitment to steer clear of cigarettes. “There were some really rough runs early on,” he recalls.
At the same time he was trying to get his body back in shape, he was dealing with the usual side effects of nicotine withdrawal: cravings, eating more and sleeping less. When he did sleep, he sometimes even dreamed about smoking. He wore a rubber band around his wrist that he would snap throughout the day to distract himself from thinking about lighting up. He stayed away from social situations that might tempt him to smoke, and he joined a running group in Emmaus. “That’s key—finding people who have common goals and interests,” he says.
And so, despite the ever-present temptation to slide back into his old habits, Palermo persevered. “No matter what my situation was, I knew there were other people out there struggling with much bigger things,” he says. Palermo says he hasn’t indulged in a single cigarette since his eye-opening trip to the ER: “No cheating along the way.”
In January of this year, he crossed the finish line of his first marathon (the Walt Disney Marathon in Orlando, Florida) in just over five hours. On that same day, he marked 300 days of being smoke-free. “It was a great feeling of achievement,” he recalls.
On the plane ride home, he set a new goal for himself: Palermo would run 14 half marathons in 2014, and he would run one of those races in less than two hours. He shattered the latter part of that goal in New York City just two months later.
Palermo says he was surprised to learn how many people were following his progress on social media sites like Facebook. “To have people come up to me and tell me they’ve been inspired by what I’ve done, that’s a great feeling,” he says. “That’s really the goal, to inspire people. If I can do it, they can do it.”
While Palermo says he regrets spending more than two decades of his life as a smoker, he’s glad he’s finally eradicated nicotine from his life for good. “I’m happy that I quit now because I’ve given myself a fighting chance down the road. In another ten years it might have been a different story.”
