Before: 257 lbs.
After: 187 lbs.
Program used: Weight Watchers

Michelle Davis, a concession manager for a multiplex in College Station, Tex., was thrilled to be sent on a Hawaiian holiday with a colleague in March 2004 for doing a bang-up job promoting a blockbuster movie. But in Hawaii, Michelle declined to go horseback riding on the beach. She also turned down the helicopter tour. There was a 275-lb. weight limit for those activities — and Michelle was afraid someone would accuse her of exceeding it. While she knew she was carrying 257 lbs. on her 5-foot-8-inch frame, her fear of embarrassment weighed even more heavily on her.

Since graduating from college in 1998, Michelle, now 32, had fallen into a go-to-work/eat-eat-eat rut, piling on pounds.

When she returned from Hawaii to her home in Bryan, Tex., Michelle resolved to start taking care of herself. First step: She joined Weight Watchers. Second step: She stuck to the program — ditching super-size portions and eating more veggies. Soon she was shedding 1 to 2 lbs. a week.

Even breaking her wrist didn’t deter Michelle from beginning a walking program. She eventually began jogging for 90 minutes four or five times a week, and her rate of weight loss doubled to 3 to 4 lbs. a week. Within six months, she had lost 50 lbs. Everything was shrinking, including her breasts, and she felt terrific. So the next month, when she felt a lump in one breast while doing a self-exam, she didn’t worry. But three weeks later, when she realized the lump had become bigger, she booked a doctor’s appointment. It was bad news: She had cancer.

Grace Under Pressure

Yet Michelle saw only blue skies: “If I hadn’t lost all that weight, I might never have been able to feel it and catch it in time,” she points out. “Weight loss saved my life!”

Her mother echoes that sentiment. “I am so thankful she lost all that weight,” says Joyce Davis. By the time Michelle discovered the lump, Joyce adds, the cancer “had already gone into her lymph nodes. In another year, she might have been gone.”

Michelle had a lumpectomy and had 26 lymph nodes removed in December. Three days after she was released from the hospital, she resumed her walking program.

At the second of Michelle’s eight chemotherapy treatments, a nurse warned her that she would gain 30 to 40 lbs. because her body would bloat up from the chemo. “I told her, ‘No way am I gaining 40 lbs.!’”

After reading that a healthy diet can reduce the risk of cancer, Michelle, with her doctors’ approval, went on an antioxidant kick, drinking green tea every day and upping her consumption of spinach, broccoli and blueberries. While she didn’t gain the 40 lbs. the nurse predicted, her weight loss indeed slowed down. But it was the following 10 weeks of radiation, five days a week, that “really put me at a standstill,” she says, because the burns on her chest — a common side effect of radiation — were so bad she could barely move. Since foot numbness made running difficult, Michelle joined a gym to use its elliptical trainer and leg-press machine.

In August, after she had finished treatment, Michelle took a trip to Europe. She ate crêpes and gelato, drank wine and walked everywhere. When she returned, she had lost a pound!

Michelle now weighs 187 lbs. Her new goal is to reach 150 lbs. by April. But the biggest change has been internal. “I’m a more pleasant person,” she says. “If you feel bad about yourself, you take it out on other people. Even though my weight loss exposed something tragic, I knew I could turn it into a positive. Tragedy,” Michelle concludes, “really can make you stronger.”