Teacher Inspired To Lose Weight

Last June, The Early Show's Dave Price met a middle school teacher from Ohio who wrote to Price telling him about her plan to lose weight. He helped her get started. But in the end, she got the body she wanted all by herself. The following is Price's report.

My story aired on The Early Show in March 2004. And it really got the attention of someone who lived a few hundred miles away.

"Hi Dave," Lori Black read from her letter. "I'm a middle school teacher in Ohio and I had the TV on while grading papers in school early this morning. I found your story touching because I am at that same point in my life right now.

Black wasn't exactly what you'd call fat. But over the years she'd fallen into a pattern that left her heavier than she wanted to be. Eating right was a problem.

She says, "My husband likes to snack so when he starts snacking pretty soon I'm joining him, and I'm snacking, too."

She also needed exercise. And she knew it.

A friend says, "I think that's the thing that she feels she's lacking, but it's hard to find the time. She's working on a masters degree; she has three little kids; her husband has a job, she has a full time job. It's hard to get everything done."

Black said she wanted to lose weight the way I'd been able to: no pills, no operations, no expensive gyms. She had the motivation; all I could do was give her a pep talk.

"How motivated are you right now?" I asked.

"Very motivated," Black said.

"How motivated?"

"One-hundred and ten percent motivated," she added.

"You're going to get this done?" I continued.

"No doubt. No doubt," she confirmed.

And her resolution showed. Thirty pounds lighter and looking great on The Early Show, she shares what she did to shed the pounds.

"First of all, I really got active this summer," she says. "I tried to do something every day exercise-wise. I think that changed my metabolism. I was able to lose weight. And then just ate really light during the daytime, stayed away from the vending machine at school. And I got a pedometer."

Price notes the pedometor only costs between $5 and $10 and it measures how far a person walks.

"Now it's become a habit," Black says. "I take the long way to make copies, or I park at the end of the parking lot and walk in. So I get those extra steps in."

She notes it was Price who inspired her all along.

"I had been trying to lose weight and couldn't," she says. "I was getting so frustrated because everything you seem to read about surgery or personal chefs, personal trainers, diet pills. When I read he had done it all on his own, I admired that much more than having something else to fall back on to lose the weight."

Today, she says she is enjoying her life and compliments she gets.
How has it changed her life?

"Kind of embarrassing sometimes, but I feel good about the way I look," she says. "I feel better. I have three kids to keep up with. And I teach and take classes. So I need that extra energy."