July 2022
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PDRMA Profiles
PDRMA Profiles

How do you stay motivated to achieve your health and wellness goals? We’d like your ideas and tips about eating right and exercising. Please email HealthinAction@pdrma.org with your story or suggest another PDRMA Health Program participant who has inspired you for us to feature in a profile. Help us to stay focused on health and wellness!

When making a big change in life, most people opt for a significant time or occasion to start their new journey, like making the change a New Year’s resolution. But Terri Kuzel, Finance/Personnel Assistant at the Park District of LaGrange, isn’t like most people. In November 2021, Terri was not feeling great. “I’m not stupid,” she says, “and I knew I needed to start making healthier life choices.” Now, seven months later, with a lot of motivation and inspiration from PATH, Terri has lost 70 pounds and feels fabulous!

A long-time PATH participant and a big proponent of PATH’s Daily Journey’s, Terri admits that although she was juggling three Journeys back in November, she knew what she really needed to do was to make some significant lifestyle changes. “I decided to stop living to eat and start eating to live,” she explains. “I did not look at it as going on a diet, because I’ve been on tons of diets over the years, and they don’t work for me. Instead, I told myself I was just going to eat healthier and stop eating junk.”

Terri also decided to take a closer look at her exercise habits. “I committed to my own personal weight-loss journey in PATH, and the first change I made was with my steps. I had been walking before, but I started making sure I was getting at least 7,000 steps per day.”

She also knew portion control was a problem when it came to eating healthy. “I started with that and found what really, really helped me control how much I ate was doing meal prep,” Terri explains. “I bought containers that can go from your freezer to your microwave, and on weekends, I prepared individual meals and filled my freezer with them. Every morning before heading to work, I would decide what I wanted for dinner, pull that meal out and stick it in the refrigerator. By the time I got home, I could just pop it in the microwave. That way I didn’t overeat or have any leftovers to tempt me. Just by not eating leftovers — always a temptation for me, since I always wanted more — I started dropping the weight!”

Instead of having chips and ice cream in the evenings, Terry replaced those treats with fruit. “In the beginning, I struggled with needing to add ‘crunch’ to my menu, so I started eating vegetables — mostly green, red and yellow peppers. I sliced them up and kept them in the refrigerator. Whenever I felt the need to crunch, I’d grab a couple handfuls of those or dry cereal like Multigrain Cheerios to satisfy my craving. And now, after seven months of eating healthier, I don’t even go down the chip aisle at the grocery store, because I no longer crave that kind of crunch. In fact, when I look at that stuff now, it disgusts me. The thought of putting that in my body is gross. Same thing with fast food. I read that after not having something for a few weeks, you stop craving it, and I found that to be true for me.

“There are still some foods I love, and once in a while I’ll still eat them,” Terri explains. “I don’t completely deny myself anything. If I’m really craving something — like I love pizza — I might have it on the weekend. I’ll eat a couple of slices and throw out the rest. And I never say I cheated — I just treated myself — and I’m still committed to eating healthier overall.”

Although Terri started her weight-loss journey last November, she chose not to tell anyone. Not even her children.


She was tired of carrying around her weight and looking like she did. Terri knew she had to get healthier.


“At Christmas, one of my daughters said, ‘Mom, your face looks skinnier,’ and another daughter mentioned the same thing. But I never told them what I was doing. Then my sister was looking at some pictures and said, ‘You look like you’re losing weight.’ I told her, ‘You know what, maybe I am.’”

Terri didn’t share her weight-loss journey with anyone at work either. “It wasn’t until I was down about 30 pounds, and still wearing my now baggy clothes, that someone noticed. One of my coworkers said, ‘You’ve lost weight!’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but just 30 pounds.’ She said, ‘What? Thirty pounds?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but I’m still big, and 30 pounds isn’t that much.’ But she insisted, ‘No! Thirty pounds is a lot, and you can really tell.’ But I still kept thinking it didn’t show and my clothes were hiding it.

“It wasn’t until I was down 50 pounds and fit into some of my older, smaller-sized clothes I had in storage that everyone at work started noticing. ‘Holy cow! How much weight have you lost, Terri?’ And finally, one day I looked in the mirror and said, ‘Oh, my gosh! Who is that?’ That’s when I knew I had to start shopping for some new clothes!”

Being down 50 pounds was a lot, but Terri wasn’t finished yet, even after a frustrating two-month plateau when she didn’t lose any weight. “In the beginning, the only exercise I did was walking. I decided to add some other activity, and the plateau finally broke. I started losing again, and now I’m down a total of 70 pounds. But I still intend to lose more, because like I said, this isn’t the result of a diet, it’s a lifestyle change for me.”

One night, Terri’s sister and brother-in-law asked her how she was losing weight. What diet was she on, what kind of pills did she take. “I told them I’m not on a diet, and I don’t take any pills. It’s all about me having a healthier lifestyle.”  

Terri does have an end goal for her weight loss, but not for her healthier lifestyle. She’s not sharing that weight-loss goal with anyone, because one day she may feel she’s lost enough whether she’s at that goal or not. The weight loss helped lower her glucose, A1C and blood pressure — and she’s looking forward to her doctor adjusting her blood pressure medicine because of that decrease. But the best thing about having lost weight?

“I feel better!” says Terri. “I have fibromyalgia, so without those 70 pounds, my body doesn’t hurt as much. I look better, I feel healthier, I’m more empowered, and I know I did it! I’m very proud of myself — and how I chose to do it!”