Kathleen Daelemans lost weight to keep a job she didn’t know she had. The chef, whose full-time gig these days is her “Cooking Thin” show on cable television’s Food Network, started taking weight loss seriously, and successfully, in 1991 when she got off a plane in Hawaii.
Well, maybe not right at the airport. But soon after unpacking, she found out that the new resort job she had flown in for had been given to someone else, and she was now in charge of spa cooking. At size 22 and 205 pounds, she thought she might have a credibility problem.
“I wanted to keep my reputation,” she said from her current home in Michigan. And she wanted to keep her job. At the time, she told the hotel executives, “Look, I’m fat.” They said, “Well, you’re living in quite a beautiful area to lose weight.”
Daelemans already knew how to cook. She started learning to eat. Or to eat less, at any rate. (She attributes one of the refrains in her book to her grandfather: “Kate, you eat too damn much.”) As she worked with a nutritionist to develop a menu (no spa guests would weigh their food, she insisted, and no one would use the word “diet”), she got her own eating habits under control. She also started moving.
Her weight-loss rate was about 1 pound a week, “maybe 2 pounds for first little bit,” she said. “Of course I did stretch out that final 10 pounds for about six months.” It took her almost 2 years to lose 75 pounds.
“My goal is not to be skinny; it’s to be healthy,” she said. “I’d like to avoid Type 2 diabetes and heart disease.”
Similarly, she encourages people to not set weight-loss goals of 10 pounds, or 50 pounds, but rather health goals: Your doctor should be happy with your cholesterol levels and fitness.
Now her aim is not to gain weight, though she didn’t panic when she gained 7 pounds: “I know my way back now.”
“Every day is not going to be a perfect lifestyle day,” she said. “It should be that most of the time, you make good choices.”
“The only thing bad is if you’re not letting yourself be aware.”
Daelemans chose not to include nutrition information with her recipes because of her own dislike of the numbers game. Many weight-loss programs require participants to count calories and weigh every portion, she said, and she couldn’t cope with that.
She doesn’t pretend to be a doctor, and she reminds readers of all the weight-loss information developed by the National Institutes of Health, using tax dollars (visit www.nih.gov). Why pay twice for weight loss advice?
