Julie Wheaton Discovers the Formula for Success and Wins the 2010 Round 2 iSatori 911 Ultimate Transformation Challenge

By Sue Mosebar, Executive Editor

Where: Highlands Ranch, Colorado

Occupation: Sergeant with the Denver Police Department Sex Crimes Unit

At some time or another, we've all heard that weight loss is a math game: consume less calories than you burn, and you'll lose.

Julie Wheaton, a sergeant with the Denver Police Department Sex Crimes Unit, had heard that for years, but she never really knew how to apply it to her own body. That is, until her department provided some clear cut numbers and iSatori helped out with a formula to help her really succeed.

Climbing into the BodPod

Before Julie had ever even heard of the iSatori 911 Ultimate Transformation Challenge (911 UTC), she was given an unusual opportunity. The chance to find out exactly how many calories her body burned in one day.

"If you asked me the one single thing that really helped me succeed, it was counting my calories. When I started thinking about calories, pounds, and weight, I had no idea how many calories I ate, and I had no idea how to judge how many calories I was burning. None! Then, about a year before I joined the iSatori 911 UTC, my department, which played a huge role in helping me, provided the opportunity to go into a 'BodPod.' I learned what my base metabolic rate was. I now know if I lie still for 24 hours, doing nothing, I will burn 1,064 calories. So I found out I needed to cut some calories, and I needed to burn some calories. And that's how I got started."

In addition to providing the BodPod opportunity, the Police Department ran a pedometer challenge, which Julie took part in. "Before the pedometer contest, I would have guessed I easily walked 10,000 steps a day. Because I don't go home from work and sit down. I have a little kid. I run around, we go to the playground, we go outside. I take care of my home, do laundry… my 'second shift' starts when I get off of this job. I sit down when I lie down to go to bed. That's it."

But curiously, Julie learned that on average, she only walked 8,000 steps a day. Probably because she has a desk job. But all she had to do was add a simple walk in the afternoon, and she would shoot up to 13,000 or 14,000 steps.

Most importantly, she learned how to count her outgoing calories as well as her incoming.

And ultimately, what this information provided Julie was what made her brave enough to start the Challenge.

Halway through the Challenge, Julie was already looking and feeling better than she had in years!

But Why? Three Doses of Motivation

The question then was why bother with the iSatori 911 UTC?

Julie wasn't completely inspired by swimsuit season. Oh, she wants to look good in a swimsuit—after all she heads for the beach at least a couple of times a year on vacation. And she had never before been ashamed of how her body looked. But in the last few years, she had been slowly adding weight. And she no longer felt as confident as she had in the past.

Plus, she had always been really physically active and physically fit. "I was put in gymnastics at the age of 3, and I was a competitive gymnast from the age of 7 until I was 19. I kind of took for granted how fit I had been my whole life. Even after I had my baby, I got back into shape pretty easily because I'm so busy with my daughter and my work."

But over the last couple of years, Julie found she had put on weight—every year, she found she was just a few pounds higher. "It went up for maybe three years, and I saw some pictures of me from a vacation, and I saw how out of shape I had gotten."

And though she was still wearing the same clothes she had been wearing for several years, those few pounds she had gained each year made her feel stuffed into her clothes. "I felt embarrassed about how I looked." Julie added laughingly, "Like when I would run off after my daughter, things would bounce around that hadn't bounced around before."

Now, however, she had her most important reason. Approaching her 40th birthday, she takes her health very seriously because, she explains, "I'm a total sissy when I'm sick. I hate to get sick! God-forbid I ever faced a true medical issue because I'm a horrible patient. Personally, my worst nightmare would be having to go see a doctor every week. I would hate that!"

Julie continues, "My theory is that if being fit and having a healthy diet can prevent me from ever having to battle breast cancer or heart disease, why wouldn't I do that now?"

With Julie's hectic work schedule and intense job, plus a young child, husband, and home to care for, it's probably not surprising that Julie didn't always feel great. In fact, she simply felt tired.

So Julie took a hard look at her age—39 when the contest started and the age of her daughter—six. She thought about her parents who have health complications now that they're in their mid-60's. Julie explains, "I used to make lots of excuses all the time—I have a demanding job, I have a little girl, I have a husband and a house, and all this stuff, and what I realized is that I have to make it a priority, and there can't be any more excuses because there's never going to be a convenient time in my life to get started."

Diet Awareness

Probably the worst part for Julie was she started to feel sick sometimes—just nauseous. "I think it was a result of some of the crap I was eating."

But Julie wasn't eating crap all the time because she likes to eat the "good stuff," like salads. And her diet really wasn't "that bad." However, Julie was almost eating a kind of vegetarian diet, and she wasn't getting enough protein. "I think I put on weight by overdoing it on carbs," she says. But because Julie didn't particularly have a sweet tooth and wasn't reaching for cake and ice cream, she had never looked at her diet. Her weakness was crackers and that type of thing, and she had no idea the added calories she was providing her body.

In addition, Julie was simply accustomed to not worrying about her diet. "Being a competitive gymnast, I worked out five nights a week for three hours at a time, so I could eat whatever I wanted. Then, once I was an adult, I stayed active enough—water skiing, skiing, hiking, swimming… so my weight didn't get completely out of control." But it did slowly get worse, and it wasn't getting any better.

At first, Julie figured her age probably had something to do with it, but for the first time in her life, she took a hard look at what she was eating and was surprised. "I had no idea the calories I was taking in, and I had no idea how little protein I was getting, and that's why I think I was always hungry."

A New Workout Routine

Julie's Program

Julie followed the Lean System Success Plan and continues to do so. "It absolutely vital—I hadn't lifted weights regularly since college. So it gave me the formula to get going. It told me exactly what I needed to do."

In addition, she used the Flash Point melt-aways and chocolate-chocolate chip Eat-Smart MRP.

"The Eat-Smart was a double positive because it had the right protein, carb, and calorie mix I needed, so after my workout, I could drink it while I was getting ready for work because I don't have time to eat. Plus, it killed that little sweet craving I had. I didn't have any kind of sweet craving in the late afternoon or evening, even though I'd drank it at 4:30 in the morning. For whatever reason, it satisfied the sweet craving.

As far as nutrition, a typical day looks like this:

SNACK: 4:30 a.m. — 8 oz Chocolate-Chocolate Chip Eat-Smart meal replacement (after her workout)

BREAKFAST: 7:30 a.m. — 1/2 cup oatmeal; 1 tbls flaxseed; 1/2 cup blueberries

SNACK: 10:30 a.m. — Carrots and hummas

LUNCH: 1:30 p.m. — Quiznos cobb salad, no dressing OR 3 hard tacos from Qdoba with chicken/lettuce/pico OR Tokoyo Joes Chicken & veggies bowl with brown rice

SNACK: 4:00 p.m. — 1/2 cup cottage cheese and a small apple

DINNER: 6:30 p.m. — mahi filet and steamed veggies

Julie loves vacationing at the beach and enjoyed her trip to Hanama Bay in Hawaii just last month.

Goal Setting

Julie's goals were fairly modest when she began. She just wanted to drop those extra pounds she had gained over the last few years: ten pounds in total to get under 120 pounds. "When I got on that scale, I was 128 pounds. I'm only five feet tall, and the last time I had weighed that, I was probably pushing six months pregnancy. I was horrified!"

Julie knew she'd be happier once she got under 120 pounds. And every time she got on the scale—every few days to a week—and would see the number go down, even just a little bit, it was really motivating. "Once I got under 120, I realized, I finally found the formula."

This is the first time she lost weight where she actually ate. "There was a time in my early 20's—around the time I was getting married—when I lost a ton of weight. I lost 20 pounds basically by starving myself for a long time. I was really little, and I loved it. I loved being super skinny. I was a size zero and below, and it was great because all these clothes fit, they looked good, I liked how I looked in pictures. But I had some chest pains a couple of years into this and ended up in the hospital. They basically diagnosed it as an infection around my heart, but in the back of my mind, I thought, 'ooo, I'm gonna kill myself. I'm having a freak'n heart attack at 26 years old because of this stuff,' so I was so relieved this time when the weight was coming off through exercise and watching my diet. I finally figured it out. I finally found the winning formula. It was such a relief.

"Before I didn't understand why I was getting so chubby. I really didn't get it. I hauled my kid around until she was like 18 months old, and she's a big kid. I didn't sit around eating potato chips, but in the end, I learned how few calories we really need and how we need to make our calories with vegetables and good protein. It dawned on me, no wonder our country is so overweight, and it gave me information to better feed my daughter because I was feeding her the diet I was eating. I would often feed her a salad and macaroni and cheese for dinner and think I was feeding her well. So this process has really helped me better feed my kid."

A Challenging Schedule

Now that Julie discovered the "winning" formula, you'd think it would be easy, right?

Not so much.

Julie goes to work at 6:00 in the morning. Then, when she gets off work, she has only about 45 minutes before she needs to pick up her little girl from school.

Her husband, however, works a completely different schedule and doesn't get home until around 7:00 at night. So, figuring out when she was going to work out was probably the toughest obstacle for Julie.

"By the time I get home," she explains, "what I really want to do is straighten up the kitchen from the morning mess, go through the mail, put stuff away, start some laundry, get changed, and be ready to give my full attention to my daughter and play with her or take her to the playground, do homework, and just interact with her and be fully present. That's very important to me."

Julie could have tried to work out once her daughter was home from school, but she wanted to keep an eye out for her daughter, and stuck down in the basement, while her kid played outside didn't work so well. Plus, again, she felt like she was taking time away from her daughter, which just didn't sit well with her. So she tried to work out when some of her daughter's friends would come over to play, but then found herself running up from the basement to check on the kids, get them a snack or a drink, etc. Not exactly the best way to focus on her workouts.

"I was never focused. I'd be on the elliptical yelling upstairs, 'Are you guys okay up there? What are you doing?' So my workouts sucked," says Julie.

So she had to find out when she could do her workouts, without taking time away from her daughter, which just stressed her out, without having to sandwich it in between the time she got home and the time she had to get her daughter home from school.

"I came to the conclusion that the only way it's going to happen is if I get my workout in before I go to work in the morning." That meant Julie needed to get up at 3:45 in the morning, so she could be in the shower by 4:30 or 4:35 to be at work by 6:00!

"It was not a pleasant thought," says Julie, "but that is the only time of the day that I could do it. So I just told myself, stop thinking about that… stop thinking 3:45, when the alarm goes off."

And that's exactly what she did. She didn't think about it. The alarm went off, and without a thought, Julie put on her workout clothes, grabbed her gym shoes from the top of the stairs, got her water, and went down and worked out.

She figured she was getting woken up at that time anyway often on her job. "Because I have a demanding job, I'm on call for two weeks out of every month, and I get a ton of phone calls in the middle of the night, so I get woken up at 1:00, again at 3:00, and we have call outs, so sleep deprivation is part of my life. I get woken up all the time at 4:00 in the morning anyways, so I might as well be on an elliptical, making it really count."

And while this started out as one of the biggest obstacles, Julie actually found it to be rather nice. "I'd get to work knowing my workout is done, and my day is now mine. When I get home from work, I can just totally relax and do the things I want to be doing."

"To be happy, I need to be physically active. 100% this is a lifestyle. It's not something I did for just those 12 weeks."

Julie found that by not thinking about it, 4:30 a.m. became the best part of her day, heading up to the shower, knowing she had gotten her workout done. She was energized and really ready to focus on work.

It also set the stage for the rest of the day. Because Julie had begun her morning so early with her workout, she wasn't tempted anymore by the donuts sitting at the conference room table. "I'd think, oh my goodness, there's 46 grams of fat in there, and I got my butt out of bed at quarter to 4 this morning to workout. Do I really want that donut? And I'm telling you, the appeal was totally gone! I didn't want the stinking donut. I didn't want the ice cream. And I could not get over what that did for my discipline for the day."

Winning

You might expect that to be Julie's mindset… but in fact, Julie never expected to win. Being a pretty modest and private person, she didn't want to even go in to have her pictures taken. "I work in a Police Department, with men. So I didn't want them to see me, especially in my before state, in a bikini, but knowing my base metabolic rate, I was brave enough to enter the contest, which greatly contributed to my success in the end."

But knowing that before picture was "out there," she was darn sure there would be an after photo to go with it.

And win she did! Julie ended up losing 16 pounds total, with three inches off her waist. She exceeded her goals, ending the contest at 112 pounds. Without once starving herself.

Julie was more than satisfied with her results. In fact, she admits she "slacked off" a bit toward the end of the contest. While she could have worked even harder and had even better results, she was satisfied, which was actually a really good place for her to be, because in the past, she's been so competitive.

"When I won state championships as a gymnast, I was very focused, very competitive. Now I laugh about it, but I have boxes of ribbons, tons of trophies, and I can remember coming home from gymnastics meets and my mom asking me how I did, and saying, 'Oh, I just got second all around. I got third on bars.' If it wasn't a first place ribbon, it was not a win for me. And I do not view life like that anymore. I have really deliberately tried to get to that, 'it's okay' stage. I've always been a very driven person, and it is a great feeling to be satisfied, especially because I far exceeded my goals."

Not only does Julie look better, she feels 100% better! "I was proud of myself and what I had set up and what I achieved. It was fun to have this. I'm very proud. I'm happy. And I'm appreciative. I'm really appreciative to my department and Chief Witman, and I'm really appreciative to iSatori. iSatori does not have to do this. They run this competition for us. They organize it. And on top of that, they donate money to one of our organizations. Chief Witman does not have to do what he did to create a health initiative plan and put a cop in a position to run that program for us. It's not for him. It's for us. I think that's enormously generous. I was very humbled by the whole experience."

What's Next?

Julie says this is her way of life now. Forever! And now, she's training for her first triathlon. "The worst thing that could happen to me is to have to be sedentary. I want to be able to hike with my grandkids. I want to be able to snorkel in exotic places. I want to physically be able to do all of the things I love to do today in 20, even 40 years… To be happy, I need to be physically active. 100% this is a lifestyle. It's not something I did for just those 12 weeks."

Ready to start your own transformation? Need support, encouragement, or help with your nutrition or exercise plan? Call our Fitness Advisors at 1-866-688-7679 to help you put together a customized plan to build your best body this year!

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