“The first week I lost 6 pounds in water weight,” she tells eDiets. "Then it kept going and going and going. I was eating a ton of food. I couldn’t believe I was eating so much food compared to what I had previously eaten. It wasn’t huge portions. I was getting so full by eating and the scale was going down and down and down.
“People would say it’s a change of lifestyle or a change in eating habits. That sounded so trite. I would never have said that. Lo and behold, I totally changed.
"It is a lifestyle change. It was so gradual but that’s why it works. I was not in a rush. I kind of kicked back and went along for the ride. I watched the scale drop. Every time it did it blew me away.”
The 32-year-old sax player says there was plenty of changing to be done. For starters, she and husband Ronnie frequently played “fast food roulette.” It might be Del Taco for lunch and Burger King for dinner. They would bounce from one restaurant to the next. Any fast food joint was fair game. Because of their super busy schedules it quickly became an unhealthy way of life.
Scheila admits she was an eDieter for nine months before she actually began using the program. The meal plans were a welcome change for Scheila who'd grown up a healthy eater. Despite her hectic musician's lifestyle, she was determined to make it work. She followed the eDiets combination plan which enabled her to build menus based on frozen entrées and recipes.
“I knew what my life was like and I was ready to do what it took," she says. "I travel a lot in my daily schedule. I’m up and out of the house. Then I teach. Then I have rehearsal. Then I have performances. All my days are different. There is nothing consistent about my day-to-day schedule. I’m not at an office 9 to 5. I thought ‘well you got to plan.’ I know that’s really stressed within eDiets.”
And planning is just what she did. Scheila gathered her Tupperware together and started packing meals, salads and low-fat snacks to cart along. Eating plenty of healthy fruits and vegetables proved simply a matter of planning ahead.
Wherever she went, she was usually armed with healthy choices. It wasn’t long before she realized she needed a back-up plan for those rare moments she wasn’t prepared.
Through surfing the net, she came across a website that served up the nutritional values for popular restaurant food (similar to the eDiets fast food guide). She quickly learned how to integrate her favorite on-the-go foods (Subway, Baja Fresh, Pollo Loco) into her meal plan.
“I got really into it," Scheila says. "I took some time looking through the menus, looking at what I could eat that would fit and that I would feel good about and be full. I needed choices where I could stick to the plan or close to it. That’s what I did to prepare.”
In the beginning, Scheila attempted to keep her weight loss efforts under wraps. But four months into the program, she could no longer hide her progress. Friends and family members began taking notice of her success. Scheila also started noticing changes.
“I felt so much healthier," she raves. "I felt light. I had more energy. I was eating more food than I had been eating for years.”
After losing 55 pounds, Scheila added exercise to her healthy new lifestyle. She knows that exercising at the onset would have made her weight loss go faster, but she wasn’t ready then. These days, she loves doing aerobics and step class. At least three times a week, she goes to the gym. She also lifts weights at home.
Scheila never imagined when she filled out the eDiets profile more than three years ago that it would change her life so drastically. Looking back at old pictures still catches her off guard every now and then.
She notes, “I never thought I’d have a picture like the one of me in the leather pants. That’s why I took it. I figured I’d get them altered. But when I put them on and they fell off, I thought no way.
"I never realized how drastic the change was. When I developed the new pictures, I leafed through them and literally had a moment where I didn’t know I was looking at pictures of me for a split second. Then I had to sit there and look at them and let it sink in. That’s me... that’s what I look like now!”
What impacts her the most is realizing how the weight could have affected her health. She says carrying a 56-pound suitcase on a recent trip kicked her butt. Then she realizes that she was carrying an extra 70 pounds on her body.
“That’s a ridiculous amount of weight to be carrying around," Scheila says. "That’s a huge strain to be putting on your heart, joints, ankles, knees and everything.”
At 5’5” and 222 pounds, Scheila was hip to the fact she was overweight. Yet she rarely gave her extra weight a second thought. As a professional musician, Scheila was always in the public eye. She felt good. She looked good. There were no self-esteem issues. There were no health woes. Scheila was born chubby and figured she’d die chubby. It was a fact of her life... one that she didn’t really plan to change.