Before: 192
After: 133
Program used: Weight Watchers

It was spring of 2003 when Julie Bray, a legal assistant in Yukon, Okla., asked her son, Ethan, to describe the mother of one of his third-grade classmates.
“She’s like you, Mom,” Ethan said.

“You mean short?” asked Julie, who’s 5-foot-1.

“Noooooo,” Ethan said. Brightening, he asked, “Can I say the ‘F’ word?” Julie gaped at her 9-year-old son, astonished. “You know,” Ethan added, “she’s fat.”
“To know that my son saw me that way — that my weight trumped all of my other characteristics — just killed me,” recalls Julie, recounting the moment she decided to diet.

There was another incentive, too: Her “thin sister,” Jennifer, was getting married, and Julie dreaded being the portly matron of honor. Julie, now 39, had joined Weight Watchers in high school and college, but her losses never lasted. She returned to Weight Watchers on April 28, 2003, weighing 188 lbs. and strengthened with fresh resolve.

Julie’s weight stakes were especially high because when she was 20, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis — a chronic, often disabling disease of the central nervous system. Already, she had been jolted by its attacks. Her face had periodically frozen up and gone numb for months at a time, and sometimes her hands shook. When Ethan was 9 months old, Julie lost the use of her left arm (“and I’m left-handed!”) for five months.

Physicians had put her on medications not just to slow the progression of her MS, but to lower her high blood pressure. Obesity worsens the symptoms of MS, and Julie realized she needed every advantage she could wrangle. “I thought, ‘I can’t completely control what will happen to me physically, but I can control my weight,’” she recalls.

A New Way to Eat
Julie quickly implemented the strategies she learned at Weight Watchers. While she incorporated more veggies into her usual diet of pork chops, biscuits and quesadillas, she also focused on portion sizes. When she and her husband, Ricky, 41, ordered pizza, Julie pushed away from the table after a single slice. She dragged Ricky to Subway more times than he cared to go in order to grab a reliably low-fat turkey sub.

Ricky, an aircraft mover at Tinker Air Force Base, who is 6 feet and 204 lbs., also helped out by changing his cooking habits: He left butter out of vegetables and baked chicken in garlic or lemon and pepper instead of flipping chicken parts into a frying pan. Julie promptly began to slim down at a fairly steady rate of 2 lbs. a week.

Exercise was a challenge because MS causes fatigue as well as balance and coordination problems. But Julie rallied anyway: “My mom gave me a stationary bike, and I rode it in front of the TV.” As the pounds peeled away, her energy level increased, and soon she and Ricky started bowling together once a week.

One horrifying “Why do I even bother?” event came during the fitting of her bridesmaid blouse, which was made much too small. “The shop lady said, ‘You must have gained since we measured you’ and made me pay $97 for new blouse. I had already lost 20 lbs. by then! I walked out of there like a whipped puppy because those situations are so humiliating for a heavy person,” she recalls. What got her through? Her friend Kim Shepherd [see “Friendships That Fight Flab,” below], who was always available for a pep talk.

A Size 6!
Julie reached her goal weight of 133 lbs. on Aug. 28, 2004; she had dropped from a high of 192 lbs. “It took me longer to lose the weight — one and a half years — because I can’t do aerobics due to my MS,” she says. The struggle, though long, was oh so worth it. Julie reports that her “ooh-la-la moment came when my sister [the ‘thin sister’] and I went shopping in Dallas. We were in the dressing room, and she said, ‘Do you realize you’re wearing smaller clothes than I am?’ She was in a size 10, and I was down to a 6!” Julie, who at her heaviest wore a size 18, recalls, “I just started crying.”

Julie thought back to her bridesmaid blouse debacle and realized that the confident New Julie would not be cowed by a cruel sales clerk. “Now I’d just bring my weight-loss journal in there and say, ‘No, you’re not going to make me pay for your mistake!’”

Meanwhile, Julie has earned the admiration of, and even a bit of possessiveness from, Ricky, who notices that men at the mall tend to look longer at his wife these days. “I’m like, ‘She’s mine!’” says Ricky.

Julie has no idea what course her MS will take, but she knows her weight-loss efforts have already improved her health. Her doctor plans to stop prescribing her blood-pressure medications because she no longer needs them. “I still have these bouts of fatigue, but they’re nothing like the ones I had when I was heavy,” she says. “I feel like a new person.”

Her son’s eyes, too, have had to adjust to the New Julie. She was brushing her hair one night when Ethan stopped to stare at her. “Mom, you look beautiful,” he declared.