Meet: Jennette Fulda, aka PastaQueen, author of Half-Assed: A Weight-Loss Memoir

Age: 28

Occupation: Web designer/developer

Where she lives: Indiana

Pounds Lost: 200

How long it took to lose the weight: 2 years

How long she has kept it off: 4 years

She’s funny, inspirational, and oh yeah – she lost 200 pounds – more than half her weight! Jennette Fulda blogged about her weight loss journey here. Then she wrote a book about it all, appropriately called, Half-Assed: A Weight-Loss Memoir. I missed meeting her at BlogHer this year, but always wanted to connect. So, when one of her readers wrote me about how incredible she thought Jennette was, I knew it was time to get in touch. After all, someone with Jennette’s sense of humor just had to get a kick out of getting a Weight Loss WooHoo! right? – It’s FatFighterTV’s fun way of celebrating healthy weight.

How Jennette gained the weight:
“I’d always been overweight as a child and I just kind of slowly kept gaining weight year after year after year. I never yo-yo dieted, but I yo-yo exercised. Freshman year of high school, I joined the marching band and I probably lost some weight there. Between high school and college, I started walking a lot and I probably dropped about 40 pounds. But then I went to college and I started eating a lot and I didn’t keep up with my exercise. So I kept gaining and gaining and gaining and it got to a point where I didn’t want to step on a scale because I didn’t want to know how much I weighed. Eventually I was 372 pounds.”

“I was afraid I was going to be over 400 pounds, so I was actually kind of relieved (laughs) it was only 372. It was like I’d lost 30 pounds already! You gotta think positive.”

Wake-up Call:
“About a year before I started (losing weight) I had a gall bladder attack, which was extremely painful. I had to have my gall bladder removed – that was kind of scary. I was like, I’m pretty young to be having surgery. This is only a harbinger of things to come. My health is definitely starting to decline and I’m only in my 20’s.’  So I said, ‘Okay I’m going to lose the weight this time. Then three days after surgery I kind of forgot about my promise.”

“In the next year, my younger brother started to lose weight. He was eating pretty normal food and just exercising more, so he kind of made it seem like something I could do.”

How she shed the pounds:
“The first week, I just started walking. The week after that, I started making dietary changes. I started experimenting with recipes. Once I got to a point where I had six or seven recipes that I knew were good for me and I liked, it started to get a little bit easier. I basically followed the South Beach Diet.”

“There were some days where I was like, I’ve lost 50 pounds but I still have to lose another 150. There were times where I just wanted to fast forward to the endpoint.”

Weekly workouts:
“In the summer, I’m usually running. There’s this nature trail near my apartment that’s really nice so I’ll usually run on that. Now it’s gotten kind of colder so I’m using the workout room in my apartment complex – it has an elliptical trainer and a treadmill. I own dumbbells so I can do weight training. And I also do Pilates.”

Diet Philosophy:
“I try to make more healthy choices than not. If it’s my birthday, I’m going to eat cake! I have pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving. I just try not to binge or get into a pattern where I’m making a lot of unhealthy choices.”

Daily challenge:
“I got a new job in January and I’m working in a bigger department with more people, so there’s definitely a bigger temptation to eat out, just to be social and hang out with people. Eating out and eating healthy can be really difficult, particularly because I work with a lot of guys.”

“If I’m having problems at work or in relationships or if I’m feeling really down, it can be harder to stick to the diet because coping with food is kind of my drug of choice. I find that when my life is going well, my diet tends to go better too.”

Tips from Jennette:
“Everyone needs to find what works for them. And don’t be too hard on yourself. If you’re succeeding 80-90 percent of the time, you’ll start to make progress.”

Favorite healthy recipe:
Peanut Butter Crepes

Jennette’s Weight Loss WooHoo!:
“I would have to say it’s basically my mobility. I can walk from the far end of the mall and I can walk all around the mall then come back and I’m not totally out of breath – I’m not exhausted; my knees don’t hurt. It’s really just a sense of freedom that I get because when I was that heavy, it really constricted how far I could go. It made my world smaller because I couldn’t go as far without hurting myself. So the freedom physically that comes with weight loss really makes me go, WooHoo!”

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Freedom. Wow, that’s powerful, isn’t it? Glad we finally connected, Jennette. And I can’t wait to try those Peanut Butter Crepes – yum!

See more weight loss success stories on the Weight Loss WooHoo! Wall of Fame.

If you know of someone who deserves this honor, just let me know – send me an email at sahar [at] fatfightertv [dot] com

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