Georgia's Meals: Shaken, Not Stirred

Teachers, assistant teachers and a principal from Kinry Road Elementary School in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., are dieting together in The Early Show's Weight Off series.

They have different weight-loss goals, diet histories, ages and lifestyles. But they share the common goal of wanting a healthy lifestyle while being good role models for their students. On Monday, we found out how Georgia Butor-Pavlock is doing with the Slim-Fast plan.

Butor-Pavlock says she would like to lose 125 pounds, for Bob, her husband of 10 years, and her daughters Alexis, 9 and Natalie, 6.

At 262 pounds, she says she cannot go for hikes, amusement park rides and do all the things parents do with their children.

Though she is a veteran dieter, Butor-Pavlock says she finds dieting a mystery and her tendency is to skip meals: coffee in the morning, no breakfast and no lunch. She is determined, however, to improve her health and fitness and she is positive about the "Weight Off.

"I think this time is going to be different losing weight because I'm on TV. I don't want to be the one to not to meet this challenge," she says.
She has changed her eating routine and so far she has lost 8.25 lbs. in the last week.

"Now I eat breakfast, a small lunch and small dinner. It's where you eat and when you eat that is really important," she says noting it is easy with Slim-Fast. "I don't have to worry about making lunches or my dinner. I worry about the family and I'm all set."

She also starting exercising, "We walked an average of a half hour each day and started an exercise program," she says and so far she has felt better.

"It might be mental, but I feel a lot lighter. I feel I have more energy. At first, I was very tired. Now I just feel really great," she says.

Weight has been a struggle for Butor-Pavlock most of her life. The problem runs in her family, she says. There were a couple of years, however, when she weighed 130 pounds, but she says after the birth of her two children, her weight has been going up.

Her main challenge is to control her emotions and appetite. Her comfort food is probably cheesecake, she says, and once she starts eating it, she cannot stop.

As a child, Butor-Pavlock says she suffered cruel teasing and was on occasion shunned because of her weight. So she says she learned to cover up her feelings and keep going.

"I weighed about 173 lbs. when I was in like fifth grade. So you get teased a lot," she says. Today, she says she still continues to experience embarrassing situations in public. "As I grew older, you'd go into a shop, and you hear, 'We don't have any clothes that fit you here.' So what happened was that it hurt my mother's feelings one day and that was it. I went on a serious diet. I lost quite a bit of weight. So I can't really keep it off."

This time, however, she thinks it will be different for her, "because everybody is watching us. We're an influence to children. It's important for young kids to get a lot of exercise."

Her advice to kids is to be nicer with those who are overweight. Unkind remarks, she says, can chip away a child's self-esteem. "It makes the kids feel like they are really useless, like there's something wrong with them, that they have to be either overly nice...or they have to give away things for the other students to like them. So it's important for kids to feel good about themselves," she says.

Butor-Pavlock is a teaching assistant, but is going to school at night to get her degree.