How I Quit Smoking and Lost 22Lbs.
Britta D. is a mother of two. She was a heavy smoker until, two years ago, she got pregnant with her second son. At that point, she firmly decided to quit smoking—and she did! It was a huge step, but it was 100% forward for her—a wise, timely move for the present and future health of her and her family.
Weight-management failures
Apart from the obvious benefits of quitting smoking, one inevitable outcome of the pregnancy and nicotine cut-off—one many women are well-aware and quite scared of—was progressive weight gain.
“My body took [on] so much due to quitting smoking and being pregnant. I tried to lose weight with diets but felt sad and did not lose any kilos,” Britta remembers. She was sad because she felt fat, which had never been her problem before. “I have never been a fat person. And then I gained so much, and did not know how to lose it.”
“When I got my kid, I started to try losing weight, but I couldn’t. I did all the [body] wrap things, I did a protein diet, [and] I felt really tired. I tried, I tried, and tried, but it all didn’t work.”
Britta underlines the failure factor she thought she couldn’t beat: “[When] I stopped smoking, the calories didn’t go down that easily back then because smoking is a calorie burner. Everyone knows that.” She was almost in despair when she came across HEALBE GoBe, which she decided to give a try—and never regretted.
It’s personal
“I discovered it online when I was tracking calories myself in-app,” Britta remembers, referring to manual calorie input for all food intake, “but it was a hassle to always do that and not to forget. And you don’t always have accurate input. You don’t know exactly how many calories you cooked yourself.”
Britta was also very curious about the comments from HEALBE staff and social media users that calorie intake is very personal and might differ a lot depending on individual digestions—a truth she was already guessing. “And indeed, I can eat like twenty French fries and not gain weight, and my boyfriend just looks at French fries and he gains weight,” she says with a smile. “It’s a different story from person to person, so this is something that I was really interested in.”
The main reason for this interest lay in Britta’s stats, which never moved anywhere despite all the food-management and exercise efforts she made to beat the extra weight. “I was stuck,” she remembers. “I started running. I ate healthy. At least I thought I was eating healthy, but I had no idea what food actually did to me.”
Britta’s level of self-awareness rose significantly as soon as the GoBe smart band appeared in her life.
“I ordered a GoBe and saw that my body reacted really well when I walked every day for 30 minutes and ate enough and healthy!” she says. The fact that, for Britta, just walking could be as effective as running from a weight-management point of view was an eye-opener. “I’ve found out for myself, personally, that I better go for a walk than go for a run ’cause I burn as many calories with a good walk. This is one of the things that I did not know. I thought I had to run for miles, and I was upset. Now I know what I can do. And walking is as good for me as running.”
With her real-time HEALBE GoBe stats, Britta has also changed her lifestyle and eating habits with no pain. She didn’t do any special diet, even though at the very beginning she tried protein shakes—something she had quickly realized she didn’t like. All she really did was check her energy balance. Sometimes she would have a big meal and then check her caloric data from the past 3–4 days in the HEALBE app and tell herself, “You took [in] two thousand calories every day and burned only seventeen hundred—of course you didn’t lose weight!” referring to her first weight-management results. “So it’s a good explanation every time. I don’t feel lost.”
“With HEALBE GoBe, I just started living a life,” she says. “I eat a lot of vegetables, fruit, and grains. And I don’t even want to eat unhealthy anymore—like pizzas or coke—all of that, ‘cause it [the new lifestyle] makes you feel so great that you don’t want to go back.”
A frequent restaurant visitor, she has noticed that her quickly changing food preferences started giving her true joy. “I enjoy and crave healthy foods,” she exclaims, “just because I know it helps my body achieve the weight loss I want without starvation. I only drink water, tea, and, from time to time, a glass of milk. I eat oatmeal and fruit in the morning, a salad packed with vegetables during lunchtime, and a seed, vegetable, or fish dinner. And above all, I’ve found a lifestyle that fits me, my body never looked better, [and] the weight doesn’t come back, either!”
Even more benefits
Lifestyle changes for the better happened not only calorie-wise.
“GoBe helped me to get in my weight,” Britta continues, “but also to just think—I can, for instance, quickly check my watch and see ‘Oh, I’m only in minus two [calories], so I’m going for a walk,’” referring to the GoBe’s energy balance feature, which provides an automatic real-time calculation of calories in versus calories out in the user’s body. “It just changes your lifestyle. It lets you have more energy.”
Among other changes, the GoBe has helped Britta (1) achieve better sleep quality with its sleep tracker, (2) dispel headaches by managing the right water balance with its hydration feature, and (3) raise her emotional awareness with its stress and emotion monitoring feature.
Britta enjoys the latter in particular. “Sometimes you don’t even realize. And then when the watch is buzzing,” referring to the GoBe’s emotion alert, “you’re like, ‘Yes, it’s true, I have an emotion when I’m looking at my children. Yeah, I know I love them.’”
GoBe has become essential for Britta. She calls it “a friend on the wrist who is always there to tell you, ‘Hey, look, you’re doing great.’” Since she has used it, she has lost 10 kg (22 lbs.) “in a very easy way,” as she puts it. Even more importantly, she now knows exactly what’s good for her body and what’s not and actually enjoys taking care of it. “But I would have never known this without my HEALBE GoBe,” Britta concludes.
Our heroine’s initial target was to return to the body she had before having two kids—an ambitious goal—and she did. The interesting thing, however, is that she’s not stopping there. She is very satisfied weight-wise. But now she is also training to run a 10-kilometer (6.2-mile) marathon. “That’s an ultimate goal,” she says, “and as someone who smoked, I never had that goal, but I take my smart band everywhere to learn more about myself. That’s my companion tool to achieve these goals.”
