NILOU JONES: To Surprise Her Soldier, Part XI

While her husband shipped out to serve in Iraq, Nilou Jones spent the following months shaping up. Now that she’s lighter, fitter and armed with real-life strategies for making weight loss work, she’s shipping out herself.
Jones is getting her family ready to move to England, and in the process she’s facing the toughest challenges yet to her commitment to eat sensibly, exercise regularly and make smart daily decisions that add up to consistent, sustainable success. After a hectic summer and autumn that ripped up her routines, she’s redoubling her efforts to keep the good habits she has learned and stay a step ahead of the scale.
Daily Progress readers have been following along as Jones, a Charlottesville mother of two, decided in July 2005 to change her appearance, her health and her future.
Her initial goal was to lose 100 pounds before her husband, Sgt. 1st Class Charles Jones, came home from Iraq. She began by researching proper nutrition and fitness so she could develop reasonable, safe goals.
She joined Gold’s Gym and began working with personal trainer Jen Cote, learning how to balance strength training and cardiovascular conditioning to lose weight while building calorie-burning muscle and avoiding sidelining injuries.
Nutritionist Kate Bruno, who’s also a personal trainer, helped Jones make food choices that fueled her active life as a mother of two high-energy preschoolers and kept her metabolism stoked.
Studying Pilates with Robin Truxel taught Jones new ways to tone her leaner frame and make time for herself so she could have a more balanced life in her new body.
Jones said she enlisted the help of Daily Progress readers to build accountability into her quest, but she was pleased to discover enthusiastic support as well. Folks stopped her while she ran errands around town and headed to the gym. They told her they were pulling for her - and often said that she’d inspired them to try improving their own habits.
Along the way, Jones learned the importance of staying flexible - both on and off the Pilates mat. At about this time last year, outpatient surgery required her to take a six-week break from her exercise routine and adjust her eating plan so enforced idleness wouldn’t pile the pounds back on. Then her husband came home for a welcome break earlier than expected, in March, so she hadn’t had time to lose the whole 100 pounds.
The latest challenge, though exciting in many ways, is testing everything Jones has learned on her journey.
In the months since the Jones family’s happy reunion - and Charlie Jones’ delighted discovery of a more slimmed-down, energized, determined wife - the couple has been getting ready to relocate to England for Charlie Jones’ next military assignment.
While her husband trained in Florida, Nilou Jones spent the summer and fall packing, planning and tackling a whirlwind of decisions and changes. Jones and sons Cyrus, 4, and Arman, 2, moved to Richmond to stay with her sister, Yasie Tamaddon, while she coordinates the trans-Atlantic move, set for early in the new year.
The resulting upheaval of relocating, sorting all her household goods and finding a new school for Cyrus has been a stressful dress rehearsal of sorts during which Jones has struggled to maintain good eating habits and carve out a new exercise routine. And just as Jones needed to dive into sorting out which belongings got shipped and which got stored, her husband needed to head out of state for training, so the whole move to Richmond fell on her shoulders.
“It wasn’t just a little move to Richmond,’’ Jones said. “It was, ‘What do we take to England? What can we do without for three years?’ ’’
Moving is part of life for military families, and Jones is good at it. Losing the reliable comfort of routines, however, can interfere with anybody’s weight-loss endeavor, and it has been the toughest foe she has faced so far. For the first time since she began her self-improvement project, she has seen some pounds return.
Taking a critical look at her habits has shown Jones that stress is one of her triggers for overeating, but at a time when she most needed to keep tempting snack foods out of sight, she moved in with her sister, whose house hadn’t been “junk-food-proofed,” as Jones put it.
Jones admires her sister’s snacking philosophy of knowing that treats are close by if she wants them but safely behind closed cabinet doors if she doesn’t.
“For me, that’s not the case,’’ Jones said. “If it’s there, I have to eat it - and not just eat it, I have to finish it.’’ She’d rather keep those wicked mouthfuls out of the house, because if she has to drive somewhere to get indulgent goodies, it’s easier to say no.
“She’s got an exponential number of temptations around the house,’’ Jones said with a chuckle. “I open the cupboard to get the kids a fruit snack, and there are Thin Mints staring me in the face.’’
Fatigue also caught up with her. Jones ordered pizza for the movers and ended up having a slice herself, which she wouldn’t have done earlier. She was dismayed to find that some of her new clothes in hard-won smaller sizes were more snug that she was comfortable with, and she grew frustrated.
“It was overwhelming,’’ Jones said. “It was just automatic. I’m just eating.
“I plead insanity at this point. Everything I taught myself went right out the window. I knew better. I know better.’’
But instead of getting discouraged by being too hard on herself, Jones is drawing on what she has learned to regain her focus.
“I’m working on the recovery track now,’’ she said.
Her first realization was that she missed the structure of the gym environment. Jones missed her workouts and the supportive camaraderie at Gold’s. She compared the dramatic change to her enforced break after her surgery.
“You work out four or five times a week, and then you quit cold turkey,’’ Jones said. “It was such a wake-up call: ‘Go out and find yourself a gym.’ ’’
She signed up at her sister’s gym in Richmond in mid-October, but it’s more expensive, and she’s still getting settled and making new friends there.
Jones values having more family time with her sister and parents before the big move to England, but it creates another unexpected barrier to exercise.
“When you’re around your family, the temptation is to spend more time with them,’’ she said. “When my family came to Charlottesville, they came with me to the gym.’’
But Jones isn’t going to give up. She simply has come too far to turn around, back down and expect less out of life.
“In the grand scheme of things, they’re all excuses,’’ Jones said. “I have to do something. I’m not going back. I will never be the way that I was.
“I will not let myself get to the point that I need to buy new [larger]clothes. I will not give up.’’
“I was so happy before, and I had so much more energy. I felt fit. I don’t feel fit now; I feel frumpy. I want to go back to being fit.’’
Next in her strategy: She’s considering joining Weight Watchers to jump-start her routine.
“Part of the secret to Weight Watchers may be that you need to show your face there,’’ Jones said. “I need accountability.’’
As she builds back her equilibrium and sets up new routines for eating and exercising, she is using the positive attitude that has kept her weight-loss quest moving forward for almost a year and a half to get her thought patterns back on track as well.
“This is a life lesson,’’ Jones said. “This is how you learn these things, is by making the mistakes.
“Seeing myself react in this manner will be a lesson so that when I get to England, I won’t react this way to stress.’’
Jones also is planning ahead for her own British invasion - a healthy lifestyle in England. She said that the area where they’ll be living has lots of parks, and she looks forward to getting outdoors with her boys for walks and active playtime.