The Weight Is Over: Richmond woman loses 100 pounds

Pictured is Linda Koch when she weighed about 212 pounds. (Photo provided)

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Linda Koch pulls out an overflowing scrapbook filled with recipes, grocery lists and all sorts of healthy eating tips.

Inside, a quote reads, “No matter who you are, no matter what you do, you absolutely, positively have the power to change.”

“This is kind of like my Bible,” says Koch, of Richmond.

Since what Koch labels as her “AHA moment” about four years ago, she has lost half her body weight or nearly 100 pounds.

She went from weighing 212 pounds at her heaviest to the 118 pounds she weighs today at age 57. And she says she has never felt healthier.

About six months after her husband, David, died, Koch suffered from mini strokes and congestive heart failure. Before that, she had tried every diet imaginable.

“No more dieting,” she told herself. “I’m going to do this for the long haul.”

She vowed to live a healthier lifestyle.

A medical assistant in Algonquin, Koch says in this day and age, the information really is out there for everyone to learn to live healthier, as long as they’re ready for it. She started by eliminating the following from her diet: soda, salt, fast food, alcohol and red meat.

She added more water to her diet and learned to eat more often throughout the day instead of one to two large meals a day. At restaurants she fills up on salads, and at parties she goes for the vegetable trays.

She eats more fruits and vegetables, as well as more fiber and protein. She drinks fat-free milk and has learned to read labels.

She doesn’t starve or deprive herself, she says.

It’s all about portion sizes, she adds. Before, she would eat two Big Macs and two large fries from McDonald’s for lunch and drink the largest soda she could buy.

To this day, she still uses the 8-inch plate she began using back then to limit portions.

“I was tired of not feeling good,” she says. “You hear, ‘The older you get, the harder it is.’ It’s kind of true. I had to retrain my brain.”

“That’s enough,” she would tell herself. “Don’t argue with me!”

What she did was make the right choices, says Peggy Crutchfield, a fitness coach who worked with Koch at Butterfly Life Health Club in McHenry, which closed in June. She worked hard and made choices every day to live her life differently.

“It has been phenomenal,” Crutchfield says of Koch’s accomplishments. “I’ve seen the pictures of before and after. They’re incredible. It doesn’t even look like the same person.”

Koch did most of the weight loss on her own before joining Butterfly Life last August. She wanted to tone up. Through exercising roughly three times a week for an hour at a time, she lost 2.9 percent of her body fat, another 11 pounds and about 12 inches.

As part of that membership, she took a healthy eating class, in which she was encouraged to write about her weight-loss experiences.

“A lot of the girls, it was a long process for them,” Koch says. “They couldn’t see the outcome. I figured I would share a bit, tell them it’s not going to be a process, it’s a way of living.”

She wrote about how in her teens and early 20s, she never had a weight problem. As maid of honor at her best friend’s wedding, she was told when measured for her dress she was the “perfect size” at 36-26-34 and 110 pounds.

Of course at the time, she never felt “perfect.”

“You could be Miss Barbie, (and) you’ll always see something wrong,” she says.

While writing a journal of sorts, including what she ate and why, she discovered what sparked the eating binges. Her weight went up during pregnancy and never really went back down.

It continued to climb after a divorce and as she raised her son as a single parent. She would try a diet, lose 20 to 30 pounds, then gain it back again and more.

“Mine was depression and guilt,” she says. “I would always blame. It was a bad day, the rain, stuff like that. Finally I said, ‘Hey, grow up!’”

She wanted to be there for her son and her three grandchildren, to watch those grandchildren grow up.

And she didn’t want her son to end up taking care of her, similar to the way she took care of her husband after he suffered a stroke.

She wanted to feel good about herself.

“I figured I deserved more than that,” she says. “I was going to take responsibility for myself and not blame everyone else for how I looked and felt, and that was that.”